Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1065 page)

Once only was he conspicuously before the Court, and this publicity was due neither to the weightiness of the matter nor to the brilliancy of the advocate. One day he met in the street a certain judge of the Court of Session, whom he saluted in the customary manner. Stevenson had just emerged from a public-house, and was dressed at the time in a suit of old clothes which may have been dear to his heart, but were certainly not of the style habitual to members of the Bar. The judge looked surprised, but acknowledged the salute and passed on. When Stevenson reached home, he found a brief waiting for him with instructions to 4 revive’1 a certain case the next day before this very judge. At the hour appointed he appeared in his robes, wigged and properly habited, and expecting the empty court usual for such formal business. But he reckoned without numbers of his friends, who, having got wind of the brief, came in to see how he would acquit himself, and the court was crowded. The judge scented a joke; recognised his young friend of the day before; asked who he was, and proceeded to require a great deal of entirely unnecessary information about the details of the case. The brief contained no allusion to these facts; counsel was completely ignorant of the history; the solicitor took care to keep well out of the way, and enjoyed the joke from the back of the court, until at last Stevenson’s eye fell upon him, and the judge was referred to him for all further facts. So counsel escaped, but he had his quarter of an hour.

The Advocates’ Library in the Parliament House is the best in Scotland; and here Stevenson hoped to get some of his literary work done, while he was waiting for briefs. But the division of interests and the attractive company of his fellows were too unsettling; he soon returned to his own upper room in his father’s house, and came no more to the Salle des Pas Perdus.

But although, after he abandoned Parliament House, he was no longer confined to the city of his birth, it was still his home and the point of return from his wanderings in England or abroad. Three of the first 1 I.e. make a purely formal motion that it be replaced in the list, in order to prevent it from lapsing.

four friends named in the preceding chapter were, like himself, now released from the necessity of living constantly in Edinburgh, yet their connection with it was maintained, and they continued more or less frequently to visit it; while Professor Jenkin and Mr. Baxter remained resident there as before.

Nor did Stevenson’s manner of life, at the times when he was in Edinburgh, suffer any sudden change. We must think of him in Scotland at this time as living chiefly in the society of a few intimates, still wandering about the city and its neighbourhood, ‘scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind,’ travelling deliberately through his ages and getting the heart out of his own liberal education, still to some extent in bonds to himself, though he had escaped in a degree from circumstance. No longer as a supplement to professional studies, but now as his avowed business, he wrote and rewrote, he blotted and recast his essays, tales, verses and plays as before, and accomplished much solid work. From general society he still held aloof, and it was in 1875 that he last took part in the Jenkins’ theatricals, acting the Duke in Twelfth Night.

‘ He played no character on the stage as he could play himself among his friends’ was his verdict upon Jenkin, and it was even more applicable to himself where his own friends were concerned; but as yet he could not modify his attitude towards the burgess or the Philistine, or forgo the intolerance of youth.

All this did not heighten his popularity or the estimation in which he was held, nor was he generally looked upon at this time as likely ever to bring honour to his native city. The brilliance and diversity of his talk appealed to few of his fellow-citizens, whether old or young, and merely disconcerted those whose minds ran in narrower grooves. Mostly they perceived little more than the exterior of the lad, with his dilapidated clothes, his long hair, and distaste for office life. The companions who knew him best did not spare their criticism or laughter, and it was at this time that names like Flibbertigibbet and Mr. Fastidious Brisk were aimed at his volubility and exaggeration on the one hand, and a supposed tendency to sprightliness and affectation of phrase upon the other.

It is a keen eye which can discern in a young man the difference between the belief in gifts which he does not possess, and his consciousness of powers as yet undeveloped, until Time, which tries all, reduces the one and justifies the other. It was chiefly the older men who looked with a kindly glance upon the manifestations of his youth, such as old Mr. Baxter, who had for him as warm an appreciation as his son Charles had found in turn at the hands of Thomas Stevenson; Mr. J. T. Mowbray, the family lawyer, a grim, dry, warm-hearted old bachelor, whom I have always fancied to be the original of Mr. Utterson in Jekyll and Hyde; Mr. Robert Hunter, of whom Stevenson has left a speaking portrait in the second part of Talk and Talkers; and other friendly veterans. These seem best to have realised the good that was in him, and indeed the husk is hardly noticeable to those who can read (as his contemporaries could not) how the frail lad found a lost child of three crying in the street in the middle of the night, and carried him half over Edinburgh, wrapped in his own greatcoat, while he sought in vain for the missing parents.1

And still, as in his childhood and as in most of his books, happiness came to him chiefly in the country. Long walks in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh; summer evenings in the garden at Swanston, or on Caerketton or Allermuir; days passed in canoeing on the Forth at Queensferry, or skating upon Duddingston Loch — these were the chief part of his outdoor life, and the last of his time that was spent amid the scenery of his boyish days.

1 Letters, i. 89.

In August 1874 he was yachting for a month with Sir Walter Simpson and Mr. T. Barclay, on the West coast of Scotland — a happy experience not to be renewed for many a long year. The Heron, a fore and aft schooner of sixteen tons, had two Devon men as crew, and their labours were supplemented by the help of the owners and their friends. Stevenson lived a hard, open-air life, and throve upon it. * My health is a miracle. I expose myself to rain, and walk, and row, and over-eat myself. I eat, I drink, I bathe in the briny, I sleep.’ His return to Swanston was characteristically announced: * I left my pipe on board the yacht, my umbrella in the dog-cart, and my portmanteau by the way,’ and he reached home without his luggage, in a hat borrowed from one of his friends and a coat belonging to another.

In the following winter there came to him a new friendship. 4 Yesterday,1 Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull, economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace, or the great King’s palace of the blue air.’

Here was no ordinary patient: the poet was Mr. W. E. Henley, who had come to Edinburgh to be under the care of Lister. The cheerful talk was but the first of many; if we may treat Stevenson’s essays2 as autobiographical, for a part of his youth he was wont to ‘ avoid 1     13th February 1875. Letters, i. p. 86.

2     ‘ Old Mortality,’ Memories and Portraits, p. 111.

the hospital doors, the pale faces, the sweet whiff of chloroform/ but that time was now past. Here was a man of kindred spirit to himself, in need of the companionship that none could better give, and from that time forth Stevenson was his friend, and placed himself and all that he had at his disposal. He soon returned, bringing books, piles of Balzac, ‘big yellow books, quite impudently French,’1 and with the books he brought Mr. Baxter and others of his friends. In return, he found a friendship based on common tastes in literature and music, the talk of a true poet, the insight of one of the freshest and clearest and strongest of critics, whose training had been free from academic limitations, and whose influence was different in kind from the criticism on which the younger man had learned to rely, though not less full of stimulation and force.

In these years he first discovered that taste for classical music which was afterwards fostered by successive friends. The revelation dated from a concert in Edinburgh for which some one had given him a ticket, and to which he went with reluctance. It was a Beethoven quartet, I think, that then burst upon him for the first time, and on that day he permanently added another to the many pleasures he so keenly enjoyed, although it was some years before he attempted to make any music for himself.

To London in these years he paid frequent visits, and several times stayed with Mr. Colvin at Cambridge, besides spending a week or two with him at Hampstead in June 1874. This last occasion, however, and a return to the same place in the autumn of that year were practically indistinguishable from his life in London. On June 3, 1874, after only six weeks’ delay, he was elected a member of the Savile Club,2 which had been 1     Book of Verses, p. 47, by William Ernest Henley.

2     Mr. Colvin proposed him, and he was supported by Mr. Andrew Lang, Prof. Fleeming Jenkin, Mr. Basil Champneys, Prof. W. K. Clifford, and Mr. C. B. B. M’Laren.

founded five years before, and was still in its original house, 15 Savile Row. This was for the next five years the centre of his London life, and though it would probably be a mistake to speak as if it were at once to him all that it afterwards became, yet, since he was of all men the most clubbable, from the beginning it gave him ample opportunities of acquaintance with men of various tastes, many of them,of great ability, even if they had not yet achieved or were not achieving a reputation. Some of the members he already knew. Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Andrew Lang he had previously met in the Riviera; Professor Masson was an Edinburgh friend of the family; to Dr. Appleton, editor of the Academy, and Mr. Walter Pollock, editor of the Saturday Review, he was soon introduced; but it would be long to enumerate the friends, and idle to recapitulate the acquaintances, that Stevenson soon made within those walls.

Into formal society nothing would ever have induced him to go in London any more than in Edinburgh; he invariably refused the opportunities which presented themselves to him, as they sooner or later have always presented themselves to young men with any reputation for social gifts and original conversation. In 1874, when he came to London for the first time under new auspices, he seems to have met a few well-known people; to have been taken to see Burne-Jones’s pictures, then strictly withheld from any chance of public recognition; to have met Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Lynn Linton, and a few other ladies, chiefly at the house of Mr. Leslie Stephen, to whom he had been introduced by Mr. Colvin. His great and natural desire to see Carlyle was frustrated, for Mr. Stephen, on whose kind offices he depended, found the sage in one of his darker moods and at a moment of irritation; and when Stevenson was mentioned as a young Scot who was most anxious to meet him, and who had taken to the study of Knox, the senior would only say that he did not see why anybody should want either to see his ‘ wretched old carcase’ or to say anything more about Knox, and that the young man had better apply when he had put his studies into an articulate shape. So Stevenson never met his fellow-countryman, who was perhaps the closest connecting link between himself and Scott.

Besides the visits to London and Cambridge there were many journeys and excursions j1 and the importance of such travel to him in these days may be estimated by the degree in which it formed the topic of his early writings. Between 1871 and 1876 no less than nine of his papers deal with travel or the external appearance of places known to him; and it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that his first three books were the Inland Voyage, the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, and the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.

In the autumn of 1874 he joined his parents in an expedition to Chester and Barmouth, and in October took the walk in Buckinghamshire described the following spring in the Portfolio under the title of ‘An Autumn Effect.’ This ended, as a matter of fact, with his only visit to Oxford;2 but Oxford and Cambridge left no more trace in his work than, at an earlier age, Rome or Naples or Venice. A reference to the chimes of the one, a conversation (in an unpublished novel) carried on at the other, and a few general remarks about the contrast between Scotch and English universities are all that is to be found about them in his writings.

In 1875 came the walk up the valley of the Loing with Sir Walter Simpson, in which Stevenson’s costume 1 A pencil list of towns in which he had slept, compiled about 1886, to relieve the tedium of illness, gives the following totals: — England, 46 towns — 19 more than once; Scotland, 50 — 23 more than once; France, 74 — 31 more than once; the rest of Europe, 40 — 16 more than once.

3 Unless it were another time when he visited Mr. Lang at Merton. The visit to Oxford is not mentioned in the Portfolio, but in a letter to his mother.

led to the incarceration described in An Epilogue to fin Inland Voyage, and this trip being cut short, he joined his parents, as he had intended, at Wiesbaden, and went with them to Homburg and Mainz.

In 1876 he spent the second week in January walking in Carrick and Galloway,1 when he slept a night at Ballantrae, and later in the year, after a visit in August to the Jenkins near Loch Carron, he joined Sir Walter Simpson again and took the canoe journey of the Inland Voyage from Antwerp to Brussels, and then from the French frontier by the Oise almost to the Seine.

These journeys and the general change in Stevenson’s life were rendered possible, as I have said, by the liberality of his father (some ten years later he wrote, ‘ I fall always on my feet; but I am constrained to add that the best part of my legs seems to be my father),’2 yet it must not be supposed that Stevenson even now was often in funds. He was open-handed to a fault; and he had many wants of his own which often went unsatisfied. It is to this period that a story belongs which he was fond of telling against himself. He was staying in London, and had protracted his visit to the extreme limit of his resources. On his way back to the North he arrived at the station with a sum barely sufficient for the cheapest ticket, available only by a night journey, and a newly bought copy of Mr. Swinburne’s Queen Mother and Rosamond. On learning his deficiency, he tried his best powers of persuasion on the booking-clerk, but in vain: the man, in his blindness, refused to accept the book as any part of the payment, and, if I remember right, Stevenson passed the day in the station without food, and reached home next morning in a famished condition.