Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1057 page)

2     Pp. 349, 353-

found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

‘When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious “ Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified “ Yes.” That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like a polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked — or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk.

‘Woe is me that I may not give some specimens — some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature — these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.’

Meanwhile, apart from his schools, the boy was gaining a wider knowledge of the world and having his first experiences of travel In Scotland his long summer holidays were spent in the country much as before, until the Manse at Colinton began to ‘ shield a stranger race.’ Now at some time he paid a visit to one of his uncles in the parish of Stow, on which, perhaps, he afterwards drew in Weir of Hermiston for his knowledge of the Lammer- muirs. In 1857 he had crossed the Border with his parents for the first time, and visited the English Lakes. In 1862, the year of the second International Exhibition, his father’s health brought the family to London and the South of England, and Louis saw not only the sights of the capital, but also Salisbury, Stonehenge, and the Isle of Wight. In July, the same cause took them all for a month to Homburg, which Louis liked very well, though he wearied sorely for the company of other boys. But this was only the beginning of his wanderings: in the winter of the same year Mrs. Stevenson was ordered to Mentone, and it was decided that her husband, her son, and a niece of Mr. Stevenson’s should accompany her. Thither they went in January, and there they stayed two months. In March they made a tour through Genoa, Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Innsbruck, returning home by the Rhine. His mother stayed behind in England, and Louis travelled from London by himself for the first time, reaching Edinburgh on the 29th of May.

In the autumn he accompanied his father on a brief tour of lighthouse inspection in Fife, and on one day they visited seventeen lights.

At Christmas 1863 Mrs. Stevenson was again at Men- tone; there Louis joined her from his boarding-school and they remained in the Riviera till the beginning of May. The two next springs were passed by mother and son at Torquay, but after that it proved unnecessary for them to leave Scotland for any part of the winter. For the last three winters they were joined by Miss Jessie Warden, another niece of Mr. Stevenson, a clever and original girl, just grown to womanhood. In 1867, to their great grief, she died; she had filled an important part in their small circle, had been a delightful companion to Louis, and always held a bright place in his memory.

The curious point about the foreign journeys is that they seem to have had very little manifest influence upon Stevenson, and to have passed almost entirely out of his mind. A boy of twelve, even if backward in his education, is generally a good deal impressed by experiences of this nature, and remembers them more or less distinctly throughout his life.

His cousin Mrs. Napier, who was one of the party in 1863, kindly tells me that she recollects distinctly how much he developed at this period. ‘ In some ways,’ she says,’ he was more like a boy of sixteen. My uncle had a great belief (inherited from his father) in the educational value of travel, and to this end and for the benefit of Louis he devoted his whole energies in the five months abroad. In the hotel at Nice he began to take Louis to the smoking-room with him; there my uncle was always surrounded by a group of eager and amused listeners — English, American, and Russian — and every subject, political, artistic, and theological, was discussed and argued. Uncle Tom’s genial manner found friends wherever he went, and the same sort of thing went on during the whole journey. Then in regard to what we saw, his keen admiration of art and architecture seemed to be shared by Louis; they would go into raptures over a cathedral, or an old archway, or a picture. I still remember Louis’ eager interest in Pompeii and in the Catacombs at Rome; Venice, too, he specially enjoyed. In some of his books there are touches which his mother and I both recognised as due to places and persons seen in that long past journey. And in the Vailima prayers I seem to hear again an old melody that I know well — the echo of his father’s words and daily devotions.’

Yet nowhere, so far as I know, did Louis allude to any of the more famous towns he then visited, as if they had come within his personal ken. Mr. Horatio Brown frequently discussed Venice with him at Davos, but without even discovering that he had ever set foot in Italy. Rome meant to Stevenson in after-life a great deal: the Roman Empire was far more of a reality to him than to many better scholars and many frequenters of the city of Rome. Yet Mr. Lloyd Osbourne tells me that the only reference he ever heard his step-father make to this time was on one occasion when he recalled with delight the picturesque appearance of their military escort in horsemen’s cloaks riding through the Papal States. Five years later his correspondence proves him already a keen observer, and yet half an hour with a guidebook would have furnished him with all the knowledge of Italian cities that he ever displayed.

With the country it was otherwise. ‘ The Rhone is the River of Angels,’ he wrote to Mr. Low, * I have adored it since I was twelve and first saw it from the train.’ And the scenery of Will d the Mill was taken in part from the Brenner Pass, which he never saw again after 1863.

But if his stores of experience were but little increased by these changes of scene, at least the boy was learning to exercise the savoir-faire which came very naturally to his disposition. At hotels he used to go to the table- d’hote alone, if necessary, and made friends freely with strangers. On his return from Homburg, he made great friends on the steamer with a Dutchman, who kept saying over to himself,’ I loike this booy.’ His French master at Mentone on his second visit gave him no regular lessons, but merely talked to him in French, teaching him piquet and card tricks, introducing him to various French people, and taking him to convents and other places. So his mother remarks of his other masters at home, * I think they found it pleasanter to talk to him than to teach him.’ Of the other side of his character, of the solitary, dreamy, rather unhappy child, but little record survives, or little evidence which can be assigned with certainty to these years. He speaks in his essay on Pepys of the egotism of children and their delight in the anticipations of memory, as of an experience of his own. 41 can remember to have written in the fly-leaf of more than one book the date and the place where I then was — if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise myself across the intervening distance.’1

In one of his books he touches a chord which thrills with a personal emotion in describing ‘a malady most incident to only sons.’ ‘ He flew his private signal and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished.’2 It was a slightly older lad of whom he was thinking at the moment, but the malady begins at an early age, and tends unfortunately to be chronic.

Of his appearance at this time Mr. Baildon says: 4 Stevenson calls himself “ ugly “ in his student days, but I think this is a term that never at any time fitted him. Certainly to him as a boy of about fourteen (with the creed which he propounded to me that at sixteen one was a man) it would not apply. In body he was assuredly badly set up. His limbs were long, lean, and spidery, and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest some malnutrition, such sharp corners did his joints make under his clothes. But in his face this was belied. His brow was oval and full, over soft brown eyes that seemed already to have drunk the sunlight under southern vines. The whole face had a tendency to an oval Madonna-like type. But about the mouth and in the mirthful mocking 1      ‘ Pepys,’ Familiar Studies of Men and Books, p. 275.

2     Weir of Hermiston, p. 155.

light of the eyes there lingered ever a ready Autolycus roguery that rather suggested sly Hermes masquerading as a mortal. The eyes were always genial, however gaily the lights danced in them, but about the mouth there was something a little tricksy and mocking, as of a spirit that already peeped behind the scenes of life’s pageant and more than guessed its unrealities.’

His reading progressed: for the date of his first introduction to Shakespeare there seems to be no evidence, and but for the strength of its impression it may have belonged to the earlier period. 41 never supposed that a book was to command me until, one disastrous day of storm, the heaven full of turbulent vapours, the street full of the squalling of the gale, the windows resounding under bucketfuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me Macbeth. I cannot say I thought the experience agreeable; I far preferred the ditch-water stories that a child could dip and skip and doze over, stealing at times materials for play; it was something new and shocking to be thus ravished by a giant, and I shrank under the brutal grasp. But the spot in memory is still sensitive; nor do I ever read that tragedy but I hear the gale howling up the valley of the Leith.’1

His first acquaintance with Dumas began in 1863 With the study of certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice:2 his first enthusiasm for Scott’s novels belongs with certainty to the time when he had begun to select his books for himself.

‘ My father’s library was a spot of some austerity; the proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The Parents Assistant, Rob Roy, Waver ley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of Captain Woodes Rogers, 1        Scribner’s Magazine, July 1888, p. 125.

2     Memories and Portraits, p. 236.

Fuller’s and Bunyan’s Holy Wars, The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe,x The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand’s Mare au Diable (how came it in that grave assembly!), Ains- worth’s Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch — these were the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read Rob Royf with whom, of course, I was acquainted from the Tales of a Grandfather; time and again the early part with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice. “ The worthy Dr. Light- foot” — ” mistrysted with a bogle “ — ”a wheen green trash “ — ” Jenny, lass, I think I ha’e her “; from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into the Clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Ivetach and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, 1 Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The third part of Robinson Crusoe, by Defoe, containing moral reflections only.

or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened.’1

What neither instruction nor travel could do for him was none the less coming about; the boy was educating himself; learning to write patiently, persistently, without brilliance or any apparent prospect of success. The History of Moses of 1856 had been followed the next year by a History of Joseph, after a brief interval devoted to a story ‘ in slavish imitation of Mayne Reid.’ Two years later came an account (still dictated) of his travels in Perth. Before thirteen he wrote a description of the inhabitants of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. When he was fourteen he developed a facility for extemporising doggerel rhymes, and composed the libretto of an opera called The Baneful Potato, of which only the names of two characters survive — 4 Dig-him-up-o,’ the gardener, and ‘ Seek-him-out-o,’ the policeman, and the first line of an aria sung by the heroine,’ My own dear casement window.’