Arthur Ransome’s Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson

Any consideration of the life and work of Stevenson must be a study of the reaction continually in progress between a delight in physical doing and making and being and an irresistible and more or less contradictory desire to write, to knit words together and to be absorbed wholly in an intellectual business. Stevenson felt that delight and this desire to be more or less opposed to each other; but, speaking with strict accuracy, the desire was no more than a result and at the same time a stimulus of the delight. Art with him as with all other artists was for life’s sake; with him more obviously than with some others because of the comparative simplicity of the life of which he sought by means of art to make himself more intensely conscious. He ‘ felt action’ he wrote in a letter: his art was a means of feeling it more clearly. It was precisely because he was an artist that he could write, ‘I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.’²

This must not be forgotten when we read his laments for an active life. These laments are mere greedy desire for yet more of what he already possessed. He lived like a candle flame and towards the end of his life climbed higher and higher in hopes to catch and consume a little more of that life which he had valued with steady wisdom from the first. There was no form of activity which he would not have liked to share for a moment at least. He felt in a different way something of the eighteenth century reverence for the natural man; not for the gentle creature whose love in the pages of Chateaubriand³ is conducted under palm trees and blessed by a hermit; but for the efficient man, who can build his house, cook his food, clothe himself, sail a boat, ride a horse, and read, a civilised Crusoe,⁴ the novels of Mr Henry James.⁵

I think it will be easier to realise how oddly his life came, without his knowledge, perhaps, to conform to his ideal, if I print one of his laments over the specialisation of modern man, before an account of the varied, vigorous activity from the enjoyment of which not even his uncertain health was able to prevent him. Jim Pinkerton in The Wrecker remarked, ‘Why in snakes should anybody want to be a sculptor, if you come to that? I would love to sculp myself. But what I can’t see is why you should want to do nothing else. It seems to argue a poverty of nature.’⁶

‘That problem,’ wrote Stevenson to Mr W. H. Low in January of the year of his death,

why the artist can do nothing else? is one that continually exercises myself. He cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can’t RLS? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable small-ness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think David Balfour a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man’s life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be otherwise busy in this world. I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too. Hinc illae lacrymae.⁷ I take my own case as most handy, but it is as illustrative of my quarrel with the age. We take all these pains, and we don’t do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even Fielding, who was an active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy bookseller. J’ai honte pour nous; my ears burn.⁸

It is curious to think that this was written when Stevenson could look back upon the vivid, adventurous career which it is now my business to record.

From the beginning⁹ Stevenson’s life was affected by his health, his parents abandoning one house because its three outside walls let in the cold, and choosing another because its protected position was likely to benefit their continually ailing child. They, perhaps fortunately, had no other children, and from his earliest babyhood Stevenson’s most constant companions were his father and mother and Alison Cunningham, his nurse, the Cummy of his familiar letters, to whom he dedicated A Child’s Garden of Verses, for whom he always felt the most lively affection. ‘My ill health,’ he wrote, ‘principally chronicles itself by the terrible long nights that I lay awake, troubled continually by a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning, from the bottom of my shaken little body.’ He remembered his father inventing conversations with guards, innkeepers, and coachmen and the other great characters of childhood to quiet the terror in which he woke from snatches of feverish sleep, and, when sleep would not come, his nurse lifting him to the window to see lights over the way, where, perhaps, another nurse and another little boy were watching for the morning.

In the lives of few writers has regular education been of so little importance as in Stevenson’s. He moved from day-school to day-school, Edinburgh Academy among others, attended fitfully, was often prevented by illness, and perhaps as much by his father’s attitude, from ever trying to get any serious benefit from his many masters. For his father, the engineer, the processes of whose mind was learned in observation of wind and current and shifting foreshore, despised the copy-book learning of the pedagogue. ‘Tutor,’ says Stevenson, ‘was ever a byword with him; ‘positively tutorial,’ he would say of people or manners he despised; and with sure consistency, he bravely encouraged me to neglect my lessons, and never so much as asked me my place in school.’ He took him early abroad, and early to England; when Stevenson was twelve he went on his first tour of inspection of lighthouses, with his father, and, a less exciting adventure, was taken to London to see the Second International Exhibition.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13th 1850 at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh. He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour but his father later altered the spelling of Lewis and Stevenson himself omitted and prescribed the omission of Balfour. His father was a civil engineer who, like others of his family, was especially interested in the work of lighthouse building, and has secured for himself an immortality in stone towers and shifting lights no less respectable than his son’s in frailer but perhaps more persistent material. He was thirty-two at the time of Stevenson’s birth and his wife (Stevenson’s mother) was a daughter of the Manse, of the Manse which Stevenson described, with perhaps half a memory of Lamb’s¹⁰ essay on a similar subject, in Memories and Portraits.

Mrs E. B. Simpson relates how: ‘His father severely criticised the tawdry make of a toy sword given to his small Louis in Crimean times, when war-fever was rampant in every nursery. ‘I tell you,’ replied the proud owner, examining his gew-gaw weapon anew, ‘the sword is of gold and the sheath of silver, and the boy who has it is very well off and quite contented.’¹¹ The best summary description of his childhood is Stevenson’s own. ‘My childhood was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other ‘land of counterpane.’¹² His youth was more robust. When his friend Walter Turner died he wrote, ‘to think that he was young with me, sharing that weather-beaten, Fergussonian youth.’¹³

Stevenson’s career at the University was shaped by his father’s hopes, though it woefully cheated them before the end. He abandoned Greek as an impossible task, and soon left Latin aside in exchange for studies more likely to be useful to an engineer. Even these he did not too diligently pursue, and boasted afterwards that few had ‘more certificates of attendance for less education.’ In vacation time also he was supposed to be training for his father’s profession, and did indeed have lively adventures among the light-house builders in the north. At Wick he went down to the sea-bottom in a diving suit, and at Anstruther heard himself referred to as the man in charge. These portions of his education he always remembered gratefully. That kind of engineering, he wrote, ‘takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) for the miserable life of cities.’¹⁴ Boats, the sea, dexterities, and a distaste for cities were the best corrections for the exercise of writing in which alone he was diligent. He may, in the momentary enthusiasm of these things, have looked complacently, even eagerly, on the future his father had planned for him, but when they sat together above an estuary, the elder Stevenson discerning the hidden forces of the waters, the younger wearing him out with indifference to his virtuoso skill in this kind of theorising, it was clear enough that sooner or later some well laid plans would go agley.¹⁵

The embryo R. L. S., that was to burst the smooth shell on which his father wrote so legibly, is to be discerned in quite different employment. There is, for example, an exultant memory of long lamp-lit evenings, toes to the fire, reading The Vicomte de Bragelonne¹⁶ in Swanston Cottage. And the unspecialised side of all these events and places of this time recur in his later writings to show how vividly Stevenson had realised them when he was supposed to be merely pressing past them to succeed to the glorious tradition of the light-house builders. Swanston Cottage, in the hamlet under the Pentlands, taken by his father in 1868, became the house where St Ives suffered after his escape from Edinburgh Castle.¹⁷ David Balfour was cast ashore, by an odd coincidence, on the island where the youthful engineer had spent three weeks in 1870.

His friendship with Fleeming Jenkin,¹⁸ the professor of engineering, had no basis of common interest in mechanics, but rather of a common interest in morality, in argument, and in life. And his father might have found a danger signal to his hopes in the character of his son’s delight in the Edinburgh students’ Speculative Society. Stevenson’s place in that body, which ‘has counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Homer, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmett, and many a legal and local celebrity besides’, was not that of a student of engineering. He was there by virtue of another self, who wrote in penny exercise books, and dreamed of books. From its library he was called by ‘three very distinguished students’ to take his share in editing and writing a College Magazine. Here he was no truant, but remained at his editorial post after his three distinguished colleagues had fallen away with faint hearts.

His father, from excellent motives, allowed him no more than twelve pounds a year for his personal expenses – a sovereign, payable monthly. Stevenson got the most out of his monthly pound in a manner that would not have pleased his parent. He was a student, idle, at the University; he boated, without conspicuous skill in his friends’ canoes on the Firth; but in his evenings, like Deacon Brodie (who always had a friendly glow in his imagination), he lived another life, was known as ‘Velvet Coat’ among the disreputable, had his seat in the chimney corner of a tavern, and was a puzzle to his strange but largely tolerant associates. Perhaps he had a model in his mind, not to imitate, but for reference and encouragement, and, perhaps, that model was Robert Fergusson. Years afterwards, in a starlit night in the South Seas, he lay under a blanket on the deck of the yacht Casco, and had a vision of Drummond Street:

It came on me like a flash of lightning: I simply returned thither, and into the past. And when I remember all I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford’s in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc. etc. And then now – what a change! I feel somehow as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate at the corner of that dreary thoroughfare for all students to read, poor devils, when their hearts are down.¹⁹

In another way also, he was moving on lines divergent from that so clearly illuminated path to his father’s ideal. When ‘Velvet Coat’ fled from Calvinism he ran to a distance, and, like many another young man, made faces at it and called himself an atheist. Stevenson once in youth was himself tempted to raise the Devil. He had read old books on magic, and, alone in his room, inscribed the mystic figures on the floor, zodiac and pentagram, and abracadabraical lettering. ‘And I got into the very happiest fright you can just imagine.’²⁰ This was play, but he had long argued with his father, too well to make their conversations pleasant. He joined the ‘L. J. R.’,²¹ which seems to have been a rather high-spirited specimen of that kind of club satirised by Goldsmith, from whose mock-rules I quote:

V. All them who brings a new argument against religion, and who being a philosopher and a man of learning, as the rest of us is, shall be admitted to the freedom of the Society, upon paying sixpence only, to be spent in punch.²²

The L. J. R. probably used better grammar, but it was the sight of its ‘rules and constitution’ which caused the most serious of the differences between Stevenson, father, and Stevenson, son.

In 1871, his father was encouraged by seeing a paper of his son’s on ‘A New Form of Intermittent Light for Light-houses’ awarded a medal by the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, but, in that same year Stevenson told him that he did not wish to be an engineer, and that he wanted to write instead. The old man stoically agreed, on condition that his son was to have some visible profession, and Stevenson forthwith proposed to be an advocate. His father must have felt him wasted, for two years after this decision the Royal Society accepted another scientific paper by Stevenson on ‘The Thermal Influence of Forests’.

Stevenson was now free to study the art of writing, so long as that did not hinder his progress in the law. He wrote continually, talked continually, but passed in 1872 his preliminary examination for the Scottish Bar, and spent some time, sitting as squarely as he could on a three legged stool, learning conveyancing in the office of an Edinburgh solicitor.

Stevenson was now twenty two, delicate in health, shaking, reed-like, in the tempestuous Edinburgh writers, avoiding ordinary society, Velvet Coat among associates who could not understand but liked him, writing continually, and beginning to choose his friends for life. Much may be learnt of a man by a survey of the friendships of his first youth. And we get a vivid stereoscopic picture of Stevenson if we set by the side of the friends of Velvet Coat the four who, though he had known some of them before, began from this time to be determining influences on his development. Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, exalted by a gust of malice into a rival of R. L. S., when both were dead, was his cousin, a fine, peacocking talker, a brilliant, suggestive, achieving man, more in stimulating others than in any private output, a man keenly interested in the processes of art, and able to supplement Stevenson’s deductions with analogies from painting, a witty, an argumentative companion. Fleeming Jenkin was a moralist capable of reproving Stevenson with a perspicuity that made reply impossible – and at the same time, a large, cheerful, boyish man, full of whimsies that were a pleasure to himself as well as to those who loved him, a lover of private theatricals, but happiest at ‘playing himself among his friends.’²³ The other two were Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin, then Mr Sidney Colvin and Mrs Sitwell.²⁴ All the more intimate confessions of Stevenson’s early letters are addressed to Mrs Sitwell, and it is easy to learn from these letters how large a part she played in helping him to know his own road, and in giving him, as it were, a private castle in life to which he felt he could retire, when his own keep and battlements were in danger of falling by storm.

Stevenson met Mrs Sitwell at a country parsonage in England where Mr Colvin was also staying. Mr Colvin was older than Stevenson, and had already earned the reputation as a critic which his admirable study of Keats²⁵ was afterwards to confirm. He became Stevenson’s most consistent correspondent; he introduced him to the Savile Club, where Stevenson was ‘Velvet Coat’ to a far more circumspicuous audience than in Edinburgh; he helped the publication of his first essays, and, in the end, edited the posthumous publication of Stevenson’s letters. If he was not in perfect sympathy with Stevenson’s later activities, if the South Seas were a little too far from the British Museum, we must not forget that they were not too far for friendship, and that at this earlier, more critical stage of Stevenson’s career Mr Colvin was just such an ally as the young Scottish law-student would have asked of the gods if he had not had him.

Stevenson had other friends or was soon to have them, notably Mr Charles Baxter and W. E. Henley;²⁶ but I think that the four I have chosen for particular mention were those who had most influence on his future. Mr Baxter and he had been schoolboys together, and their friendship lasted through life and was one of Stevenson’s best loved possessions; perhaps he was not strange enough to Stevenson to be a determining factor in his life. Henley indeed influenced him, sometimes, as I think, for bad, in worrying him with plays at a time when he wished to write other things; he was a vivid stimulant, but something of the nature of a squall which fills the sail, bends the mast, furrows the sea with silver and black, and passes leaving blue calm and the boat upright and steady in the water. He saw Stevenson very clearly, once, in a sonnet,²⁷ and obscurely when he gave him the nickname of ‘Fastidious Brisk;’²⁸ he had no sympathy with the later developments that were really to be foretold by his beginnings, and he wrote him a malicious epitaph,²⁹ full of truth and yet so distorted by feeling as to make even its truth both false and unwelcome.

In the later months of 1873, after the beginning of his friendship with Mr Colvin, he had thought of becoming a barrister instead of an advocate, and, with that purpose of entering one of the English Inns of Court. He went to London to see if this was possible, fell ill, was examined and found to be in danger of phthisis,³⁰ and on doctor’s orders was sent to winter at Mentone.

No previous winter had been so valuable to him. The essay on ‘Ordered South’, written in the succeeding spring, set the keynote (in prose not in subject for he did not care to publish his ill health) for several years of subsequent work. He had not yet been disillusioned in the pursuit of health, as he afterwards was, at Davos. He learnt for the first time what Nietzsche calls ‘the sweetness and spirituality almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,’³¹ and with the peculiar lightness of delicate health found the pleasures that go with it: idleness, sunshine, and friendships like the flowers of the birds-eye³² that are said to blossom only for a day. These friendships of convalescence are like those on ship board, filling life to the brim for a moment, and afterwards painlessly evaporating. Some Russian ladies who found him quite delightful, and a Russian baby girl, ‘a little polyglot button’, kept him fully amused in the intervals when his more permanent friends could not be with him.

He tasted, too, though in the diluted form that is all that ill health allows, the sensation of independent manhood. The money was his father’s but his was its disposition, and the feeling was altogether different from that of the schoolboy spending his pocket money which he had known before. On his return his father made him a regular allowance of seven pounds a month, and, though Stevenson had scruples sometimes as to his right to this unearned wealth, yet at twenty three he began, really for the first time, to feel ‘grown up’.

On his return from Mentone he visited Paris where R. A. M. Stevenson was studying art, and there began the friendship with Will H. Low, which that romantic artist has delightfully chronicled.³³ His health was so far improved that he was fit for boating expeditions with Sir Walter Simpson, the Edinburgh friend with whom he afterwards made an inland voyage. His father and he no longer had such violent discussions on their religious differences, and, with pleasant interludes, he moved steadily towards the Scottish Bar. In July 1875 he passed the First Examination, was duly called, and took the taste out of his mouth with a visit to Fontainebleau.

He had been³⁴ at Fontainebleau before, in the April of that year when he found it ‘very be –, no, not beautiful exactly, just now, but very bright and living. There are one or two song-birds and a cuckoo, all the fruit-trees are in flower, and the beeches make sunshine in a shady place.’³⁵ Now that he had earned the right to walk in wig and gown in the big, hollow, dimly lighted hall of the Advocates in Edinburgh, he fled to the forest again and found much more there than he had expected. Thenceforward for some time he was often at Barbizon, and in the end the forest seemed to usurp dominion over all his other memories of France and to mark a definite stage in his life and also in his work. He became one of an informal colony of young painters whose headquarters was an inn, and their occupations a modest kind of revelry, conversation, hopes for the future, and the making of studies from nature. He busied himself with old French poetry, and though he loved, physically, ‘to smell the wet forest in the morning,’³⁶ the trees and glades became for him an epitome of French history, an illustration of the French poets. Old wars and phantom hunting parties passed through the green shadows with hours of chase or battle; he lay against a tree and hummed with Charles d’Orléans:

Allez-vous-en, allez, allez,
Soussi, Soing et Merencolie,
Me cuidez-vous, toute ma vie,
Gouverner, comme fait avez?…³⁷

and recaptured not only the moral but also the artistic mood in which such songs were lived and written, by himself experimenting in the old French measures. ‘I have had some good times,’ he wrote, sending Mrs Sitwell two not very notable specimens, ‘walking along the glaring roads, or down the poplar alley of the great canal, fitting my own humour to this old versed.’³⁸

He ascribed to the influence of this place, and of his companions’ employment, the love of style, of form, which was his before he went there. It may well have been encouraged by the circumstance of being one of a number of young men all busy learning the rudiments of an art; ‘stupidly, all else being forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.’ In an essay written afterwards he said:

there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be decorative in its emptiness.³⁹

I quote this passage here, because, in spite of its special application, it seems to me indirectly to set the key and indicate the motive of the light, bodiless, exhilaritic⁴⁰ true Stevenson, a writer among painters, whose exploits he could admire but not emulate, found at Fontainebleau.

We must imagine Stevenson at this time as a young man whose interest in words made it impossible for him even to take his private letters as other than literary exercise and made him play in conversation with the technique he was laboriously acquiring. I think of him talking precisely, with a relish for clear imagery, a care for concision that gave delicacy to his jokes, and, with Edinburgh in the background, a whole-hearted acquiescence in the scorn of the bourgeois which was the one article of creed unanimously held by his companions. Long afterwards, one at least of them remembered his peculiar humor, and told a story of him, so slight as, perhaps, to seem disproportionately emphasised in this, which should be the briefest of biographies, and yet seeming, for all its slightness, to carry with it the private atmosphere of the man. Low, Stevenson and R. A. M. S.⁴¹ had taken part in a christening feast, and so well drunken that, long after midnight, they has lain full length in the middle of a road in the forest, holding high converse, and only very late indeed found their way to bed. R. A. M. S., waving a candle, told Low to see Stevenson safe to bed, and so seriously did he do it, so carefully did he tuck in the counterpane, that Stevenson ‘smiling broadly from his pillow, murmured: ‘How good you are, you remind me of my mother.’

It was perhaps a tribute to his delicacy in conversation, as it certainly illustrates their attitude towards him, that his familiar companions placed him to sit next at table to the first women students to find their way to the inn at Barbizon. These were a mother and daughter, both painters, who had come to Paris, and then to Fontainebleau from America. With the mother Stevenson was presently in love.

The years following his meeting with Mrs Osbourne were feverish with activity, and restless with his most uncertain hope. He wrote now here now there, stories, essays, The New Arabian Nights⁴² at one end of the scale and Lay Morals⁴³ at the other. In July 1879, he learnt that a divorce was possible between Mrs Osbourne and her husband. She was also very ill. On August 7 he sailed as a second class passenger in the Devonia, bound for New York. His parents knew nothing of his enterprise; he was facing a new continent and the probability of having for the first time to live entirely on his own earnings, the possibility of being able to share those earnings with another. As he set foot on the gangway of the Devonia, he must have felt all that a schoolboy feels who runs away to sea, and more, because he was going in eager hope of being trusted for the first time not only with his own life but with a larger responsibility. His friends were all against him. He stepped on board out of one existence into another utterly different and infinitely more dangerous.

He wrote ‘The Story of a Lie’ on the voyage: and even on the uncomfortable journey on the emigrant train from one side of America to the other, he was making notes for a book. In that tale, characteristic as much of it is, and in that book, I seem, perhaps with the bias of extraneous evidence, to detect for the first time in Stevenson’s writings, a faint covering tint, a shadow, a suspicion, of the attitude of the professional tradesman of letters. This Stevenson could not be; but the knowledge that he was perilously near that tradesman’s position must have intruded itself often in his mind and gave that thin, but I do honestly believe noticeable, flavour to the work he professed so zealously even in the very throes of his adventure.

It is possible to look on that adventure with the eyes of health incarnadined and to say that the worst of it was discomfort. For me, for you, I hope, who read, it would be nothing more serious. But, if we would realise what it was for Stevenson, we must remember that it very nearly shook the life out of his frail body. A second class cabin and coarse food on the sea-voyage did him no harm; but it was followed by a shilling’s worth of sleep in a dockside lodging house in New York, and then by many days of slow, jolting, train journey, a plank for a bed, in a stuffy railway carriage, or on its windy roof, from one side of that continent to the other. His health weakened from day to day, and he reached the Pacific Coast so ill that he thought he had but a heroic chance, and went up into the mountains to die, or to recover, camping by himself. He was rescued by two old goat-ranchers and nursed back to some sort of vitality.

Two nights I lay out under a tree in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire and make coffee, and all night awake hearing the goat-bells ringing and the tree-frogs singing when each new noise was enough to set me mad. Then the bear-hunter came round, pronounced me ‘real sick,’ and ordered me up to the ranche. It was an odd, miserable piece of my life; and according to all rule, it should have been my death; but after a while my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success.⁴⁴

He went down to Monterey, which had not yet turned, as it was on the point of turning, into an American sea-side resort. There, lodging with a doctor, and comforting himself at a little French restaurant, he wrote ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, and The Amateur Emigrant,⁴⁵ and grew frightened, because he worked too slowly. ‘I hope soon to have a greater burthen to support, and must make money a great deal quicker than I used.’⁴⁶ And again: ‘I am so haunted by anxieties that one or other is sure to come up in all that I write.’⁴⁷ He fell ill with pleurisy but recovered with ‘that peculiar and delicious sense of being born again in an expurgated edition which belongs to convalescence.’⁴⁸ In December he moved to San Francisco, where he lived on three or four shillings a day, including rent. There he wrote or prepared essays⁴⁹ on Thoreau, Yoshida-Torojiro, finished The Amateur Emigrant, calculated continually and apprehensively his possible earnings, and again fell ill, this time with a malaria. But on January 23rd the Osbourne divorce had made it possible for him to announce his engagement to be married, and three days later, he had to reduce his daily expenditure on food to one shilling and ten pence and a half penny. In March he was very ill again.

I have been very very sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating attacks of cough, sickening fits in which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease; and I have cause to bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr Bamford (a name the Muse repels), that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once more upon a little hill-top, with a fair prospect of life and some new desire of living.⁵⁰

Two months later, a convalescent ghost, safe in his father’s telegraphic promise of £250 annually, he married, as it were among the very reeds of the Styx, and went up into the mountains with his wife.

With the episode described in The Silverado Squatters,⁵¹ the little book the scene of which ‘is on a high mountain’, where Stevenson and his wife spent their honeymoon, his life settled again into something like calm after the gusty interlude of his American journey. He was married, happy, confident, safe so far as he need look in immediate financial concerns, at peace with his parents, and anxious only to justify himself by good work.

In marrying Mrs Osbourne, he leapt suddenly from bachelorhood to the parentage of a growing and lively boy. He had fallen in love years before with the polyglot button Russian baby at Mentone, but had had no other intimacies with children until he became the step-father of Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, to whom he taught Latin and Euclid, to whom also he owed the impulse that set him writing Treasure Island.⁵² To understand Stevenson’s married life we must remember that it never passed through the stages of a man and a woman being together, or the later stage of babies, but began as a man and his wife with a son of twelve and a marriageable daughter, and that for long before he died Stevenson had tasted all the sensations of grand-parentage.

In August 1880, Stevenson, his wife, and his stepson were met at Liverpool by his parents and Mr Colvin. After a short stay in Scotland, Stevenson was ordered to winter at Davos and lived in a hotel there with his wife and Lloyd Osbourne, from November to the following April, when he returned by way of Paris. He wrote to his parents, ‘If we are to come to Scotland, I will have fir-trees, and I want a burn, the firs for my physical, the water for my moral health,’⁵³ and they took a cottage at Pitlochry. While there he determined to apply for the Chair of History and Constitutional Law in the University of Edinburgh, which Professor Mackay⁵⁴ was resigning. He got excellent, though for the most part un-academic testimonials, but his literary reputation was not wide enough, and the memory of his truancies while a student was too fresh, to give him any real chance of election.

At Pitlochry he began a series of short tales, some of which were to be written by Mrs Stevenson, and ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Merry Men’ proved that the weakness perceptible in the work he had done just before his marriage was not more than the temporary effect of unusual and harassing conditions, more harassing, that is, than the ill health to which he had been long accustomed. The whole family moved in August to Braemar, where Treasure Island was accidentally begun, and exultantly continued as far as its nineteenth chapter. In October he went again to Davos, under the immediate compulsion of his throat and lungs, which had been seriously affected by the Scots autumn. Here for the first time, after their rickety hut in the Californian mountains, Stevenson and his wife had a house of their own. It was not always extremely happy. ‘Fanny and I have both been in bed, tended by the hired sick nurse; Lloyd has a broken finger; Wogg (the dog) has had an abscess in his ear; our servant is a devil.’⁵⁵ But, in spite of these occasional woes, Stevenson enjoyed himself in unexpected ways. Lloyd Osbourne had had a printing press at Silverado, and now at Davos the business was taken more seriously and engaged the attention of the whole household. Wood-engraving drove suddenly between Stevenson and the sun, and he and his wife did some lively woodcuts to illustrate little books (written by himself) printed by his stepson. A few of these are very good in the ancient manner, and it is impossible not to delight in their crudities when the white slash of a slipt tool is thus excused:

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!⁵⁶

Some of these woodcuts have been reproduced in The Studio; particularly I remember a very noble elephant nosing his trunk for the abstraction of a hat, and a fine study of Nelson on a pier-head looking out to sea at a ship and a floating champagne bottle. There were reproduced at the same time three or four quite pleasant pencil drawings, done in a sketch book at Monastier, at the time of his journey with Modestine.⁵⁷ He was then fresh from Fontainebleau. He had met Mrs Osbourne and her daughter, both art students, and perhaps these drawings by one who had never been able to draw as a youth was something in the nature of an offering on the altar of his love’s gods: like Browning –

Does he paint? he fain would write a poem, …
Does he write? he fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist’s,
Once and only once, and for One only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.⁵⁸

The woodcuts were a different matter altogether, a more rollicking pleasure, though serious enough as was all Stevenson’s play, serious like a child’s, like the war-game which, shared with engraving all the time when he was not finishing Treasure Island, working at Otto⁵⁹or writing verses for A Child’s Garden.⁶⁰ They played the war-game at Davos with toy soldiers in ‘an attic, reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted window, so low at the eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand upright, nor see without a candle.’⁶¹ The country was mapped on the floor. There were elaborate rules, and even war correspondence in an imaginary paper, the editor of which was so rude to Mr Osbourne that the indignant general had him summarily hanged.

In April 1882, they were again in England, in Edinburgh in May, and at the end of June tried to live in the manse of Stobo in Peeblesshire. Stevenson was ill, went to London, and was ordered elsewhere. He went to Kingussie, stayed a month in bad weather, and was presently on the way to the south of France with R. A. M. Stevenson. His wife was ill, but had recovered sufficiently to meet him at Marseilles in October when his cousin had left. They found a house, but Stevenson’s health grew worse, and he went to Nice. In March 1883, they settled again in the Chalet la Solitude, Hyères, where, with ‘a garden like a fairy story and a view like a classical landscape’, they were very happy for nine months, in which Stevenson continued the Child’s Garden of Verses, enjoyed his first popular success with the book publication of Treasure Island, worked on Otto and was ill again and again. In May 1884 he nearly died from a haemorrhage, and unable to speak, tried to comfort his wife by scribbling on a bit of paper ‘Don’t be frightened; if this is death it is an easy one.’⁶² After a very painful convalescence, he returned to England in July 1884. It is hard with dates and so few details to give a just picture of these years, in which Stevenson seems to have been like a child with all the fervour of happiness chased from room to room, in every one of which he could have played so merrily, by a Bogie Man of coughs and blood and fears. Much of his most delightful work was written in the intervals of escape from this pursuing monster.

Soon after reaching England Stevenson went to Bournemouth, where for some months he lived in furnished houses. Then, as the place seemed to suit him, though it was far from turning him into a healthy man, his father bought a house there and made a present of it to his daughter-in-law. At this house, called Skerryvore, after the lighthouse, with the exception of a few short holidays which usually ended in illness, Stevenson lived until August 1887. The three years at Bournemouth were the least exciting in his life, though as he said, he never knew what it was to be bored, his own lively spirit, even in illness, being always a sufficient entertainment. He lay abed and wrote with great industry. The works published during his stay there included The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,⁶³ Kidnapped⁶⁴ More New Arabian Nights,⁶⁵ Prince Otto and A Child’s Garden of Verses. He made several new friends, and was visited by many old, so that the period seems now to have been almost a designed prologue to the then unforeseen departure to America and the South Seas. Sargent⁶⁶ painted his portrait, and, on a visit to Mr Colvin,⁶⁷ he met Burne-Jones,⁶⁸ Browning and Lowell,⁶⁹ on which he remarked that his path was paved with celebrities.

He had already written one play, Deacon Brodie, in collaboration with Henley,⁷⁰ and when he first came to Bournemouth Henley visited him and they wrote two more, and, a few months later, another, but, though his collaborator was most helpful, Stevenson felt that ‘It was bad enough to have to live by an art – but to think to live by an art combined with commercial speculation – that way madness lay,’ and refused to be turned from the more immediately promising labour of Kidnapped.

He added another to his many games⁷¹ by becoming interested in music. He began by picking out tunes with one finger, then with two, and as thorough in this as with his battles of lead soldiers when Sir Edward Hamley’s Operations of War⁷² was at his elbow, he flung himself at the theory of music, and was presently announcing compositions. He wrote with one of them to his cousin a letter that well illustrates his rather tremulous solemnity in the matter:

Dear Bob, – Herewith another shy; more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the dam bareness of the bass, it looks like a piece of real music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time; the bass was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, sir, and may God have mercy on their souls! – Yours, The Maestro.⁷³

In his executant capacity he went so far as accompanying Lloyd Osbourne’s penny whistle with the piano, and this was, I believe, his first step towards that congenial instrument⁷⁴ which was the delight of later years.

The two events of his stay in Bournemouth were the death of his father and of Fleeming Jenkin.⁷⁵ Jenkin had been his friend since his student days in Edinburgh, and, in collaboration with his widow, Stevenson prepared the memoir that was affixed to his works, and, as he learnt more and more of the man he had loved and admired, finding him shine still brighter. The elder Stevenson had long been failing. No longer the downright disputant, fire in cloud,⁷⁶ the eager man of science, he had become a child, playing at parentage, talking to his son like a mother to a baby, the more pathetic for the memory of his sterner prime. Stevenson was summoned to Edinburgh in May 1887, and saw his father die. The advice of physicians on his health, and melancholy after his father’s death, determined him to undertake a second journey to America. On August 20th 1887 he sailed from London, not knowing that he was never to return.

On his first voyage⁷⁷ to America he had sailed without the approval of his family or friends, and arrived in a country where was scarcely one who knew his name. On the second he sailed with his wife, his mother, Lloyd Osbourne and a Swiss maid, and was received by Mr Low, one of his best friends, and a host of journalists. The voyage was almost as uncomfortable as in the emigrant ship, but to Stevenson at least, who loved the sea, infinitely delightful. They sailed from London in The Ludgate Hill, and afterwards Stevenson wrote:

I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind – full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that …⁷⁸

It was perhaps the pleasure of that voyage which decided Stevenson’s destiny, his cruising in the South Seas and so his eventual settlement in Samoa.

On reaching New York he knew, for the first time, the sensations of the travelling prize-fighter or Cabinet Minister. Jekyll and Hyde⁷⁹ had completed the work of Treasure Island and made him a public character, and in America fame is more obvious, more vociferous than in England. He was at the same time pleased and sardonic. ‘One thing is,’ he wrote, ‘they do not stick for money to the Famed One; I was offered £2000 a year for a weekly article; and I accepted (and now enjoy) £720 a year for a monthly one.’⁸⁰ And ‘I begin to shirk any more taffy; I think I begin to like it too well. But let us trust the Gods; they have a rod in pickle;⁸¹ reverently I doff my trousers, and with screwed eyes await the amari aliquid⁸² of the great God Busby.’⁸³ The excitement of fame brought no release from the chains of ill health. Stevenson had caught cold on the Newfoundland Banks, and almost immediately after his arrival was in bed and too ill to be moved. The younger Mrs Stevenson went with her son to find a fit lodging for the writer, and soon afterwards Stevenson and his mother followed them to a small house outside Saranac in the Adirondack mountains, on the Canadian border, where Stevenson worked at his monthly essays and planned The Master of Ballantrae.⁸⁴ They had the worst of Canadian winters but though his wife and mother suffered his own health steadily improved.

The country was wild, and Stevenson loved to walk in it in fitting costume. W. H. Low was to paint his portrait, but Stevenson wrote to him, smiling, saying that he ‘won’t have you till I have a buffalo robe and leggings, lest you should want to paint me as a plain man, which I am not, but a rank Saranacker and wild man of the woods.’⁸⁵

Such a robe he did get, and walked in it, in the cold of the wilderness, enjoying himself in this setting, and thinking of the last resurrection of the Master of Ballantrae. Indoors in the evenings his mother read Mr Henry James’ Roderick Hudson⁸⁶ aloud in the evenings, and Stevenson worked with difficulty and amazement at the Aeneid.⁸⁷ His lighter amusements were Patience and the penny whistle, the full possibilities of which instrument he was beginning to discover. ‘I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle,’⁸⁸ he wrote to Mr Colvin, and to Miss Boodle of Bournemouth:

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 labours now, but I have always some childishness on hand.⁸⁹

Outside his own family he had few friends at Saranac, but he had always a power of getting an intense pleasure from accidental acquaintances. Mr Low gives an amusing example. After Stevenson returned to New York from Saranac, a newspaper artist called, while Mr Low was with him, and asked to be allowed an hour in which to finish a drawing of him he had begun from a photograph. He took off his watch and gave it to Stevenson and said that it would be seen he was a man of his word. ‘Let us begin now, and stop on the minute that the hour has elapsed.’ Mr Low continues: ‘I left them, but on coming later in the day I found Stevenson delighted with the experience. He had been everywhere – has seen everything, and talked extremely well about it all. Do you know what I did? I turned his watch back an hour, I was so afraid to lose him.’⁹⁰ The act is an allegory of Stevenson’s manner with almost all he met. He was a most inviting listener.

His health had so far improved, the memory of The Ludgate Hill was so happy, that he spent much time at Saranac planning voyages, and considering the possibility of chartering a yacht. In April his wife went to California and was charged to hear if possible of any available boats in San Francisco Harbour. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne went, after a fortnight in New York to Manasquan, New Jersey, where they sharpened their ardour for the sea by sailing a cat-boat. Mrs Stevenson found the yacht Casco, and though there were difficulties of mistrust, yet as soon as the owner met Stevenson, these were whisked away, and on the 28th June 1888, he sailed from San Francisco for the South Seas.

Stevenson did not set out⁹¹ on his cruising as a mere light-hearted holiday-maker. It was an adventure, but it was also a serious bid for health. He wrote to his friend Mr Baxter, who managed his affairs for him in Edinburgh:

I have found a yacht, and we are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my health back (more or less), ‘tis madness; but, of course, there is the hope, and I will play big… If this business fails to set me up, well £2000 is gone, and I know I can’t get better.⁹²

The yacht Casco was a fore and aft schooner, ninety-nine feet over all, ‘like most yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan.’ They had an admirable sailing master in Captain Otis, but a not so satisfactory crew, and their fill of the perils of the sea. ‘We have been thrice within an ace of being ashore: we were lost (!) for about twelve hours in the Low Archipelago, but by God’s blessing had quiet weather all the time; and once, in a squall, we came so near gaun heels ower hurdies, that I really dinnae ken why we didnae a’thegither.’⁹⁴

In spite of this sombre background, the yacht glittered in the more hopeful sunshine of excitement. ‘From festering in a sick-room all winter’ (thus he ungratefully forgot his walks in buffalo-robes) ‘to the deck of one’s own ship, is indeed a change.’⁹⁵

One stirring day was that in which we sighted Hawaii. It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, foresail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her lee rail under water and flew. The swell, the heaviest I have ever been out in – I tried in vain to estimate the height, at least fifteen feet – came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind. We had the best hand – old Louis – at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, and had noble luck, for it never caught us once. At times it seemed we must have it; Louis would look over his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the cockpit coamings. I never remember anything more delightful and exciting.⁹⁶

It is interesting to compare this swift description with the account of the storm on page 173 of The Wrecker, where the demands of story necessitate a change of mood:

What I liked still less, Johnson himself was at the wheel, which he span busily, often with a visible effort; and as the seas ranged up behind us, black and imminent, he kept casting behind him eyes of animal swiftness, and drawing in his neck between his shoulders, like a man dodging a blow.⁹⁷

Nor did Stevenson’s health show any immediate sign of the improvement that afterwards justified his stay in the tropics. Once again he had an opportunity of showing his perfect calm in the face of⁹⁸ imminent disaster.

In Tahiti his life was despaired of. He had been taken ashore, and lodged in a hotel. He sent for Captain Otis, who records:

He told me in his ordinary tone, and without a flicker of excitement, that he had sent for me, fearing that he might take a turn for the worse; if he did, he said, the doctor had told him he probably would not live till morning. Then he added with a smile, ‘You see, the doctor does not give me much time; so I have divided what there is left into three equal portions, one for each, only reserving the last for Mrs Stevenson.’ He then proceeded to inform me, as calmly as though he had a century to spend, how I was to dispose of the yacht and settle the business, if disaster fell – which happily it did not. After that he bade me adieu as quietly as if no danger threatened his life and hopes.⁹⁹

In Tautira¹⁰⁰ they learnt that the mainmast was rotten and they were detained for two months in the house of a sub-chief, Ori-a-Ori, who became a most devoted friend, and when he left wrote him a letter which Stevenson said he would rather have received than written Redgauntlet¹⁰¹ or the sixth book of the Aeneid.¹⁰²

Discussion of Stevenson’s In The South Seas¹⁰³ will bring with it discussion of the islands, and I propose here to say nothing of the impression they made on him, but to keep strictly to an abridged account of his actual cruisings. They visited now the Marquesas, the Low Archipelago in the Society Islands. It was here that Stevenson was so ill, here that he was detained by delay in repairing the mast. From the Society Islands they sailed south to Honolulu (a map is really necessary to anyone who would have a clear idea of what they did.) At Honolulu they ‘got the yacht paid off in triumph,’¹⁰⁴ and settled for six months some three miles out of the town. That was in February. Stevenson here finished The Master of Ballantrae, but already, in March, they were planning a further cruise, and in June, after Stevenson had visited Molokai, the island set apart for the lepers, they were again at sea, on board The Equator, a trading schooner bound for the Gilbert Islands, and to Samoa, where Stevenson was so pleased with the climate that he bought the estate on the mountain behind Apia, ‘three streams, two waterfalls, a great cliff, an ancient native fort, a view of the sea and lowlands or (to be more precise) several views of them in various directions,’¹⁰⁵ which was to be his last home. He stayed some weeks in Apia, and then sailed for Sydney, where he wrote the ‘Letter to Dr Hyde,’¹⁰⁶ and was ill with fever and haemorrhage. In April 1890, he set sail in another trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll. He wrote hard on board, even in a gale, ’spearing his inkpot like a flying fish,’¹⁰⁷ stayed a week in New Caledonia, while his wife and stepson went on, and then joined them in Sydney in August. In October he left Sydney for Samoa, and a settled habitation, after nearly two and a half years of intermittent cruising. ‘It is a singular thing,’ he wrote during this time of sea-going, ‘that as I was packing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore’,

I came on the prophecies of a drunken Highland sibyl, when I was seventeen. She said I was to be very happy, to visit America, and to be much upon the sea. It seems as if it were coming true with a vengeance. Also, do you remember my strong, old, rooted belief that I shall die by drowning? I don’t want that to come true, though it is an easy death; but it occurs to me oddly, with these long chances in front. I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling; and yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling. Fine, clean emotions; a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging; there is upon the whole no better life.¹⁰⁸

A delightful picture of Stevenson’s arrival in Samoa¹⁰⁹ has been preserved by the Rev. W. E. Clarke. He writes:

Making my way along the beach – the sandy track with its long, straggling line of stores and drink saloons – I met a little group of three European strangers – two men and a woman. The latter wore a print gown, large gold crescent earrings, a Gilbert-island hat of plaited straw, encircled with a wreath of small shells, a scarlet silk scarf round her neck, and a brilliant plaid shawl across her shoulders; her bare feet were encased in white canvas shoes, and across her back was slung a guitar.

The younger of her two companions (Mr Osbourne) was dressed in a striped pyjama suit – the undress costume of most European traders in those seas – a slouch straw hat of native make, dark blue sun-spectacles, and over his shoulder a banjo. The other man (Stevenson) was dressed in a shabby suit of white flannels that had seen many better days, a white drill yachting cap with a prominent peak, a cigarette in his mouth, and a photographic camera in his hand. Both the men were bare footed … my first thought was that, probably, they were wandering players en route for New Zealand, compelled by their poverty to take the cheap conveyance of a trading vessel.¹¹⁰

As soon as Stevenson had bought the Vailima estate, the building of a house had been begun, and was carried on during his absence. When he returned it was hurried towards completion, and in April 1891 it was ready for its owners. ‘The house,’ says Mr Balfour, who stayed there, ‘was built of wood throughout, painted a dark green outside, with a red roof of corrugated iron, on which the heavy rain sounded like thunder as it fell and ran off to be stored for household purposes in the large iron tanks.’¹¹¹ It had three living rooms downstairs, five bedrooms above, with a verandah on each floor, part of the upper one boarded in to make Stevenson’s bedroom and writing room. In May 1891, Stevenson and his wife and stepson were joined by his mother, and by his step daughter Mrs Strong and her son. He was thus the head of a clan which soon included the servants on the estate who, as it were, adopted themselves into his family. In a very short time he had thus passed from the position of the visiting tourist to that of the established resident on the little island, and his obvious intention to live and die where he was accounted for much of the influence with the natives which he was soon to possess.

These last years of his life were very different from any that had preceded them. For the first time since he had been taken for the man in charge at Wick, he was living with vivid gusto the life of a man of action. He dug, cut trees, weeded (a heroic battle against the swift growth of tropical plants), made roads, drove cattle, rode, and was able to do all this without the immediate retribution of the sick-bed. ‘Remember’, he says exultantly,

remember the pallid brute that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride, sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours’ political discussions by an interpreter; to say nothing of sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati would look askance of itself.¹¹²

In youth the delicate experimenter in the breaking and harnessing of words, the virtuoso in riding prose rhythms, driven perhaps a little further than was quite natural into virtuosity by contrast with his firm-standing, keen-eyed practical father whose eye followed the course of a current better than a fugue of skilfully disguised alliteration, Stevenson reverted as he grew older to the paternal type and became perhaps a little more practical than was natural, in reaction from superfluous virtuosity. House-builder, road-maker, diplomatist, virtuous politician, planning with deeds instead of with words, he gave himself a taste of the life which as a boy he had chosen, rightly on the score of health at least, to reject.

Nor did this bright, external activity at all prevent, though it often broke into, his ordinary work. Here is his account of a day.

I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine. By six at work: stopped at half-past ten to give a history lesson to a step-grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40, dinner, five; cards in the evening till eight; and then to bed – only I have no bed, only a chest with a mat and blankets – and read myself to sleep. This is the routine, but often sadly interrupted. Then you may see me sitting on the floor of my verandah haranguing and being harangued by squatting chiefs on a question of a road; or more privately holding an inquiry into some dispute among our familiars, myself on my bed, the boys on the floor – for when it comes to the judicial I play dignity – or else going down to Apia on some more or less unsatisfactory errand.

Even when chronicling all their jostling business, he compares himself ruefully with Scott, unsuppressed by his immense work, and says, ‘But the lean hot spirits, such as mine, become hypnotised with their bit occupations – if I may use Scotch to you – it is so far more scornful than any English idiom. He suffered from writer’s cramp, and used to work by lamplight in the early mornings and at eight o’clock began dictation from his notes.

Much of his thought was occupied with island politics. This is not the place to discuss them. Most of his views have since been adopted, and it says much for his tact that Mr Johnstone records the fact that though in his writing on the South Seas he was seldom if ever polite to the representatives of civilisation, he left few enemies though many critics among the whites and on the other hand a host of friends. Mr Johnstone quotes the opinion of Captain Otis, the sailing master of the Casco:

Well, gentlemen, it seems this way to me: Stevenson was first and last a man of convictions – in fact he always acted promptly and vigorously when he reached a conclusion that satisfied his own mind – but his mental make-up was such that he always took the side of the under-dog in any fight that arose, without waiting to inquire whether the under-dog had the right of it, or was in the wrong. That was the man, gentlemen; and I know from personal experience that he did not understand what fear was, when he defended what he thought was right.

‘He defended what he thought was right.’¹¹³ That old seaman’s view should content us here.

The natives expressed their opinion on Stevenson in many ways. One native king remained on friendly terms with him. The chieftain of the other built a road for him in gratitude for his kindness to them when in prison. And, when there was war in the islands, he could work in peace. Mrs Strong writes in March 1894:

Our woods are full of scouting parties, and we are occasionally interrupted by the beating of drums as a war-party crosses our lawn. But nothing stops the cheerful flow of ‘Anne’. I put in the words, between sentences, ‘Louis, have we a pistol or gun in the house that will shoot?’ to which he cheerfully answers, ‘No, but we have friends on both sides,’ and on we go with the dictation.¹¹⁴

It was a strange translation from Davos, or Bournemouth, and must have been entirely delightful to one who had always thought in terms of romance, who had pictured himself not on a sick bed but turning to wars or his band of irregular cavalry, or listening to the highwayman’s taps on windows of the inn at Burford Bridge. Few invalids can ever have had so clear, so fresh a taste of the better kind of barbarism.

On January 3rd of the year in which he died, Stevenson wrote to his lifelong friend Dr Baildon:¹¹⁵

Yes, if I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce; and parties to shy bricks at me; and now it begins to look as if I should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten. It’s a pity suicide is not thought the ticket in the best circles.

But your letter goes on to congratulate me on having done the one thing I am a little sorry for; a little – not much – for my father himself lived to think that I had been wiser than he. But the cream of the jest is that I have lived to change my mind; and think that he was wiser than I. Had I been an engineer, and literature my amusement, it would have been better perhaps. I pulled it off, of course, I won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts; but how long will it last? I don’t know, say the Bells of Old Bow.

All of which goes to show that nobody is quite sane in judging himself. Truly, had I given way and gone in for engineering, I should be dead by now. Well, the Gods know best.¹¹⁶

It is to be presumed that the gods did know best. Less than a year later, Stevenson died as good a death as a man can ask, in the midst of the best work of his life, in full vigour, without pain. Nor is it extravagant to find in Weir of Hermiston¹¹⁷ a work in words nearly resembling the work of his father in stones against the beating of the seas. Here, at last, Stevenson was building on a promontory in dangerous waters, with a solidity and strength to which he had never attained. In happy consciousness of this, knowing that his latest work was not as he had feared ‘senescent’, he died. His letters seem, after the event, to prove that he had felt a coming end, but those who were with him had not perceived it. Their fear was, for the moment, elsewhere. “Do I look strange?” he asked abruptly, and died, almost at once.¹¹⁸

There is no need here to Describe His Funeral, that romantic journey to the mountain top, the tomb on the summit. That has been done by his stepson, in the letter printed in Mr Balfour’s Life which everybody who cares for Stevenson has read.

We need only look back over those forty-four years, more than half of them occupied continually in writing, and realise how adventurous a life this writer led. The outward facts are full of incident, lighthouses, walking, boating, the emigration, the South Seas; but if we would realise how romantic the life was to him who lived it, we must remember his attitude towards himself, his dramatic vision, and the two personifications he chose for his own epitaph.¹¹⁹ The hunter from the hill, the sailor from the seas; these were the men who died in Stevenson. The child cut off in a Red Indian game, surrenders even in the solemnity of death his little scalp with heroism. And in the writer of so many books, dying in the hall at Vailima, a leader of irregular cavalry, mortally wounded at last, gallantly surrendered his soul to a greater leader than he.

1 Much of this section was written between 16 and 20 April 1914, as Ransome’s diary shows. Stevenson’s ‘contradictory desires’ were his also.

2 To Henry James, 28 May 1888, quoted by Graham Balfour as epigraph to chapter III, ‘Infancy and Childhood’ of his Life of Robert Louis Stevenson [1901] (1911) (henceforth ‘Balfour’).

3 François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1769–1848), writer and diplomat, credited with being the founder of French Romanticism; the ‘gentle creature’ is perhaps Amélie in his novella René (1802).

4 Narrator and hero of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) by the journalist and writer Daniel Defoe (c. 1630–1731); cast on his desert island, he had no such wonderfully civilised pastime as reading Henry James available to him. This is Ransome’s first known reference to Crusoe, so important to the imaginative life of his ‘Swallows’.

5 Henry James (1843–1916), major American novelist and critic, author of The Golden Bowl, Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw etc.; a Francophile with tremendous knowledge of French literature, much admired by Stevenson and respected by Ransome.

7 ‘Hence these tears’, used first by the classical Latin poet Terence and later by Horace.

9 “Letters, II, Childhood.” Other notes: “Health and friends. Mrs Sitwell, Colvin, Fleeming Jenkin, R. A. M. S.”

11 “‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s Hills of Home’ in Chambers’ Journal,” (1901) by Evelyn Blantyre Simpson, and in her Robert Louis Stevenson (1906).

13 “Letters, II, 133.” The reference is to the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson. This section is headed “Edinburgh Days. Memory & the Casco;” this paragraph is editorially reconstructed.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy.

16 The third part of The Three Musketeers (1847–50) by Alexandre Dumas père, usually known in English as The Man in the Iron Mask.

17 The hero of Stevenson’s unfinished novel St Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England, published posthumously in 1897 with final chapters added by ‘Q’ (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch).

18 Fleeming Jenkin (1833–85), Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University: also actor and dramatist; subject of Stevenson’s Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1887).

20 “English Illustrated Magazine, May 1899”, an article by J. and M. C. Balfour, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson by Two of his Cousins’.

21 ‘Liberty, Justice, Reverence.’ A student club of six members founded by Stevenson with his cousin and close friend R. A. M. Stevenson (1847–1900), later to become Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Liverpool.

22 From a satirical essay by Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774), ‘On the Clubs of London.’

24 Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), Slade Professor of Fine Art, literary critic and art historian, friend and frequent correspondent of Stevenson, editor of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson (1894–7) and of Stevenson’s Letters (1899, 1911); Mrs Frances Sitwell (1839–1924), ‘Fanny’, beloved friend and early mentor of Stevenson and his sympathetic correspondent from 1873; she married Colvin in 1903.

26 Charles Baxter (1848–1919), friend and correspondent from Edinburgh days, became his solicitor. William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), poet and playwright, first met Stevenson in 1875 at the time of his amputation in Edinburgh. The two collaborated in three plays including Deacon Brodie: or, The Double Life (performed 1884). Henley is a plausible inspiration for Stevenson’s Long John Silver; his ‘doubleness’ is separately attested by his postmortem attack on Stevenson (see Introduction).

27 His sonnet ‘Apparition’ characterises Stevenson as having ‘brilliant and romantic grace, / The brown eyes radiant with vivacity’ and as being ‘a spirit intense and rare … valiant in velvet’:

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 not at all,
And something of the Shorter-Catechist.

28 A character in Ben Jonson’s Everyman Out Of His Humour (1599): ‘a neat, spruce, affecting courtier.’

29 Probably a metaphorical reference to Henley’s famously resentful article ‘R. L. S.’ in the Pall Mall Gazette xxv, December 1901, ‘this Seraph in Chocolate, this barley-sugar effigy of a real man,’ etc.

30 Tuberculosis of the lungs. “Graham Balfour, p. 82.” All Ransome’s pagereferences to The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Graham Balfour (London, 1901) are to the enlarged sixth edition of 1911 (henceforth ‘Balfour’) which he had apparently reviewed, and later used to make a chronology for this book (see the appendices for his chronology and review).

31 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher on whom Ransome had written in his Portraits and Speculations (1912). Here he paraphrases an idea from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

33 “Chronicles of Friendships, W. H. Low etc”: A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873– 1900 by Will Hicok Low (1908).

37 Charles, Duc d’Orléans (1391–1465), Rondeau 55: ‘Be off with you, Grief, Care and Melancholy! Would you influence me all my life the way you have in the past!’

39 Stevenson, Across The Plains, chapter 3, ‘Fontainebleau’. A separate noting of this quotation is headed by Ransome “Technical Importance of France”.

40 One of Ransome’s coinages, suggesting a mix of jubilant and romantic breathlessness.

45 The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook was published posthumously in 1895.

49 In Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). ‘Henry David Thoreau: his character and opinions’ is chapter 4, ‘Yoshida-Torojiro’ is chapter 5. Thoreau (1817–62) was an influential American philosopher; Yoshida-Torojiro (b. c. 1830) was a hero of the American invasion of Japan (1852–4) under Commodore Matthew C. Perry; Stevenson was demonstrating his range. Ransome too wrote on Japanese culture, for instance on Japanese poetry in 1906 and 1910.

50 “Letters, I, 286.” This section is headed “Scotland and Davos. Drawings. War Game.”

52 (1883); originally titled ‘The Sea Cook’, it had been earlier serialised in Young Folks magazine as ‘Treasure Island; or, The Mutiny of the Hispaniola by Capt. Geo. North’ (1881–2).

54 Aeneas Mackay, 1839–1911, Professor of Constitutional History, and generous benefactor to the University of Edinburgh Library.

55 To Gosse, 9 November, 1881, Letters, II, 57 (‘the dog’ is Ransome’s interpolation, and Colvin has slightly abbreviated the original).

56 “Studio, Winter number, 1896–97.” The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art (1893–?) The verse is ‘The Graver the Pen: or, scenes from nature, with appropriate verses’, v, ‘The Foolhardy Geographer’.

58 “Quote Browning ‘paint a picture’. Studio, Winter number, 1896–97.” The lines are inserted from ‘One Word More. To E. B. B., London, September, 1855’; the capitalisation of ‘One’ is Ransome’s.

60 A Child’s Garden of Verses. A trial version was first published as Penny Whistles (1883).

61 “‘Stevenson at Play,’ with an introduction by S. Lloyd Osbourne. (Article in some Am. magazine ?Century.” The article, drawn from Stevenson’s notebooks, was in fact published posthumously in Scribner’s Magazine, December 1898.

64 (1886); first published in Young Folks Paper from May to the end of July that same year.

68 Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), painter and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

69 James Russell Lowell (1819–91), American Romantic poet and diplomat in London from 1880.

71 ‘Games’ is a word oddly used by Ransome. As late as 1960 in an unpublished letter he advised his sister Joyce to ‘consider Stevenson’s games, such as “Providence and a Guitar”, “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door”, etc.’

72 Sir Edward B. Hamley, The Operations of War Explained and Illustrated (1878).

73 “Letters, II, 291.” Ransome double-underlines the words ‘The Maestro’.

74 In a discarded alternative ‘Conclusion’ to the first part of his book (see appendix A.2.iii) Ransome wrote: ‘The instrument is unjustly despised, even laughed at, but it is capable of great things … it is symbolical of his career. A grown man playing the instrument of youth… playing a penny whistle in the orchestra of English literature.’

75 “Death of Fleeming Jenkins and his father. Pub[lished]: Jekyll. Kidnapped. More New Arab. Prince Otto. C[hild’s] G[arden of] V[erses]. Friends. Plays with Henley. Music.”

76 See Exodus 40:38: ‘For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys;’ for Ransome, a rare but commonplace Biblical allusion.

77 Ransome’s headers for this section are: “Saranac. Penny Whistling. Wild Men of the Woods. Buffalo robes. Fame. Ludgate Hill.”

78 “To R. A. M. S. Saranac Lake Adirondacks. Oct[ober], 1887. [Letters,] III, 9.”

83 “Gosse, Saranac, Oct[ober] 8 1887. Letters, II, 13.” Dr Busby was a famous flogging headmaster of Westminster School.

87 Virgil’s epic poem on the adventures of Aeneas. Stevenson was working at a translation by way of encouraging his stepson’s Latin.

91 This section, “Cruising in the South Seas. Near Death. The Sea”, was mostly written on 9 January 1914, according to Ransome’s diaries.

93 Ransome’s approximation. The letter to R. A. M. Stevenson of October 1887 reads:

I know a little about fame now; it’s no good compared to a yacht; and anyway there is more fame in a yacht, more genuine fame; to cross the Atlantic and come to anchor in Newport (say) with the Union Jack, and go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier, among the holiday yachtsmen – that’s fame, that’s glory, and nobody can take it away; they can’t say your book is bad; you HAVE crossed the Atlantic.

Again to his cousin Bob that same month Stevenson had written: ‘Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette.’ Elsewhere Ransome notes: “Fame is nothing to a yacht; experto crede. They do not stick for money to the Famed One …’ To Sir Walter Simpson, Saranac Lake, Oct[ober], 1897.”

96 “Letters, III, 100.” Ransome quotes rather more than the extract he had elsewhere copied for use, where he observed “changes of mood” and noted the recipient: “R. A. M. S., Honolulu, Feb[ruary] 1889.” The following sentence is editorially completed.

97 The Wrecker (1892) by R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, chapter 12, ‘The North Creina’. This paragraph is inserted from a separate sheet; it appears to belong here.

99 Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, by Arthur Johnstone (1905), 39.

103 In The South Seas (1896) was first published in the New York Sun, 1891. It was Ransome’s favourite of Stevenson’s travel books. He is right to say a map would be necessary. Stevenson’s pencil sketch from 1881 was the basis for the map published as frontispiece to the book in the Tusitala edition (1924).

106 Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu (1890), a characteristic championing of an underdog. This was Stevenson’s first influential intervention in Pacific politics. Fr Damien was a missionary priest.

107 In his letter to Colvin, Stevenson says he worked ‘four to six hours per diem, spearing the ink-bottle like a flying-fish …’ Letters, III, 163. This is Ransome’s approximation.

109 This is preceded by working notes: “Vailima. Open air life. Politics. Work. The idiot boy. War. First appearance.”

110 “Personal Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson, by the Rev. W. E. Clarke. Article in The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society, April, 1908.”

111 The more substantial Australasian colonial houses of the period were very similar in structure.

114 “Memories of Vailima, p. 55.” By Isobel Field and Lloyd Osbourne (1902).

115 Dr Henry Bellyse Baildon (1849–1907), a friend from the University of Edinburgh, who was author of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism (1901) a work strongly criticised by G. K. Chesterton in Twelve Types of Biography (see Introduction).

116 “To H. B. Baildon, Jan[uary] 30, 1894. Letters, IV, 246.” An earlier version of this paragraph is in appendix A.2.iii.

117 Stevenson’s last novel, often considered his most powerful, incomplete at his death, and published posthumously in 1896.

118 A different, apparently discarded version of this paragraph may be found in appendix A.2.iii.

119 Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’, the final sentence of which (with the interpolation of ‘the’ before ‘sea’) is carved on his gravestone at Mt Vaea in Samoa:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Ransome constructs a fine peroration; his affirmation of hope may be no more than the sort of thing which his masters at Rugby School and contemporary readers might approve. Neither Stevenson nor Ransome had formal Christian beliefs. This passionate, image-upon-image laying-to-rest of man and writer is unique in Ransome.

PART I

Biographical Summary¹

PART I

Biographical Summary1

Biographical Summary¹