A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

"Took down the folds of her hair – shook it round her face and the pool repeated her thus veiled."

A DAY WITH STEVENSON

Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been permitted to enter its doors – you might account yourself a somewhat favoured person. For the master of the house, "that rickety and cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the nonce – shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing hemorrhage. Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest you left contagion of that cold.

But if fate befriended you, you would chance upon the most remarkable personality, it might be, that you had yet encountered. A lean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic of gesture – pacing up and down the room as he talked – burning with hectic energy – a man of rich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin: mutable, mirthful, brilliant – above all "vital," as he had described himself, "wholly vital with a buoyance of life" which had upborne him hitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.

Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six years old: and ever since his sixth year, when, as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed that he "heard the noise of pens writing," his aim had been set unswervingly toward the one goal. Born of a strong and strenuous family, the great lighthouse builders of the north, he was not, like them, intent upon the subjugation of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining of rocks and seas. Dhu Heartach and the Bell Rock and Skerryvore he could admire at a distance: but the material which cried aloud to him for mastery, was much more plastic, – yet, to him, no less stubborn. "I imagine," he declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out." His fastidious soul refused to be contented with a facile and slipshod utterance. A passionate quest: after le mot propre, which had led him, in his own phrase, to "play the sedulus ape" to all the great prose writers of the past – and a sense of style such as no man had ever so anxiously and assiduously developed in himself – these had achieved their own reward. "'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson, "I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world."

And this was a just pride: for there was no branch of literature in which he could not admirably acquit himself. So many years a struggler in obscurity, with small hopes, few successes, little encouragement – battling with continuous and crippling maladies, – this indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry," now suddenly stood forth in full blaze of public recognition. The author of Virginibus Puerisque, Treasure Island, Prince Otto, The Child's Garden of Verse, and Dr. Jekyll, was very much a man to be reckoned with.

Probably few modern books have met with such instantaneous and triumphant success as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll. The first, after running its course, unannounced and comparatively unrecognized, the serial of an obscure author, in Young Folks' Paper, was published in book form, – and Stevenson, like Byron, "awoke to find himself famous." The honours which he had failed to obtain with all the dainty humour, all the valiant fatalism, of Virginibus Puerisque, had been accorded without stint to Treasure Island. It was a tense and stimulating piece of pure adventure. The authentic air of the eighteenth century breathed through every sentence of it: and its fine flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even sober statesmen, such as Mr. Gladstone, to a very furore of avidity in devouring its breathless pages.

As for Dr. Jekyll, that gruesome work – literally the product of a nightmare – had been quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read by everybody, – it had taken the world by storm. Yet Stevenson's head was not turned by his tardily-won success: with his customary sang froid, he took things as they came, failures and triumphs, and met each alike with smiling gallantry.

The motives which had led him into authorship – or rather forced him, despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances, – were as curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which still drove him hard and incessantly. To fame he was perhaps not wholly indifferent. No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether. Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and beyond the appreciation of the general public. For money, – though it was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year, – for money he did not care, except as a means to an end. "Wealth is only useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly want." Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was true. It was for money only, no doubt, that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of tushery," The Black Arrow, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself ill at ease. But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home."

And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more than justified his choice.

All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit condition. Under any and all circumstances, he continued to write unflinchingly; racked by coughing, reeling with weakness, with his right arm in a sling, and his left hand holding the pen, – sitting up in bed with a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet, as he declared, "I like my life all the same … I should bear false witness if I did not declare life happy." … He was, in his own words, "made for a contest, and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle."

"To declare life happy," became, in fact, his literary mission, – the condensed philosophy of his gay, inveterate courage. "I believe that literature should give joy," was his maxim, "one dank, dispirited word is harmful, – a crime of lèse-humanité." This brave and cheerful outlook is evident in all his essays, – it is, so to speak, a glorified and artistic Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready to survive the most malevolent accidents of life, the crowning tragedy of death itself. And so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed himself, still ready, in all but body, for great risks and inspiriting adventures, and – through a mist of pain – leading forlorn hopes with a waving sword of flame. You hear him proclaiming that:

"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?" (Virginibus Puerisque.)

And to him, above all, applied his own triumphant lines, those which he addressed to W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like courageous outlook, who, like himself, "in the fell grip of circumstances, had not winced nor cried aloud:

At present he was engaged upon Kidnapped, that admirable piece of fiction which he had begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a pot-boiler." It was a relief, after the concentrated horror of Dr. Jekyll, to escape into the Scottish heather-scent and to feel the salt sea-wind whistling through the cordage of Kidnapped.

Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries." Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of Jekyll had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is an accident." But now he was at liberty to give play to his infinite variety upon a true boys' book, – a story to satisfy the inveterate boyishness of his own heart. "Of the romance of boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master … the philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature man." (J. W. Mackail.) And even the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys in petticoats." The phrase has reason. "I have never admired a girl," he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of mine." The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he hardly cared to solve, – a sealed book which he was not desirous to open. "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with the warfare.

And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life: and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes had changed. His wife, – "trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very alter ego: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics: and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses." To while away the weary hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him, – and subsequently the husband and wife would write them out together. She, with her "eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as companion, helpmate, friend; – and far – how infinitely far! – above the ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly, – in his bachelor days, – that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections," and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her life-long comrade. The character of the ideal wife, as there indicated, – apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent tongue, – was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion. And now that Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity for him, – he was loth to speak of it, as to write of it. It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour. But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously insisted, in his desiderata of the female character.

"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily in his wife. Therefore it came about, that, unversed in women – as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic – and if they failed in flesh-and-blood-vraisemblance, they had that "steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he had chosen.

You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor; from Catriona, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when, having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the staggering side of the Rose into the little boat below; – when, in David Balfour's words:

"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself … But this was to reckon without the lass's courage … Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than would be thought genteel in cities" – (Catriona.)

to Seraphina in Prince Otto, still inherently valorous in that desperate flight through the forest: where:

"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool. Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images. She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe … She addressed herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair. She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled." (Prince Otto.)

Clara Huddlestone, in the Pavilion on the Links, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the Sieur de Malétroit's Door, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.

The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord them the assistance of a personal description. But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where they are conspicuously absent, such as The Ebb Tide, The Wreckers, and The Master of Ballantrae. In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book: and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry, – even in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the author describes how:

"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs. Henry… When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my old lord cleared his throat. The first to move was the singer, who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro in the low end of the hall." (The Master of Ballantrae.)

But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here, of two men's lives: it is a rôle of vis inertiæ at best. And, indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure? Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine should enter – that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and Herrick the cockney vagabond. "The spice of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with fortune.

The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy. He revelled in delineating his ideal man:

"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. 'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence." (Virginibus Puerisque.)

The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar – a thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve a whole intricate plot. With the simplest of sentences, he could electrify the startled reader, as when in The Wrecker, where the desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"

"All turned at the cry, – and there, in the wild light of the morning, heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig Flying Scud of Hull." (The Wrecker.)

On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot. All its involution and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead – backwards or forwards – to this one swift breathless sight.

His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play awhile. After weeks, it might be, of enforced seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him. Stevenson, – the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather moss, – was now, under a woman's tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort. "Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit down in it. No other room is so lovely in the world … I blush for the figure I cut in such a bower." The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons. A large dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.

Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his hands – "wonderful hands – long and fragile, like those in the early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys. For a while he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which conveyed to him the indefinable pot-pourri-like, flavour of his favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity, "the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading courtly measures. Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music, but he had never attained to any facility of execution. And when he grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as he called it – composing, that is to say, after a fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger." The fact that he had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his delight. "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write in four parts, and that cannot be done by man." So he continued to "pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.

Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close. Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no means disdained the pleasures of the table. Not, perhaps, in the role of a gourmet – but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of taste and smell. "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part in life that is played by eating and drinking. "There is a romance about the matter after all," he observed. "Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining than scenery." It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine. "Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April" – these, he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.

After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to sleep – at a moment's notice – and after a short, sound repose, was as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued until friends arrived.

At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief wishes. "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, O Du lieber Gott! friends." The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered. Never was a man more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and without effort. "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and in the second, for a man of genius." Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?" His expression, of mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic presence" – together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so unique as could command all love at will. And the friends were very many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore. First and foremost was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described him. "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife. These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son. He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.

But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:

And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."