Part 4

Such, then, in brief, is a rough summary of the library of this remarkable man; many of the editions de luxe were packed away, but I believe what I saw was his working stock. We now opened a little glass door leading from the room into Stevenson's sanctum, where he dictated almost all his work. It was quite a small room, lighted by two windows; and in one corner lay a bed with a mat "Samoan fashion" spread thereon, while beside it was a table with a bunch of withered flowers (the last he ever looked on), and which Mr. Chatfield has very properly never permitted to be removed. Here, in one corner, stood a small bookcase with editions of his own works; the walls were hung with engravings of ancestors--the only sign of his Scotch origin I noted in the house--while above the chimney-piece (the only chimney-pieces and fire-places in Samoa are at Vailima), were a lovely series of drawings of Gordon Browne, to illustrate one of his later books, "The Island Nights' Adventures." These pictures, though only in black and white, breathe the spirit of the islands in a marvellous manner, especially remarkable being the illustration, "The Beach of Falesa." In a small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, "A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals." I heard that Stevenson was fond of "supping full of horrors," and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me that on some days he was the most charming of companions--brilliant, witty and fascinating; on others, dull and morose beyond description, hardly uttering a word, and giving no sign of the wealth of tenderness and genial kindness that lurked within. As a host, it is agreed on all hands he was incomparable. His entertainment catered for the tastes of all, and in the sunshine of his delightful company all sorts and conditions of men were happy.

We left this room with a feeling of depression, and passing through the other to the door, my eye fell on what I had not before noticed, the original of the delightful map which is the frontispiece to Treasure Island--a most beautiful piece of drawing, reminding me, in its quaint accompaniments of spouting dolphins and horn-blowing Tritons, as much as in its pretended accuracy, of those strange maps in the earlier editions of Gulliver, where Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., are all laid out with geographical detail of latitude and longitude. The curious, sprawling writing of Flint and Billy Bones were in contrast to the fine workmanship of the rest of the map, which, save for some slight coarseness in the shading of the steeper side of "Spyglass Hill," might have been engraved. The last thing I saw in the library was perhaps the most curious of all. It was a navigating chart constructed by the natives of the Wallis Islands for their own use and guidance. I have since learned that such charts are used by the traders also who navigate these latitudes. The form of the charts is a parallelogram constructed on a framework of cane or other light wood. Across this parallelogram run vertically convex pieces of wood bent to show the general run or set of the wind and waves; cross currents are marked with cross pieces of wood showing their direction, and their force and variation are indicated on the slips of wood themselves (which are not half an inch wide) by means of signs and curious marks. Islands are denoted on this wonderful piece of native work by cowrie shells fastened to the framework. I suppose Stevenson must have picked this up on his travels among the islands, and I believe that although these charts are universally used in the Wallis group and are found perfectly correct, very few specimens of the kind have emerged as yet from those islands. I puzzled a long time to guess what it was, Mrs. Chatfield enjoying my mystification, which she herself had experienced when she first saw this remarkable map. One more fact I must mention about the library. In a corner I found a number of quarto volumes, well bound, containing apparently a continuous day-book of some of Stevenson's many voyages. It is to be hoped that these journals may some day be given to the world. Many and curious were the scenes he witnessed; various and entertaining the personages he must have met on his travels. He seems to have visited most of the many groups of islets with which the Pacific is so plentifully sprinkled.

I did not care to visit the rest of the house, though my hostess most kindly offered to show me anything she could, but I stood outside and looked at the lofty hill over the house where he sleeps his last sleep in the land and among the people he loved so well. Samoans show much poetic feeling in selecting beautiful sites for the graves of their chiefs. In my journeys round the island, in the most remote districts, I was frequently delighted by coming suddenly upon the usual inclosure of rough stones which mark the resting-place of a chief, always in a beautiful spot and invariably commanding a wide and splendid view. This may also have been Stevenson's object in selecting the summit of the hill for his grave. The labor required to carry him to his last resting-place was immense, as many as sixty Samoans being employed, while only nineteen Europeans braved the difficulties of the ascent to be present at the sad offices. But his last home is beautiful; by day the trees innumerable round his lonely grave are musical with the fanfare of the glorious tradewinds, while at times the sound of

"The league-long roller thundering on the reef"

is borne across the waving forest. The view by day is superb; mountain, valley, reef and palm, with the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf around the distant reef, while overhead the solitary tropic bird wings its silent flight through the dazzling azure of the skies. No more beautiful spot for a grave can be imagined; the majestic voice of those southern seas he loved so well makes melody in the very air around his grave. No spot more typical of the Pacific could have been found; and I turned away with a feeling of relief that one whose nature was so allied to that he wrote of should in his death not have been divided from the scenes he made familiar to so many thousands of admirers.

A PEN PORTRAIT

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, really does look like the watermelon portrait of him in one of the magazines. He sat in a Long Branch car on Tuesday on his way from Manasquan to New York.

He has a long, narrow face, and wears his long brown hair parted in the middle and combed back. It is just such straight, coarse hair as General Roger A. Pryor's, but much lighter in color. Stevenson sat in a forward corner of the car, with his hat off, and the cape of his coat up behind his head like a monk's cowl. His black velvet coat and vest showed plainly, and over his legs he wore a black and white checked shawl. His Byronic collar was soft and untidy, and his shirt was unlaundered, but his clothes were scrupulously clean. On the long, thin, white fingers of his left hand he wore two rings, and he kept these fingers busy constantly pulling his drooping moustache. His face is slightly freckled and a little hollow at the cheek, but it has a good bit of Scotch color in it.

Mr. Stevenson presented such an odd figure that all in the car stared at him, particularly when a rumor of who he was ran among the people. But he seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused. He was reading a book, and every now and then he would fix a sentence in his mind, close the book on one finger, look at the ceiling and muse. When a sentence pleased him, he smiled at it, and then read it again. At the Jersey City depot he threw off his shawl and stood up, and then the figure he cut was extraordinary, for his coat proved to be merely a large cape, with a small one above it, and under both came his extra long legs, or, rather, his long lavender trousers, for they appeared to have no legs within them.

Mrs. Stevenson was with him, but sat apart studying the scenery. Her husband looked at her frequently with a whimsical smile, and found great fun in laughing at her behind his book when a dude of tremendous style took the seat beside her.--_The Sun, 1887._

APPRECIATION AND HOMAGE.

"The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,' and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its forerunner, 'Tom Sawyer.'"

...."He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to 'Silverado Squatters'.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic ... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs."

_Brander Matthews._

"No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is most unceasingly inspired by '_an unextinguishable zest in technical successes_' and has also most constantly remembered that '_The end of all art is to please_.'"

_M. G. Van Rensselaer._

"In the years I knew him, if Stevenson expressed much interest in children, it was mainly for the sake of their fathers and mothers: but that after a while he began to take a very great delight in summoning back to his clear recollection the panic fears and adventurous pleasure of his own early youth, thus becoming, in his portraiture of himself, the consummate painter of one species of child. But his relation to other children was shy and gently defiant; it would have exhausted him to play with them; but he looked forward to a time when they should be old enough to talk to him."

_Edmund Gosse._

R. L. S. AND MUSIC.

Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don't want it--the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang contends; you need not even read poetry, if you "hate poetry and painting," like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza. Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand "Will ye no come back again?" and "Bonnie Dundee," Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music "the least disagreeable of noises," even he was at the worst only insensible to the charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet--that he never made out a tune is no matter--and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months before his death he asked to be taught "at least the alphabet of your language." Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music of his country, and, like Congreve's Jeremy, had a "reasonable ear" for a jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent Novello's house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ and listen to his daughter's singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin went into mild raptures over Halle's playing of Thalberg's "Home, sweet home." Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him; and if Shakespeare wasn't musical he ought to have been considering the way in which he has spoken of the man who "hath no music in his soul." In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people--some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.

To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays. In "The Wrong Box," for example, we have the humorous situation where the young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a veritable "locus classicus" on the art of playing the penny whistle, and the difference between the amateur and the professional performer. Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that instrument. "The young of the penny whistler," as he puts it, "like those of the salmon, are occult from observation." He endows David, his forbear at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour "in the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a deep philosopher, but much of a musician."

It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had not much of a musical ear, and had only a "rudimentary acquaintance" with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green." It is clear that he improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the visitors round the cathedral.

"We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them with, I dare-say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me. 'Ah,' says he (the verger), 'You're very fond of music.' I said I was. 'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music."

The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him; but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is "useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly excited" over Halevy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to "slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside, so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.

That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural, but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far. When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that "I write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano until I go to bed." At this time the whistle was Osborne's instrument. "You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!" Stevenson exclaimed to his father, "Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes." By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is arranging certain numbers of the "Magic Flute" for "two melodious forefingers." Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley's powers as a virtuoso that Stevenson should have "counterfeited his playing on the piano."

But Stevenson's particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised instrument. "Played on my pipe," "took to tootling on the flageolet," are entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that "pipe" is synonymous with flageolet. "If I take to my pipe," he writes on one occasion, "I know myself all is over for the morning." Writing to Mr. Colvin in June, 1891, he says:--"Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing 'Le Chant d'Amour' lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence." Generally speaking, Stevenson "tootled" by himself; but now and again he took part in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music "furiously" with these two. A day or two later he writes:--"Woke at the usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice, Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the pipe."

But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in 1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or "a sheaf of 'em."