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Stevensoniana

Stevensoniana

BEING A REPRINT OF VARIOUS LITERARY AND PICTORIAL MISCELLANY ASSOCIATED WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The Bankside Press M. F. MANSFIELD, 14 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK

Copyright 1900 M. F. Mansfield

_Contents_

Biographical 3 Scotland London The Riviera The Golden Gate The South Seas

Apparition 16

Stevenson's First Book 17

Books Which Have Influenced Me 19

A Stevenson Letter 33

A Justification 33

The Davos Platz Books 40

Stevenson's Later Letters 44

A Stevenson Shrine 49

Stevenson and Hazlitt 55

On Beranger 57

Stevenson of the Letters 61

Apropos Vailima Letters 62

A Visit to Stevenson's Pacific Isle 65

A Pen Portrait 76

Appreciation and Homage 78

R. L. S. and Music 81

_Illustrations_

Frontispiece Portrait. From Etching by Hollyer

Facsimile Title Page Travels With a Donkey } 17 An Inland Voyage } 17

Facsimile Title Page Not I } 40 Black Canyon } 40

Facsimile Title Page A Pentland Rising 49

Facsimile Title Page A New Form of Intermittent Light 64

_Stevensoniana_

_By Way of Introduction_

The early days of the literary career of Robert Louis Stevenson can hardly be said to have been entirely devoid of recognition, though it would appear doubtful if the world at large was willing to recognize his abilities had it not been for his wonderful personality; with a soul and an imagination far above those of his early associates he gradually drew around him the respect and admiration of that larger world of letters, the London coterie. The following biographical notes are to be considered then as a mere resume of the various chronological periods and stages of his career as is shown by the many facts which have already become the common property of the latter day reader, but which by reason of the scattered source of supply and the extreme unlikelyhood of their being included in any authoritative life or biography, makes them at once interesting and valuable.

As sponsor for the abilities of Robert Louis Stevenson, stands first and foremost, the name of William Ernest Henley a belief which was latterly endorsed by most literary critics from Gladstone to LeGallienne.

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th of November, 1850. From his eighteenth year he seldom, if ever, signed himself aught but Robert Louis Stevenson, omitting the name Balfour therefrom. From birth he was of a slight and excitable nature and suffered keenly from chronic and frequent illness. His recognized literary labors may be said to have commenced at the immature age of six when, it is recalled, he wrote, presumably for his own amusement and that of his immediate family, "A History of Moses," and some years later an account of his "Travels in Perth."

In these early years there also took shape and form in his imagination what was afterwards given forth to the world in the pages of "Treasure Island."

At eight, Stevenson was at school, and at eleven entered the Academy of his native city. Here he began his first real literary labors, publishing, editing and even writing and illustrating the contents of a small school periodical.

Stevenson was emphatically a bird of passage, for regardless of the ties of kindred and sentiment he was ever on the wing, and when in after years as a seeker after health he proved none the less a careful observer than he had been in his schoolboy days, small wonder it is that he was able to give to the reading world such charming and novel descriptions of things seen.

In his schooldays he journeyed far into the country round about, the inevitable outcome of which was for him to ultimately to write out in his own picturesque and imaginative words a record of his observations. From "Random Memories" we learn of his pleasure at having taken a journey in company with his father around among the lighthouses of the Scottish coast, "_the first in the complete character of a man, without the help of petticoats_." And with these excursions into Fife began his wanderings so charmingly and characteristically chronicled in his later letters and reminiscences.

In 1862 he went abroad to Germany and Holland, and in the next year and in that following to Italy and the Riviera. In 1865 he wintered at Torquay, an English winter resort on the south coast.

At seventeen, at Edinburgh University, Stevenson became a pupil of Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, whose biography he wrote with much pride and devotion some years later.

Thus it is seen from early childhood that Stevenson was constantly putting forth the product of his pen, in Verses, Essays, Plays, Parodies, and Tales. In the "Stevenson Medley," a privately issued volume published as a sort of supplement to the "Edinburgh Edition" of his writings are to be found reprints of various of his early efforts, including the famous pamphlet "The Pentland Rising," which, in its original form, is now considered as being perhaps the rarest of all "Stevensoniana."

Quoting from a letter of Stevenson's to a friend, he says: "_I owned that I cared for nothing but literature; my father saying that that was no profession but that I might be called to the Bar, if I chose * * * * so at the age of twenty-one I began to study law._" Accordingly the next few years were spent with ardous reading of Blackstone and his contemporaries, and arriving at the age of twenty-five, in 1875, Stevenson passed the examinations and was formally called a few days thereafter. During his matriculation at the law schools Stevenson was all the while perfecting himself in the profession of his heart's choice.

About this time he came to know Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. William Ernest Henley, the beginning as the world knows, of a life long friendship with both these gentlemen.

Stevenson's first introduction to the reading world at large was on the occasion of an article which appeared in the _Portfolio_ for December, 1873, with the signature L. S. Stoneven appended.

Already Stevenson had begun to reap the benefit of acquaintanceship and association with the little coterie of literary folk whom he had fallen in with in London. For a time he sojourned in the artistic colony which had taken up its abode in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and has recorded its charms of life and association in the essay "Fontainebleau." He also came to know Bohemian Paris as well, and in certain circles which there exist, or did at one time exist, the memory of M. Stevenson still fondly lingers. Returning to Edinburgh Stevenson hung forth his placard at the now famous 17 Heriot Row, which read Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate. He did not, however, hang for long between the balance of Law and Literature, and it has been said, he never tried a case. Finally it was but apparent that he was so firmly wedded to literature that, needs must, he should devote himself to it and with the publication of "Virginibus Puerisque," he is truly said to have emerged from the threatening obscurity of his early struggles.

"An Inland Voyage" has recorded Stevenson's travels in Belgium in 1876, and "Travels with a Donkey in The Cevennes," chronicles another wandering in search of the picturesque, undertaken at about the same time. It is doubtful if either volume proved financially profitable at first though they proved, in connection with the volume of essays before mentioned, the means of introducing the name and work of Robert Louis Stevenson to an ever widening circle of fame.

During this period Stevenson was a frequent contributor to the London literary journals, and he had also rewritten an early production in the form of a play; this in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, and had also contributed his notes on "Picturesque Edinburgh" to Hamerton's _Portfolio_.

In 1879 Stevenson set sail for the new world taking ship as a mere emigrant, crossing the ocean as a steerage passenger and afterwards by emigrant train, across the American continent to the Golden Gate; a rude but romantic method of travel for one who had been nurtured in comfort and a chronic sufferer from ill health; a long journey though destined to be but the beginnings of a wandering after peace and health which latterly brought him to "Vailima" by the shore of that "ultimate island where now rest the remains of the beloved "Tusitala."

The "Amateur Emigrant" did not at once meet with the success it deserved in the American literary arena, though no one will deny but that praise was afterward showered upon the author's work to the full. Eight months were spent in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Gate when he succumbed to a severe illness which proved a serious draft on his powers.

In 1880, Stevenson, then in his thirty-first year, was married to Mrs. Osbourne, an American lady whom he had known in France, and with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs. Stevenson took up his abode in an abandoned mining camp at Juan Silverado, situated in the mountains of the Coast range. The life here can be no more pleasantly referred to than by recalling the record which was given to the public in "Silverado Squatters." The family remained at Silverado through the summer from whence they all journeyed to the old home in North Britain. For his health's sake, Stevenson, accompanied by his household, then betook himself to the dry and invigorating atmosphere of Davos Platz in the high Alps; and here amid the sunshine and the clear air the family settled for a winter's stay; and here it was that Stevenson, in conjunction with his step-son, concocted those ingenious and unique booklets known to collectors as the "Davos Platz Brochures." They had set up a small press and derived much pleasure in designing and printing these little books; "Black Canyon," "Not I," and "Moral Emblems," all of which are now of such extreme rarity as to be almost unobtainable in their original state.

In 1881 was begun the actual labor of writing "Treasure Island," the germ of which had been lying dormant in Stevenson's brain since his early schoolboy days. After another visit to Scotland, Stevenson set his footsteps still further to the southward and domiciled himself with his family at the Chalet la Solitude, near Hyeres near Marseilles, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, "Treasure Island" was running its course serially in the _Young Folks Paper_, and when it appeared as a volume pointed the definite way of Stevenson's popularity, the book being in every sense his first popular success.

Realizing that his malady grew no better in the southland Stevenson settled at Bournemouth, a mild winter resort on the south coast of England. Here he occupied the house presented to him by his father, and which he named "Skerryvore" after the lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. Stevenson continued his literary labours at this place unremittingly, though never at any one extended period was he really free from the dread grasp of his malady. Up to now writing had brought him but scant profit, and until his thirty-sixth year, says Mr. Colvin, his income had scarcely, if ever, exceeded three hundred pounds per year. His second great success was that weird tale of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and thenceforth he came to know his value as a writer of ability, and felt definitely assured that his labors would return to him a satisfying income.

In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson again went to America, sailing for New York in August of that year, and sojourning for short periods among and with friends in the East.

In the spring of 1888, when in his thirty-eighth year, Stevenson accompanied by members of his family, accepted an offer to cruise among the islands of the South Seas and write the story of his voyagings in a series of letters to a syndicate of newspapers. Arrangements were made for the charter of the schooner Casco, Captain Otis, in which he set sail from San Francisco, early in the spring, bound ostensibly for the "Marquesas." The cruise covered six months. During the voyage northward the Stevensons stayed some months at Honolulu and while there a visit was paid to the leper settlement on the island of Molokai, which ultimately called forth the "open letter" to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, wherein that Reverend gentleman received an unmitigated scathing from Stevenson's incensed pen, an incident which is only too readily recalled for one to linger over it at this time.

From Honolulu the cruise was continued southward for another six months on a trading schooner called the Equator which arrived at Apia, in Samoa, about Christmas time (1889). Here the company remained for some weeks, and here Stevenson purchased an estate of some hundreds of acres, lying on the mountainside overlooking the sea, which he called _Vailima_. The Stevensons went to Sidney, N. S. W. soon after, but again in the month of April steamed away in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, visiting Auckland and the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Ellis, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands and via New Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia where they arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as also Stevenson's step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining years of Stevenson's life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him as he worked in his exile in a far away land.

Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both native and European. He became actively interested in the political life of the islands, and when international complications came upon them in 1891, he dignified the whole proceedings by his impartial letters to the _London Times_, and later by the publication of the "Footnote to History," a monograph published in 1892.

Meanwhile he was applying himself to his writing with ardous persistancy, and quoting his own words from a letter written in 1893, he was seriously overworked, "_I am overworked bitterly, and my hand is a thing that was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains._"

In January of the same year he suffered from an attack of influenza from which he never fully recovered. While yet ill in bed he had begun to dictate "St. Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston."

From the Dictionary of National Biography is taken the following description of the sad end. "On the afternoon of the Fourth of December he was talking gaily with his wife, when a sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him at her feet and within two hours all was over."

* * * * *

Out across the pearly Pacific on the lonely mountainside at Samoa, lies all that once was mortal of "_Tusitala, the Teller of Tales_."

_APPARITION._

_"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face-- Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race. Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity-- There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy.

Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist."_ (W. E. HENLEY)

STEVENSON'S FIRST BOOK

The publication of the Stevenson letters revived interest in his career, both as man and writer. His first published book, as our readers will remember, was "The Pentland Rising," a pamphlet of twenty pages issued in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1866, when the author was but sixteen. At the time of Stevenson's death copies of this little work were sold for upwards of L20 a piece, but the price afterwards fell considerably. In 1868, he wrote the "Charity Bazaar," a boyish skit, filling four pages quarto, and which was privately printed. His next appearance in print seems to have been in the pages of a college paper, the _Edinburgh University Magazine_, which he and three fellow-students edited, and which lived through four numbers only. These numbers were issued from January to April, 1871. He says:

"A pair of little active brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the University building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers."

The first number was edited by all four associates, the second by Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier, the third by Stevenson alone, and of the last he says: "It has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth," and then: "It would perhaps be still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night."

Stevenson contributed six articles to the four numbers, one of which, "An Old Scotch Gardener," he revised and reprinted in "Memories and Portraits."

It will be news to many people that Stevenson was awarded the silver of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts for a paper entitled "A Notice of a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses." This paper was printed separately from the Transactions of the Society in a thin pamphlet, consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the headlines, "Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses," and contains five illustrations in the text.--_Publishers' Circular._

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME

_By R. L. S._

The Editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. The dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress," a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived; the "Essais" of Montaigne. That temperate and general picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies" and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent.