Part 2

I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make his a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognize their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great Roman empire.

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book; a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feeling--those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies farther back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a royal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforth, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that there is among the hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not--Mill did not--agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error--the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate.

I should never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David. * * * "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is haunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author, "he is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic Islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope, or the editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after have said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written.

A STEVENSON LETTER

_Dear Madam_:--It is impossible to be more gracefully penitent: I give you leave to buy ----'s triple piracy in ---- the library; and this permission is withheld from all other living creatures, so that you alone will possess that publication without sin.

I am, dear madam, Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. March, 1887.

A JUSTIFICATION

Boston, June 5, 1900.--When Mr. Stevenson was at Saranac in the Adirondacks I sent him a short editorial on his Brownies that I had written for the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, and also a letter, saying that I owed him one dollar. I professed penitence for having bought a pirated copy of "Dr. Jekyll" for 25 cents, and promised to make good the deficit if I ever met him. He sent me the letter above.

In May, eleven years later, Miss Louise Imogene Guiney invited me to meet her friend, Mrs. Virgil Williams, to be told--for print--the true story of the Stevenson marriage. I was unable to go to meet Mrs. Williams at the time appointed, but a day or two later she came by Miss Guiney's introduction to an editorial desk where I had been for eight years in the office of the Boston _Evening Transcript_, and gave me certain facts, from which the article below was written. It appeared in _The Transcript_, May 18, 1898.

MINNA CAROLINE SMITH.

MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who has been ill in New York, has recovered and has gone to England for an indefinite stay. It is, however, her purpose to make her home again ultimately in San Francisco. Her presence in England is necessary, as Mr. Sidney Colvin is now engaged in writing the "Life of Stevenson," and depends upon Mrs. Stevenson for aid in compilation, and in deciding what shall be said and what shall be left out. A great deal has been said about the Stevensons which might much better have been left unsaid, for the simple reason that it is not true. Like the old story of Phillips Brooks and the boy with the "Episcopalian Kittens," some of the truthless tales are harmless. Others are less innocuous than the imaginative yarns which are always likely to be current about any bright personality, any "shining mark," like Stevenson and his accomplished wife.

Now that he is dead, and Mrs. Stevenson has gone to his native Britain, it is well to deny authoritatively the absurd story which has often been revived during the past twenty years that Mrs. Stevenson's first husband, Mr. Osbourne, gave her away in marriage on the day of her wedding to Robert Louis Stevenson, and that Stevenson afterwards fraternized with his predecessor. As a matter of fact, Stevenson never in his life even saw the father of Lloyd Osbourne, who was about fourteen years of age at the time of his mother's marriage to the famous Scot. The father of Stevenson, an old-time Presbyterian gentlemen, made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, thus wholly welcoming his beloved daughter-in-law in the family, where she and her children have found happiness and where they gave so much. It is advisedly said that the elder Stevenson made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, his property to be that of his son's step-child after the death of his son and that son's wife. It is well known that Stevenson's mother was with his family in Samoa, and this dignified and conservative lady also followed the custom of the country which the family followed, in homely phrase, "going bare-footed" at home. Pictures of Stevenson in his Samoa home, enjoying the freedom of this native fashion, have been common enough. This Samoan custom seemed simple and natural to any one who saw the Stevensons in Samoa going without shoes and stockings, quite as summer girls on the Massachusetts shore have gone about without gloves or hats during recent years, an unconventionality which would once have shocked thousands. The matter would not be worth mentioning, but a curious myth about Mrs. Stevenson has sprung from it. A paragraph has been floating through contemporaries in several cities of late, to the effect that Mrs. Stevenson went out to dine in London, when first introduced there by her husband, without shoes and stockings! This little yarn really denies itself on the face of it. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Stevenson's conformity to social customs has never been found insufficient wherever she has been. She is a woman of original talents and great adaptability of talent who, for many years, was the nurse, the "guide, philosopher and friend," as well as the beloved wife of the child of genius whose name she bears. She was studying art in Paris, where she had gone with her three children, when she first met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was among the artists and literary folk at Barbizon. She returned to America with her daughter and her son--one son had died while she was in France--and readily got a divorce from Mr. Osbourne. No word concerning the father of her children has ever been uttered for publication by Mrs. Stevenson, or ever will be. He married a second time and, after a while, left his wife and disappeared. He has since been seen in South Africa. It is here repeated that Robert Louis Stevenson never saw him. Mrs. Stevenson wished to delay her second marriage for a year, but Stevenson had travelled over land and sea to California, and was ill and homesick. So, by the advice of a close friend, the marriage was not long postponed. This friend was Mrs. Virgil Williams, wife of the well-known teacher of painting in San Francisco, the founder of that pioneer art school of the West, which, since Mr. Williams's death, was munificently endowed by Mr. Searles as the Hopkins Institute. Mrs. Williams went with the pair to the house of Dr. Scott, a Presbyterian minister of San Francisco, who married Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson. Nobody else was present at the private wedding, except Mrs. Scott, the wife of the minister. This divine made Stevenson a present of a religious book of his own writing to read on the journey to Scotland, and the whimsical fear of Stevenson that he might not read it all while crossing the continent and the Atlantic was characteristic. But if he felt that this was not sufficiently light reading for a steamer journey he appreciated the gift, and in return sent Dr. Scott a book on a like topic written by his father in Scotland.

"People are very much like folks"; the fairy tales which are told about the famous are very likely to need large grains of salt in the taking. The simple truth about the Stevensons was that theirs was a peculiarly fortunate and happy marriage, and that if they lived in Bohemia it was "on the airy uplands" of that land, where freedom of personal action never meant wilful foolish eccentricity or lack of conformity to the canons of true courtesy and kindness.

THE DAVOS PLATZ BOOKS

Mr. Joseph Pennell has contributed to _The Studio_ an account of an unpublished chapter, which is delightful reading and reveals Stevenson to the world as an illustrator and wood engraver. With the people of Le Monastier, the lace-makers, Stevenson became a popular figure and was known for miles in the country. In the town every urchin seemed to know his name, "although no living creature could pronounce it." One group of lace-makers brought out a chair whenever he went by, and insisted on having a good gossip. They would have it that the English talked French, or patois, and "of all patois they declared that mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp about the streets in ecstasy." In a notice of the article, a writer in _The London Chronicle_ says:

"There was a dear old lady of Monastier with whom he struck up an attachment. She passed judgment on his sketches and his heresy with a wry mouth and a twinkle of the eye that were eminently Scottish. 'She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial. * * * "No, no," she would say, "that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better looking than that. We must try again."

"But the most characteristic work of Stevenson as illustrator is to be found in the quaint little woodcuts which adorned the volumes turned out by the press of Osbourne & Co. at Davos. With some very primitive type and a boundless capacity for frivoling, this 'company,' consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson and young Lloyd Osbourne, managed to while away the hours of the Swiss Winter in delightful fashion. As Mr. Pennell states in _The Studio_ these Davos editions are exceedingly hard to secure. The British Museum itself has only two copies, and there is no hint of their existence in any of the published works. One of these works was entitled 'Moral Emblems; a Collection of Cuts and Verses.'

"There was also a second collection of 'Moral Emblems, an edition de luxe, in tall paper, extra fine, price tenpence, and a popular edition for the million, small paper, cuts slightly worn, a great bargain, eightpence.' Another of these volumes was entitled 'The Graver and the Pen,' of which the author asserted on the poster that it was 'a most strikingly illustrated little work, and the poetry so pleasing that when it is taken up to be read is finished before it is set down.' There were five full-page illustrations, eleven pages of poetry finely printed on superb paper, and the whole work offered a splendid chance for an energetic publisher. One of the moral emblems runs as follows:

"Industrious pirate! See him sweep The lonely bosom of the deep, And daily the horizon scan From Hatteras or Matapan. Be sure, before that pirate's old, He will have made a pot of gold, And will retire from all his labors And be respected by his neighbors. You also scan your life's horizon For all that you can clap your eyes on.

"Sometimes an unintentional effect was introduced into the woodcuts, as in the case of 'The Foolhardy Geographer.' We cannot tell the story, but the effect is thus described in a postscript:

"A blemish in the cut appears, Alas! it cost both blood and tears. The glancing graver swerved aside, Fast flowed the artist's vital tide! And now the apologetic bard Demands indulgence for his pard."

STEVENSON'S LATER LETTERS

_London Bookman, Dec. 1899._

Out of these noble volumes of Stevenson letters two things come to me of new, of which the first is the more important. Before and above all else these books (with their appendage, the Vailima Correspondence) are the record of as noble a friendship as I know of in letters. And perhaps, as following from this, we have here a Stevenson without shadows. Not even a full statue, but rather a medallion in low relief--as it were the St. Gaudens bust done into printer's ink.

It is difficult to say precisely what one feels, with Mr. Colvin (and long may he be spared) still in the midst of us. And yet I cannot help putting it on record that what impresses me most in these volumes, wherein are so many things lovely and of good report, is the way in which, in order that one friend may shine like a city set on a hill, the other friend consistently retires himself into deepest shade. Yet all the same Mr. Colvin is ever on the spot. You can trace him on every page--emergent only when an explanation must be made, never saying a word too much, obviously in possession of all the facts, but desirous of no reward or fame or glory to himself if only Tusitala continue to shine the first among his peers. Truly there is a love not perhaps _sur_passing the love of women, but certainly _passing_ it, in that it is different in kind and degree.

Obviously, however, Mr. Colvin often wounded with the faithful wounds of a friend, and sometimes in return he was blessed, and sometimes he was banned. But always the next letter made it all right.

To those outside of his family and familiars Stevenson was always a charming and sometimes a regular correspondent. To myself, with no claim upon him save that of a certain instinctive mutual liking, he wrote with the utmost punctuality every two months from 1888 to the week of his death.

It is the irony of fate that about thirty of these letters lie buried somewhere beneath, above, or behind an impenetrable barrier of 25,000 books. In a certain great "flitting" conducted by village workmen these manuscripts disappeared, and have so far eluded all research. But at the next upturning of the Universe, I doubt not they will come to light and be available for Mr. Colvin's twentieth edition. It was a great grief to me that I had no more to contribute besides those few but precious documents which appear in their places in the second volume of "Letters to Family and Friends."

Albeit, in spite of every such blank, here is such richness as has not been in any man's correspondence since Horace Walpole's--yet never, like his, acidly-based, never razor-edged, never, for all Stevenson's Edinburgh extraction, either west-endy or east-windy. Here in brief are two books, solid, sane, packed with wit and kindliness and filled full of the very height of living.