Chapter IX His Essays and Poems
‘Golden thoughts that ever will resound,
And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.’
—R. S. Mutch.
Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent, and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement, that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not himself who was considered the important author. The Life of Robert Stevenson, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very interesting book.
Among his mother’s relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day correspondence.
He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely from his father’s family, but there is interesting proof that even in his grandfather’s day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a folio copy of Pearson on the Creed, presented to him by his friend, the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801.
‘My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name,
For my breast glows with no inferior flame,
This gift was thine, expressive of thy love,
Which spurning earthborn joys for those above
Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow,
And feel the truths impressive as they flow.
While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow,
And love to God directs our life below,
One view of things now seen, and things to come,
But pilgrims here, a future state our home,
Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair,
Begun below, but rendered perfect there.’
More than one of the old gentleman’s family inherited his talent for graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large measure of fame. These are Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, and the even more popular The Senile Heart. About the latter he tells an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse, wrote papers in The Indian Annals and The Edinburgh Medical Journal, which were very highly esteemed.
In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people. Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin—a son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably on medical and other subjects—has already gained for herself no inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, The Fall of the Sparrow, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable books of last year.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still a careless student of twenty, his papers in The Edinburgh University Magazine possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.
An Old Gardener and A Pastoral especially had much of the depth of thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr Stevenson’s later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him ‘the feast of reason and the flow of soul’ provided by the writers into whose company he takes you, or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in The Old Manse and Random Memories see familiar places and people touched by the light of genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them, hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and the poet can hear and see them.
His style, too—strong and virile as it is in his tales—attains, one almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson’s work. One can take up a volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of the wide silence of nature, or to fill one’s mind with strong and worthy thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.
In his Familiar Studies of Men and Books, published, in one volume, by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally appeared in the New Quarterly, Macmillan, and Cornhill. The essays deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr Stevenson’s fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.
To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting phase of the character of the great Reformer—who so enjoyed brow-beating Queen Mary—that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the Reformer as to the ladies.
Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer’s homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet’s life and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson’s, but there was far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in his preface, we find him giving to Scotland’s national bard an ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.
Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find his essays on Villon, Victor Hugo’s Romances, Samuel Pepys, Yoshida Torajiro and Charles of Orleans a very pleasant means of obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.
In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the title Virginibus Puerisque, Mr Stevenson discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom, and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.
That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never far away from the man whose paper on Ordered South is like the bravely repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on El Dorado proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often to be its own reward.
Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the writing of four plays which were privately printed, Deacon Brodie in 1880, Beau Austin in 1884, Admiral Guinea in 1884, and Robert Macaire in 1885—the whole being finally published in volume form in an edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. Beau Austin was acted in 1890 at The Haymarket, and quite recently Admiral Guinea has been played with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a great success on the stage.
In the later papers, ‘A Christmas Sermon,’ ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman,’ and ‘Pulvis et Umbra,’ in the volume of collected essays called Across the Plains, the note of pathos which appears now and then in Virginibus Puerisque is even more forcibly struck. The writer is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant reading, and Across the Plains and The Old and New Pacific Capitals give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.
In ‘Random Memories’ in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the ‘Scottish Sea,’ under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father in The Pharos round the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.
Not the least pleasant of his volumes of Essays is that called Memories and Portraits, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father’s death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled ‘Thomas Stevenson,’ in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on ‘The Manse,’ that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that ‘it was mair blessed to give than to receive,’ but gave her of his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to
‘Gardener’s garters, shepherd’s purse,
Batchelors’ buttons, lady’s smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.’
In this book also are ‘A Pastoral,’ in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on ‘The Character of Dogs,’ and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in ‘A Humble Remonstrance,’ with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be.
Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, The Silvarado Squatters, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner’s house—if one can by courtesy call a house the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!—on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.
Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience than ‘roughing it’ in that sheltered cañon on the mountain side with the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.
Silvarado Squatters, like The Vailima Letters, shows to perfection how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson’s books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells of home.
‘From the dim sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a world of seas,
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,’
he quotes and adds—
‘And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.’5
One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches patronise he wrote The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue, which was given to me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which, rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book with the initials ‘R. L. S.’ in strong black writing at the end of it.
Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in 1885 was The Child’s Garden of Verses, and anything more dainty than the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an imaginative child.
Ballads, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting narrative poems. The first two, ‘Rahéro, a Legend of Tahiti’ and ‘The Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,’ deal with native life in the sunny islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north. With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends, Ticonderoga and Heather Ale. The first gives in easily flowing lines a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection to the dead man’s brother and the honourable fashion in which the living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in battle there.
The Heather Ale is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.
Christmas at Sea is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on board the labouring ship—that stormy Christmas Day—that she has at last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the lighted home behind the coastguard’s house,
‘The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair...
... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way
To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blesséd Christmas Day...
... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.
But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.’
Underwoods was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written at different times and in different places, and while many of them are full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.
Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very charming lines are to his father.
Eight lines called ‘The Requiem’ seem the very perfection of his own idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone hill-top where he lies.
Book II. of Underwoods is ‘In Scots,’ very forcible and graphic Scots too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise.
‘I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,’ he writes; and again—
‘To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.’
And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible ‘Scots’ after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as ‘hame-ower’ and as pithy as the words.
The Maker to Posterity, Ille Terrarum, A Blast, A Counterblast, and The Counterblast Ironical, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than A Lowden Sabbath Morn, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in Embro, her Kirk, and The Scotsman’s Return from Abroad. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends:
‘It’s an owercome sooth for age and youth,
And it brooks wi’ nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
And the young are just on trial.
‘There’s a rival bauld wi’ young an’ auld,
And it’s him that has bereft me,
For the surest friends are the auldest friends
And the maist o’ mine hae left me.’...
The last volume of verses, Songs of Travel, has a pathos all its own, for, like St Ives and Weir of Hermiston, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of Underwoods, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.
They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like If this were Faith and The Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world’s struggle for existence.
In The Vagabond he is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes—
‘I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.’
After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when in the last words of the book he says—
‘I hear the signal, Lord,—I understand
The night at Thy command
Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.’
Footnote
5 Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals so truly to Caledonia’s sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume of Good Words, and never knew its source. Like many other people he quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W. Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in the original—
‘From the lone sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’
In Tait’s Magazine for 1849 it is given as ‘Canadian Boat Song, from the Gaelic.’ The author of the English version was Burns’ ‘Sodger Hugh,’ the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789, and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses—the first four lines, and chorus, of which are—
‘Listen to me as when we heard our father
Sing long ago the song of other shores;
Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
All your deep voices as ye pull your oars.
Chorus—Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand,
But we are exiles from our fathers’ land.’
Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton’s lines, and is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.