O
pleasant
party round the fire!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v24 - Sta to Tal
L.
STEVENSON
a peg for his fancy. ” “I could not learn
my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a
business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. ”
Burnt-cork mustachios expanded his spirit with dignity and self-
reliance. To him the burnt cork was not the significant thing,
the warm delight of it. It is not the silly talk of the boys on the
links, or the ill-smelling lantern buttoned under their great-coats,
but “the heaven of a recondite pleasure” which they inhabit, that is
worth considering. “To find out where joy resides, and give it a
«
voice far beyond singing,” — that was Stevenson's endeavor; «for to
miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of
any action. ” That is the very spirit of romantic youth; the search
for the incommunicable thrill of things,” which his friend and
biographer Sidney Colvin says was the main passion of Stevenson's
((
## p. 13928 (#114) ##########################################
13928
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
life. “To his ardent fancy,” says Colvin, “the world was a theatre,
glaring with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance. ”
To any one looking for the reason of Stevenson's perpetual charm,
- even to those who can give a score of arguments for not liking his
romances, - this brave spirit of youth is an adequate and satisfying
motive. The young find in it a full justification for their own hopes;
the middle-aged feel again the very spring and core of the energy
which they have been so long disciplining and driving to the yoke
of every-day effort that they have forgotten its origin; and the old
find their memories alive and glowing again with the romance of
youth, In sickness or in health, in comedy or tragedy, Stevenson
and the characters he creates are never wholly unconscious of man's
inalienable birthright of happiness. No matter how dire his circum-
stances, it is a man's duty to keep looking for it, so that at the end
he may say that he has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
(If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books and my food, and summer rain,
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain,-
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake. ”
This temperament in many men of a different race would surely
lead to a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure,– in one long quest
for new sensations,— which in the end is sure to arrive at ennui and
disgust. But Stevenson united the blood of the Balfours, who were
preachers, given to metaphysics and the pursuit of moralities, with the
Stevensons,“ builders of the great sea lights,” practical men of trained
scientific minds and shrewd common-sense. The touch of the moral
philosopher was never deeply hidden in his lightest work, which also
showed the hand of the artisan in the skill of its construction. «What
I want to give, what I try for, is God's moral,” he once said; and
(Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is a potent exhibition of it.
early in life this temperament began to reveal itself in the craftsman,
he shows in one of his essays: “All through my boyhood and youth
I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I
was always busy in my own private end, which was to learn to write.
I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read and one to
write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with
appropriate words.
I lived with words, and what I thus wrote
was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It
How very
## p. 13929 (#115) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13929
(
was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished
that too), as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. ) And
years afterward he wrote to Colvin from Samoa: «I pass all my
hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspond-
ence. I scarce pull up a weed but I invent a sentence on the matter
to yourself. ”
In his youthful reading, some happy distinction in the style » of
a book sent him at once to the imitation of it; and he confesses, “I
have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Words-
worth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne,
to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. ” All this gave him what he knew
to be “the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, – the
choice of the essential note and the right word”; but he also knew
that “that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write. ” To those
who say that this is not the way to be original, he has given the
best answer: “It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so.
Nor yet if you are born original, is there anything in this training
that shall clip the wings of your originality. ”
The “love of lovely words” was one of his passions. From
Skerryvore to Vailima it led him and charmed him. In Across the
Plains) he says that «None can care for literature in itself who do
not take a special pleasure in the sound of names”; and notes the
poetical richness and picturesqueness of many in the United States.
In his Vailima Letters' he recurs again and again to the liquid
beauty of the Samoan language, and names “Ulufanua): «Did ever
you hear a prettier word ? ” he asks. There was the ear of a poet
always evident in his prose as in his verse.
If Stevenson is always spoken of as a man with a style, here is
the reason for it. The spirit of the light-house builders, who knew
that something more than inspiration was necessary to build a beacon
that would stand up against the waves, was strong in him. From his
boyhood to his death he was a conscious artificer in words. And if
his books are to stand as beacons, here is the foundation of solid
rock, here the strength of the tower. But no reader of Stevenson
need be told the tower is only a stable support for the light. That
is a thing of the spirit; and it glows in his works with a steady
flame.
With his eagerness to have a full draught of the joy of living,
it was natural that Stevenson should have traveled much in many
countries. The pursuit of health, which was for twenty years a
pressing necessity in his "great task of happiness,” was not the sole
reason for his wanderings. He was always hungry for the greater
world; not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and colleges, but
## p. 13930 (#116) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13930
3
20
& 12
the world where men still live a man's life.
My imagination,
which is not the least damped by the idea of having my head cut
off in the bush, recoils aghast from the idea of a life like Glad-
stone's; and the shadow of the newspaper chills me to the bone. ”
He looks back with more satisfaction on the things he learned in the
streets while playing truant, than on what he retained of books and
college lectures. « Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to
sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back
turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. ”
His wanderings, which were his real education, began soon after
his college days. Born on November 13th, 1850, in Edinburgh, he
had the usual advantages of children of thrifty people in that intel-
lectual city. He went to private schools, and had long vacations in
the East Neuk of Fife,-a country full of romance, and associated
with the Balfours, his mother's family. He has given a pleasing
glimpse of his vacations there in The Lantern-Bearers,' where he
pictures the play of the boys along the cliffs, fronting on the lonely
and picturesque Bass Rock, which even then to his eye of fancy still
«flew the colors of King James ”; and it held its fascination for him
until, long years after, in Samoa, he penned one of the most imagi-
native chapters in David Balfour) to celebrate its weird associations.
His career at Edinburgh University was not distinguished. But he
was always about his business, which was learning to write); and
helped to found a short-lived college magazine, which furnishes the
topic for a charming bit of autobiography in Memories and Por-
traits. Following the traditions of his family, he began to practice
the practical elements of a civil engineer by working around the
shops that had to do with the light-house business. Soon he declared
his distaste for this vocation, telling his father that he wanted to be
a writer. As a compromise he was put at the study of law when
twenty-one years of age, and kept at it until he became an advocate,
-Writer to the Signet, as it is phrased in his will. His failing
health drove him to the south of France in 1873: and from that time
to his death, on December 3d, 1894, he followed his bent for travel;
and while seeking health accumulated, in the way he best liked, the
materials for his books. Barbizon and the artistic colony there held
him for a time; and there he met Mrs. Osbourne, whom he married
in 1879. His vagabonding had furnished him the experiences for
his first book, (An Inland Voyage) (1878), and later, (Travels with a
Donkey'; and then came his first American trip in 1879, which in
after years produced The Amateur Emigrant, Across the Plains,' and
“The Silverado Squatters. ' There was a period of invalidism — «the
land of counterpane » — at Bournemouth, which at length drove him
## p. 13931 (#117) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13931
to seek renewed vigor by a winter in the Adirondacks (1887-8); and
then he began in June 1888 his voyages on the Pacific, which culmi-
nated in his finding the home he delighted in at Apia, Samoa, in
1890. There health came to him again; and with few intervals he
led an out-door life, superintending the building of his house, and
working with his own hands on his plantation. The strange people,
their ways and their politics, became an absorbing interest; and
his Vailima Letters) show that his life was full to the utmost. “Do
you think I have an empty life? ” he wrote Colvin, “or that a man
jogging to his club has so much to interest and amuse him! ” He
laughed at those who pitied his exile, and ascribed the occasional
notes of despondency in his letters to physical depression. I have
endured some two-and-forty years without public shame, and had a
good time as I did it,” he wrote in a letter which he called “a
gloomy ramble,” which came from a twinge of “fine healthy rheuma-
tism. ”
These few suggestions of biography are all that need be here
noted. His published works and letters are his best biography -
which will be rounded out with the collection of unpublished let-
ters and journals which Mr. Sidney Colvin, his literary executor, is
engaged upon. Never was a man more frankly autobiographic in
his writings; and those who have most carefully read his books need
the least to complete the portrait of Stevenson's personality.
1
The kind of judgment upon his works that Stevenson always wel-
comed was that of the craftsman. Whether or not you liked one
kind of story better than another, did not seem to him significant.
The main question with himself always was, Had he achieved the
result artistically that he had in mind ? He never forgot the ambi-
tion of his boyhood,—“his own private end” of learning to write.
And while he is hammering away at a new work, no matter what,-
of romance, travels, poem, or history,— he stops from time to time to
consider whether he has really done it. When he despairs of ever
getting it right, he is led on again by «that glimmer of faith (or
hope) which one learns at this trade, – that somehow and some time,
by perpetual staring and glowering and rewriting, order will emerge. »
The most useless form of criticism that can be applied to Steven-
son's works is of the comparative kind, that shows how far short of
certain great names he fell in certain accepted characteristics. It is
easy to pile up the strong and effective literary qualities that he
does not possess.
But he has a right to be judged from his own plat-
form: what did he try to do, and did he do it?
He was once asked why he did not write more pretty tales like
(Will o' the Mill," why he had abandoned the “honey-dripping” style
## p. 13932 (#118) ##########################################
13932
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
of his earlier essays and tales ? “It's a thing I have often thought
over,” he said, — «the problem of what to do with one's talents. ”
His own gift, he averred, lay in the grim and terrible. ” He added
that some writers touch the heart; he clutched at the throat. If
his romances are full of grim and terrible scenes, it is because he
believed that he could do that kind of writing best. He wanted to
make the most of his best talent. Alan Breck's great fight in the
round-house, the duel scene in "The Master of Ballantrae,' the terri-
ble slaughter on shipboard in The Wrecker,' are convincing proof
that he did not misjudge the bent of his genius. He was the leader
in the revival of romantic writing, and yet he proclaims that he is
essentially a realist. Life is what he was after: "Life is all in all. ”
If there is grimness and horror in his books, it is because he saw it
in life. This is a strange paradox in one who declared that joy in
life was the essential thing. Yet if you analyze any one of Steven-
son's terrible episodes, you will find that some character is giving
the freest expression to his nature in that scene. Alan Breck gloried
in the delight of battle. Wiltshire found barbaric joy in the slaughter
of his enemy.
A scene in Stevenson may be dire and terrible,
but in it some barbaric passion is finding its fullest relief.
In a letter written in 1892 he passes this judgment on his work:
<< < Falesá' and David Balfour) seem to me to be nearer what I mean
than anything I have ever done — nearer what I mean by fiction; the
nearest thing before was Kidnapped. I am not forgetting the Mas-
ter of Ballantrae); but that lacked all pleasurableness, and hence
was imperfect in essence. ” And in another place — «David himself I
refuse to discuss; he is.
Tod Lapraik is a piece of living
Scots; if I had never writ anything but that and Thrawn Janet, still
I'd have been a writer. »
There you get at his art as he saw it. David and Wiltshire and
Alan and Janet are vital. When they acted, it was from the primi-
tive passions; the direct, simple emotions that are not dependent on
culture and civilization for existence and for strength. Civilized men
still retain them, but they are well covered up with conventionalities.
That is why Stevenson loved vagabonds and savages: they showed
him the basic passions at work. The old King of Apemama became
his brother, and the rebel chiefs of Samoa were his devoted admir-
But he had no affection for them unless he found that among
their barbaric emotions they cherished a certain ideal of conduct.
The Road of the Loving Heart repaid him for all his worries about
the Samoan rebels.
While the vitality of a character was its main fascination for Ste-
venson, in either real life or fiction, he followed Scott and Dumas in
the belief that the best way to reveal character in a romance is by
ers.
## p. 13933 (#119) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13933
incident:- «It is not character but incident that wooes us out of
our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to
ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is
realized in the story with enticing or appropriate details. Then we
forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge
into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience: and
then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. ”
By this method, things which are not even pleasurable become inter-
esting. “It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic
import, in which every incident, detail, and trick of circumstances
shall be welcome to the reader's thought. ”
How he labored to make every incident fit into his general
scheme is shown in many of his letters. To a suggestion that he
change a certain ending, he replied that every incident in the story
had led up to that. An invalid for half his years, he looked on life and
art with the eye of a man of action. The psychology of a character
interested him, as it naturally would the descendant of the meta-
physical Balfours. But no amount of analysis was sufficient in Ste-
venson's view to reveal a character to his readers. Action was the
mirror in which it was reflected.
Measured by this, his own highest standard, there can be little
question that Stevenson's highest achievement as a writer of romance
remains where he placed it, with Kidnapped' and (David Balfour'
(called in England Catriona'). In these stories the grim, the ter-
rible, and the eccentric, fall into their proper places in the devel-
opment of the characters. Their reality, their appeal to what is
universal and human, is never obscured by the barbaric. And near to
them as a work of literary art is the finest product of his South Sea
experiences, (The Beach of Falesá' - a story which is so original in
setting, character, and construction, so exquisite in its workmanship,
that it may well be called a masterpiece. The magnificent frag-
ment which he left in Weir of Hermiston justifies many of his own
predictions that it was to be his best work. His style certainly
was never more a flexible instrument in his dexterous hand. There
is nothing which he cannot do easily with it. Words and phrases
strike you with a new beauty and force. Even when the artificial
note of style is too persistent, his vision of the characters remains
clear, vivid, and simple. Lord Braxfield had been in his imagination
for many years — ever since he saw Raeburn's portrait of him and
wrote about it. In Hermiston the long-conjured vision is materi-
alized: and with him two fascinating women, the elder and the
younger Kirstie; a last convincing proof that Stevenson could tri-
umphantly create — what he had so long avoided in his stories
thoroughly charming woman. (Barbara Grant' had led the way to
this success, and had given him confidence.
a
## p. 13934 (#120) ##########################################
13934
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Like all expert craftsmen, he was fond of trying experiments in
his art. He exhibited in them a less strenuous manifestation of his
genius than in the great romances by which he wanted his achieve-
ment to be judged. 'Treasure Island' - a boy's tale of adventure, and
one of the most perfect in workmanship — had a grown-up successor
in «The Wrecker,' which was avowed to be a tale of incident pure and
simple; it was Treasure Island made real by his own experience
of voyaging among the islands of the Pacific. 'The Wrong Box)
(devised with Mr. Osbourne) was his idea of a mystery tale, with the
stage machinery of a farce often painfully present. His ingenious
fancy at play showed its best traits in the fantastic tales of the
(New Arabian Nights,' and “The Dynamiter' (in which Mrs. Steven-
son took part). Prince Otto' is a fantasy written under the inspira-
tion of George Meredith; and it contains some of the most graceful
and melodious prose that is to be found in Stevenson's writings.
Whatever form of literary play his exuberant fancy led him into, it
was always marked with originality of expression. Often it was arti-
ficial, but never labored or dull. His vivacity, his untiring interest in
new things, led him occasionally into trivial and even disappointing
experiments; but he carried them off with that gay air which never
quite let the reader forget that he was a precocious boy doing his
tricks.
The unfailing delight that he got out of his journey through the
world is shown most vividly in his volumes of Essays and Travel,
from which we have so freely quoted his own expressions of his
likes and dislikes, his aspirations and his ideals. To these, readers
will always turn for renewed acquaintance with Stevenson the man.
His literary essays are cordial appreciations and interpretations by a
fellow-craftsman, who knew the difficulties of doing the best work.
His other essays are similar appreciations of characters in real life.
His travels also resolve themselves into this. Wherever he went
he was looking for men who touched some part of his vigorous ideal
of manhood,— the chief factors in which were always "courage and
intelligence. ” It had many phases; but at the bottom there was a
certain loyalty that was the supreme test for vagabond or nobleman.
When he found that, much was forgiven. He believed in an “ulti-
mate decency of things; aye, and if I woke in hell, I should still
believe it!
The lyrical expression of this attitude is the inspiration of his
To use his own figure of music, his ideal of a prose style
was harmony; of a poetic style was melody. In his verse the strain
is extremely simple, but it always sings. While he believed that the
"grim and terrible ” was the best subject for his prose, in his poetry
he allowed beauty to lead him. All the gentler emotions that made
him so loved by his friends found voice in his verse. Many of them
poems.
## p. 13935 (#121) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13935
were directly inspired by personal friendships. Loyalty to his coun-
try and his friends evokes the sweetest music:-
« It's an owercome sooth for age an' youth,
And it brooks wi' nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends,
And the young are just on trial. ”
While his deepest feelings are expressed in Underwoods,' his ten-
derest are found in A Child's Garden of Verses. ' Its simplicity, and
the delicate truth with which it images a child's fancies, have made
it a classic of childhood. The conscious artist is never evident in it.
It seems to be the spontaneous expression of a child's mind.
The place that Stevenson will take in literature is surely not to
be made evident so long as the glamour of his personality remains
over those who were his contemporaries. And with this personality
so fully interwoven with his works, it seems hard to believe that the
glamour can soon fade away. It is easy to imagine that, like Charles
Lamb, he can never become wholly a “figure in literature,” but will
remain vividly present to many generations of readers as a gifted
child of genius who is to be fervently loved.
Robert Bridges,
(
Broch. )
BED IN SUMMER
From Poems and Ballads. ? By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
I
N WINTER I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
## p. 13936 (#122) ##########################################
13936
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TRAVEL
From (Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
1
SHOULD like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie,
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats;-
Where in sunshine reaching out,
Eastern cities, miles about,
Are with mosque and minaret
Among sandy gardens set,
And the rich goods from near and far
Hang for sale in the bazaar;
Where the Great Wall round China goes,
And on one side the desert blows,
And with bell and voice and drum,
Cities on the other hum;
Where are forest, hot as fire,
Wide as England, tall as a spire,
Full of apes and cocoanuts
And the negro hunters' huts; –
Where the knotty crocodile
Lies and blinks in the Nile,
And the red flamingo flies
Hunting fish before his eyes;-
Where in jungles, near and far,
Man-devouring tigers are,
Lying close and giving ear
Lest the hunt be drawing near,
Or a comer-by be seen
Swinging in a palanquin;-
Where among the desert sands
Some deserted city stands,
All its children, sweep and prince,
Grown to manhood ages since,
Not a foot in street or house,
Not a stir of child or mouse,
And when kindly falls the night,
In all the town no spark of light.
There I'll come when I'm a man,
With a camel caravan;
## p. 13937 (#123) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13937
Light a fire in the gloom
Of some dusty dining-room;
See the pictures on the walls,
Heroes, fights, and festivals;
And in a corner find the toys
Of the old Egyptian boys.
THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
"HEN I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.
WHEN
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bedclothes, through the hills.
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant Land of Counterpane.
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Suns
I.
GOOD-NIGHT
HEN the bright lamp is carried in,
The sunless hours again begin;
O'er all without, in field and lane,
The haunted night returns again.
W"
Now we behold the embers flee
About the firelit hearth; and see
XXIV-872
## p. 13938 (#124) ##########################################
13938
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Our faces painted as we pass,
Like pictures, on the window-glass.
Must we to bed indeed ? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
Farewell, O brother, sister, sire!
O pleasant party round the fire!
The songs you sing, the tales you tell,
Till far to-morrow, fare ye well!
II.
SHADOW MARCH
All round the house is the jet-black night:
It stares through the window-pane;
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light,
And it moves with the moving flame.
Now my little heart goes a-beating like a drum,
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;
And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.
The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed, -
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.
III.
IN PORT
Last, to the chamber where I lie
My fearful footsteps patter nigh,
And come from out the cold and gloom
Into my warm and cheerful room.
There, safe arrived, we turn about
To keep the coming shadows out,
And close the happy door at last
On all the perils that we past.
Then, when mamma goes by to bed,
She shall come in with tiptoe tread,
And see me lying warm and fast
And in the Land of Nod at last.
## p. 13939 (#125) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13939
<IF THIS WERE FAITH »
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
G
OD, if this were enough,
That I see things bare to the buff
And up to the buttocks in mire;
That I ask nor hope nor hire,
Not in the husk,
Nor dawn beyond the dusk,
Nor life beyond death:
God, if this were faith?
Having felt thy wind in my face
Spit sorrow and disgrace,
Having seen thine evil doom
In Golgotha and Khartoum,
And the brutes, the work of thine hands,
Fill with injustice lands
And stain with blood the sea:
If still in my veins the glee
Of the black night and the sun
And the lost battle, run;
If, an adept,
The iniquitous lists I still accept
With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,
And still to battle and perish for a dream of good:
God, if that were enough?
If to feel, in the ink of the slough
And the sink of the mire,
Veins of glory and fire
Run through and transpierce and transpire,
And a secret purpose of glory in every part,
And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;
To thrill with the joy of girded men
To go on for ever and fail and go on again,
And be mauled to the earth and arise,
And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the
eyes:
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough?
## p. 13940 (#126) ##########################################
13940
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
REQUIEM
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
UM
NDER the wide and starry sky,
Dig the 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.
TO WILL. H. LOW
From "Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
You
OUTH now flees on feathered foot,
Faint and fainter sounds the flute,
Rarer songs of gods; and still
Somewhere on the sunny hill,
Or along the winding stream,
Through the willows, flits a dream;
Flits, but shows a smiling face,
Flees, but with so quaint a grace,
Nor can choose to stay at home, -
All must follow, all must roam.
This is unborn beauty: she
Now in air floats high and free,
Takes the sun and breaks the blue;-
Late with stooping pinion flew
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet
Her wing in silver streams, and set
Shining foot on temple roof:
Now again she flies aloof,
Coasting mountain clouds and kist
By the evening's amethyst.
In wet wood and miry lane,
Still we pant and pound in vain;
Still with leaden foot we chase
Waning pinion, fainting face;
## p. 13941 (#127) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13941
Still with gray hair we stumble on,
Till, behold, the vision gone!
Where hath fleeting beauty led ?
To the doorway of the dead.
Life is over, life was gay:
We have come the primrose way.
(THE TROPICS VANISH »
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
T.
He tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,
New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.
There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-incrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence. Continents
And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain. The voice of generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And all mutation over, stretch me down
In that denoted city of the dead.
ΑΡΕΜΑΜΑ.
## p. 13942 (#128) ##########################################
13942
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TROPIC RAIN
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
S THE single pang of the blow, when the metal is mingled well,
Rings and lives and resounds in all the bounds of the bell:
So the thunder above spoke with a single tongue,
So in the heart of the mountain the sound of it rumbled and clung.
A
Sudden the thunder was drowned — quenched was the levin light-
And the angel spirit of rain laughed out loud in the night.
Loud as the maddened river raves in the cloven glen,
Angel of rain! you laughed and leaped on the roofs of men;
And the sleepers sprang in their beds, and joyed and feared as you
fell.
You struck, and my cabin quailed; the roof of it roared like a bell.
You spoke, and at once the mountain shouted and shook with brooks.
You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.
VAILIMA.
CHRISTMAS AT SEA
From (Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
T"
а
seaman
He sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where
scarce could
stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.
They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.
All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the
North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
## p. 13943 (#129) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13943
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.
We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So 's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coast-guard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.
The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'longshore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.
The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coast-guard's was the house where I was
born.
Oh! well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.
And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And oh the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.
They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
"All hands to loose topgallant sails,” I heard the captain call.
"By the Lord, she'll never stand it,” our first mate, Jackson, cried. -
"It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,” he replied.
She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.
And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.
## p. 13944 (#130) ##########################################
13944
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
A FABLE
From "The Lantern-Bearers)
T"?
HERE is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:
the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard
a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and
found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates; for
he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there
survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods
that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there.
A11 life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two
strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just
this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so
incommunicable; and just a knowledge of this, and a remem-
brance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to
us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of
the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far
as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap
fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which
we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-
devouring nightingale we hear no news.
STRIVING AND FAILING
From A Christmas Sermon)
He goes
L"
IFE is not designed to minister to a man's vanity.
upon his long business most of the time with a hanging
head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards
and pleasures as it is, — so that to see the day break, or the
moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner call when
he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys, - this world is yet
for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails,
weariness assails him; year after year he must thumb the hardly
varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly
process of detachment.
When the time comes that he should
go, there need be few illusions left about himself. « Here lies
one who meant well, tried a little, failed much,” — surely that may
be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
## p. 13945 (#131) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13945
1
WE PASS THE FORTH
From Kidnapped. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles
Scribner's Sons
T"
he month, as I have said, was not yet out, but it was already
far through August, and beautiful warm weather, with every
sign of an early and great harvest, when I was pronounced
able for my journey. Our money was now run to so low an
ebb that we must think first of all on speed; for if we came not
soon to Mr. Rankeillor's, or if when we came there he should fail
to help me, we must surely starve. In Alan's view, besides, the
hunt must have now greatly slackened; and the line of the Forth,
and even Stirling Bridge which is the main pass over that river,
would be watched with little interest.
“It's a chief principle in military affairs,” said he, “to go
where ye are least expected. Forth is our trouble; ye ken the
saying, 'Forth bridles the wild Hielandman. Well, if we seek
to creep round about the head of that river and come down
by Kippen or Balfron, it's just precisely there that they'll be
looking to lay hands on us. But if we stave on straight to the
auld Brig' of Stirling, I'll lay my sword they let us pass unchal-
lenged. ”
The first night, accordingly, we pushed to the house of a
Maclaren in Strathire, a friend of Duncan's, where we slept the
twenty-first of the month, and whence we set forth again about
the fall of night to make another easy stage. The twenty-second
we lay in a heather-bush on a hillside in Uam Var, within view
of a herd of deer,- the happiest ten hours of sleep in a fine,
breathing sunshine, and on bone-dry ground, that I have ever
tasted. That night we struck Allan Water, and followed it down;
and coming to the edge of the hills saw the whole Carse of
Stirling underfoot, as flat as a pancake, with the town and castle
on a hill in the midst of it, and the moon shining n the Links
of Forth.
"Now,” said Alan, “I kenna if ye care, but ye're in your own
land again. We passed the Hieland Line in the first hour; and
now if we could but pass yon crooked water, we might cast our
bonnets in the air. ”
In Allan Water, near by where it falls into the Forth, we
found a little sandy islet, overgrown with burdock, butterbur, and
the like low plants, that would just cover us if we lay flat. Here
-
»
## p. 13946 (#132) ##########################################
13946
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
it was we made our camp, within plain view of Stirling Castle;
whence we could hear the drums beat as some part of the gar-
rison paraded. Shearers worked all day in a field on one side
of the river; and we could hear the stones going on the hooks,
and the voices and even the words of the men talking. It be-
hoved to lie close and keep silent. But the sand of the little
isle was sun-warm, the green plants gave us shelter for our
heads, we had food and drink in plenty; and to crown all, we
were within sight of safety.
As soon as the shearers quit their work and the dusk began
to fall, we waded ashore and struck for the Bridge of Stirling,
keeping to the fields and under the field fences.
The bridge is close under the castle hill; an old, high, narrow
bridge with pinnacles along the parapet: and you may conceive
with how much interest I looked upon it, not only as a place
famous in history, but as the very doors of salvation to Alan and
myself. The moon was not yet up when we came there; a few
lights shone along the front of the fortress, and lower down a
few lighted windows in the town; but it was all mighty still, and
there seemed to be no guard upon the passage,
I was for pushing straight across; but Alan was more wary.
" It looks unco' quiet,” said he; but for all that, we'll lie
down here cannily behind a dike and make sure. ”
So we lay for about a quarter of an hour, whiles whispering,
whiles lying still and hearing nothing earthly but the washing of
the water on the piers. At last there came by an old, hobbling
woman with a crutch stick: who first stopped a little, close to
where we lay, and bemoaned herself and the long way she had
traveled; and then set forth again up the steep spring of the
bridge. The woman was so little, and the night still so dark,
that we soon lost sight of her; only heard the sound of her steps,
and her stick, and a cough that she had by fits, draw slowly
further away.
« She's bound to be across now, I whispered.
“Na,” said Alan, her foot still sounds boss * upon the bridge. ”
“
. ”
And just then - «Who goes ? » cried a voice, and we heard
the butt of a musket rattle on the stones. I must suppose the
sentry had been sleeping, so that had we tried we might have
passed unseen; but he was awake now, and the chance forfeited.
(
(C
* Hollow: pronounced bose.
## p. 13947 (#133) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13947
»
“This'll never do,” said Alan. “This'll never, never do for
us, David. ”
And without another word he began to crawl away through
the fields; and a little after, being well out of eye-shot, got to
his feet again, and struck along a road that led to the eastward.
I could not conceive what he was doing; and indeed I was so
sharply cut by the disappointment, that I was little likely to be
pleased with anything. A moment back, and I had seen myself
knocking at Mr. Rankeillor's door to claim my inheritance, like
a hero in a ballad; and here was I back again, a wandering,
hunted blackguard, on the wrong side of Forth.
« Well ? » said I.
“Well,” said Alan, “what would ye have? They're none such
fools as I took them for. We have still the Forth to pass, Davie
- weary fall the rains that fed and the hillsides that guided it! ”
"And why go east ? ” said I.
Ou, just upon the chance! ” said he. “If we cannae pass
the river, we'll have to see what we can do for the firth. ”
« There are fords upon the river, and none upon the firth,”
said I.
“To be sure there are fords, and a bridge forbye,) quoth
Alan; "and of what service, when they are watched ? »
“Well,” said I, “but a river can be swum. ”
"By them that have the skill of it,” returned he: “but I have
yet to hear that either you or me is much of a hand at that
exercise; and for my own part, I swim like a stone. ”
"I'm not up to you in talking back, Alan," I said; but I
can see we're making bad worse. If it's hard to pass a river, it
stands to reason it must be worse to pass a sea. ”
"But there's such a thing as a boat,” says Alan, “or I'm the
more deceived. ”
“Ay, and such a thing as money,” says I.
< But for us that
have neither one nor other, they might just as well not have
been invented. ”
« Ye think so ? said Alan.
“I do that,” said I.
" David,” says he, "ye're a man of small invention and less
faith. But let me set my wits upon the hone, and if I cannae
beg, borrow, nor yet steal a boat, I'll make one! ”
"I think I see ye! ” said I. "And what's more than all that:
if ye pass a bridge, it can tell no tales; but if we pass the firth,
(
(
»
C
(
(
## p. 13948 (#134) ##########################################
13948
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
there's the boat on the wrong side - somebody must have brought
it — the countryside will all be in a bizz
Man ! » cried Alan, “if I make a boat, I'll make a body to
take it back again! So deave me with no more of your non-
sense, but walk (for that's what you've got to do) — and let Alan
think for ye.
All night, then, we walked through the north side of the Carse
under the high line of the Ochil mountains; and by Alloa and
Clackmannan and Culross, all of which we avoided: and about
ten in the morning, mighty hungry and tired, came to the little
clachan of Limekilns. This is a place that sits near in by the
water-side, and looks across the Hope to the town of the Queens-
ferry. Smoke went up from both of these, and from other vil-
lages and farms upon all hands. The fields were being reaped;
two ships lay anchored, and boats were coming and going on the
Hope. It was altogether a right pleasant sight to me; and I
could not take my fill of gazing at these comfortable, green, cul- .
tivated hills, and the busy people both of the field and sea.
For all that, there was Mr. Rankeillor's house on the south
shore, where I had no doubt wealth awaited me; and here was
I upon the north, clad in poor enough attire of an outlandish
fashion, with three silver shillings left to me of all my fortune,
a price set upon my head, and an outlawed man for my sole
company
“O Alan! ” said I, “to think of it! Over there, there's all
that heart could want waiting me; and the birds go over, and
the boats go over - all that please can go, but just me only! 0
man, but it's a heart-break! »
In Limekilns we entered a small change-house, which we only
knew to be a public by the wand over the door, and bought
some bread and cheese from a good-looking lass that was the
servant. This we carried with us in a bundle, meaning to sit
and eat it in a bush of wood on the sea-shore, that we saw some
third part of a mile in front. As we went, I kept looking across
the water and sighing to myself; and though I took no heed
of it, Alan had fallen into a muse. At last he stopped in the
way.
“Did ye take heed of the lass we bought this of? ” says he,
tapping on the bread and cheese.
“To be sure," said I, "and a bonny lass she was. ”
“Ye thought that ? ” cries he. “Man David, that's good news. ”
(
»
## p. 13949 (#135) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13949
ye,
“In the name of all that's wonderful, why so ? ” says I. . “What
good can that do ? »
"Well,” said Alan, with one of his droll looks, "I was rather
in hopes it would maybe get us that boat. ”
"If it were the other way about, it would be liker it,” said I.
“That's all that you ken, ye see,” said Alan. “I don't want
the lass to fall in love with ye, I want her to be sorry for
David; to which end, there is no manner of need that she should
take you for a beauty. Let me see” (looking me curiously over).
"I wish ye were a wee thing paler; but apart from that ye'll do
fine for my purpose - ye have a fine, hang-dog, rag-and-tatter,
clappermaclaw kind of a look to ye, as if ye had stolen the coat
from a potato-bogle. Come: right about, and back to the change-
house for that boat of ours. ”
I followed him laughing.
« David Balfour,” said he, "ye're a very funny gentleman by
your way of it, and this is a very funny employ for ye, no doubt.
For all that, if ye have any affection for my neck (to say noth-
ing of your own), ye will perhaps be kind enough to take this
matter responsibly. I am going to do a bit of play-acting, the
bottom ground of which is just exactly as serious as the gallows
for the pair of us. So bear it, if ye please, in mind, and conduct
yourself according. ”
« Well, well,” said I, have it as you will. ”
As we got near the clachan, he made me take his arm and
hang upon it like one almost helpless with weariness; and by
the time he pushed open the change-house door, he seemed to
be half carrying me. The maid appeared surprised (as well she
might be) at our speedy return: but Alan had no words to spare
for her in explanation, helped me to a chair, called for a tass of
brandy with which he fed me in little sips, and then breaking
up the bread and cheese helped me to eat it like a nursery-lass;
the whole with that grave, concerned, affectionate countenance,
that might have imposed upon a judge.
a peg for his fancy. ” “I could not learn
my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a
business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. ”
Burnt-cork mustachios expanded his spirit with dignity and self-
reliance. To him the burnt cork was not the significant thing,
the warm delight of it. It is not the silly talk of the boys on the
links, or the ill-smelling lantern buttoned under their great-coats,
but “the heaven of a recondite pleasure” which they inhabit, that is
worth considering. “To find out where joy resides, and give it a
«
voice far beyond singing,” — that was Stevenson's endeavor; «for to
miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of
any action. ” That is the very spirit of romantic youth; the search
for the incommunicable thrill of things,” which his friend and
biographer Sidney Colvin says was the main passion of Stevenson's
((
## p. 13928 (#114) ##########################################
13928
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
life. “To his ardent fancy,” says Colvin, “the world was a theatre,
glaring with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance. ”
To any one looking for the reason of Stevenson's perpetual charm,
- even to those who can give a score of arguments for not liking his
romances, - this brave spirit of youth is an adequate and satisfying
motive. The young find in it a full justification for their own hopes;
the middle-aged feel again the very spring and core of the energy
which they have been so long disciplining and driving to the yoke
of every-day effort that they have forgotten its origin; and the old
find their memories alive and glowing again with the romance of
youth, In sickness or in health, in comedy or tragedy, Stevenson
and the characters he creates are never wholly unconscious of man's
inalienable birthright of happiness. No matter how dire his circum-
stances, it is a man's duty to keep looking for it, so that at the end
he may say that he has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
(If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books and my food, and summer rain,
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain,-
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake. ”
This temperament in many men of a different race would surely
lead to a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure,– in one long quest
for new sensations,— which in the end is sure to arrive at ennui and
disgust. But Stevenson united the blood of the Balfours, who were
preachers, given to metaphysics and the pursuit of moralities, with the
Stevensons,“ builders of the great sea lights,” practical men of trained
scientific minds and shrewd common-sense. The touch of the moral
philosopher was never deeply hidden in his lightest work, which also
showed the hand of the artisan in the skill of its construction. «What
I want to give, what I try for, is God's moral,” he once said; and
(Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is a potent exhibition of it.
early in life this temperament began to reveal itself in the craftsman,
he shows in one of his essays: “All through my boyhood and youth
I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I
was always busy in my own private end, which was to learn to write.
I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read and one to
write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with
appropriate words.
I lived with words, and what I thus wrote
was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It
How very
## p. 13929 (#115) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13929
(
was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished
that too), as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. ) And
years afterward he wrote to Colvin from Samoa: «I pass all my
hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspond-
ence. I scarce pull up a weed but I invent a sentence on the matter
to yourself. ”
In his youthful reading, some happy distinction in the style » of
a book sent him at once to the imitation of it; and he confesses, “I
have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Words-
worth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne,
to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. ” All this gave him what he knew
to be “the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, – the
choice of the essential note and the right word”; but he also knew
that “that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write. ” To those
who say that this is not the way to be original, he has given the
best answer: “It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so.
Nor yet if you are born original, is there anything in this training
that shall clip the wings of your originality. ”
The “love of lovely words” was one of his passions. From
Skerryvore to Vailima it led him and charmed him. In Across the
Plains) he says that «None can care for literature in itself who do
not take a special pleasure in the sound of names”; and notes the
poetical richness and picturesqueness of many in the United States.
In his Vailima Letters' he recurs again and again to the liquid
beauty of the Samoan language, and names “Ulufanua): «Did ever
you hear a prettier word ? ” he asks. There was the ear of a poet
always evident in his prose as in his verse.
If Stevenson is always spoken of as a man with a style, here is
the reason for it. The spirit of the light-house builders, who knew
that something more than inspiration was necessary to build a beacon
that would stand up against the waves, was strong in him. From his
boyhood to his death he was a conscious artificer in words. And if
his books are to stand as beacons, here is the foundation of solid
rock, here the strength of the tower. But no reader of Stevenson
need be told the tower is only a stable support for the light. That
is a thing of the spirit; and it glows in his works with a steady
flame.
With his eagerness to have a full draught of the joy of living,
it was natural that Stevenson should have traveled much in many
countries. The pursuit of health, which was for twenty years a
pressing necessity in his "great task of happiness,” was not the sole
reason for his wanderings. He was always hungry for the greater
world; not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and colleges, but
## p. 13930 (#116) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13930
3
20
& 12
the world where men still live a man's life.
My imagination,
which is not the least damped by the idea of having my head cut
off in the bush, recoils aghast from the idea of a life like Glad-
stone's; and the shadow of the newspaper chills me to the bone. ”
He looks back with more satisfaction on the things he learned in the
streets while playing truant, than on what he retained of books and
college lectures. « Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to
sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back
turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. ”
His wanderings, which were his real education, began soon after
his college days. Born on November 13th, 1850, in Edinburgh, he
had the usual advantages of children of thrifty people in that intel-
lectual city. He went to private schools, and had long vacations in
the East Neuk of Fife,-a country full of romance, and associated
with the Balfours, his mother's family. He has given a pleasing
glimpse of his vacations there in The Lantern-Bearers,' where he
pictures the play of the boys along the cliffs, fronting on the lonely
and picturesque Bass Rock, which even then to his eye of fancy still
«flew the colors of King James ”; and it held its fascination for him
until, long years after, in Samoa, he penned one of the most imagi-
native chapters in David Balfour) to celebrate its weird associations.
His career at Edinburgh University was not distinguished. But he
was always about his business, which was learning to write); and
helped to found a short-lived college magazine, which furnishes the
topic for a charming bit of autobiography in Memories and Por-
traits. Following the traditions of his family, he began to practice
the practical elements of a civil engineer by working around the
shops that had to do with the light-house business. Soon he declared
his distaste for this vocation, telling his father that he wanted to be
a writer. As a compromise he was put at the study of law when
twenty-one years of age, and kept at it until he became an advocate,
-Writer to the Signet, as it is phrased in his will. His failing
health drove him to the south of France in 1873: and from that time
to his death, on December 3d, 1894, he followed his bent for travel;
and while seeking health accumulated, in the way he best liked, the
materials for his books. Barbizon and the artistic colony there held
him for a time; and there he met Mrs. Osbourne, whom he married
in 1879. His vagabonding had furnished him the experiences for
his first book, (An Inland Voyage) (1878), and later, (Travels with a
Donkey'; and then came his first American trip in 1879, which in
after years produced The Amateur Emigrant, Across the Plains,' and
“The Silverado Squatters. ' There was a period of invalidism — «the
land of counterpane » — at Bournemouth, which at length drove him
## p. 13931 (#117) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13931
to seek renewed vigor by a winter in the Adirondacks (1887-8); and
then he began in June 1888 his voyages on the Pacific, which culmi-
nated in his finding the home he delighted in at Apia, Samoa, in
1890. There health came to him again; and with few intervals he
led an out-door life, superintending the building of his house, and
working with his own hands on his plantation. The strange people,
their ways and their politics, became an absorbing interest; and
his Vailima Letters) show that his life was full to the utmost. “Do
you think I have an empty life? ” he wrote Colvin, “or that a man
jogging to his club has so much to interest and amuse him! ” He
laughed at those who pitied his exile, and ascribed the occasional
notes of despondency in his letters to physical depression. I have
endured some two-and-forty years without public shame, and had a
good time as I did it,” he wrote in a letter which he called “a
gloomy ramble,” which came from a twinge of “fine healthy rheuma-
tism. ”
These few suggestions of biography are all that need be here
noted. His published works and letters are his best biography -
which will be rounded out with the collection of unpublished let-
ters and journals which Mr. Sidney Colvin, his literary executor, is
engaged upon. Never was a man more frankly autobiographic in
his writings; and those who have most carefully read his books need
the least to complete the portrait of Stevenson's personality.
1
The kind of judgment upon his works that Stevenson always wel-
comed was that of the craftsman. Whether or not you liked one
kind of story better than another, did not seem to him significant.
The main question with himself always was, Had he achieved the
result artistically that he had in mind ? He never forgot the ambi-
tion of his boyhood,—“his own private end” of learning to write.
And while he is hammering away at a new work, no matter what,-
of romance, travels, poem, or history,— he stops from time to time to
consider whether he has really done it. When he despairs of ever
getting it right, he is led on again by «that glimmer of faith (or
hope) which one learns at this trade, – that somehow and some time,
by perpetual staring and glowering and rewriting, order will emerge. »
The most useless form of criticism that can be applied to Steven-
son's works is of the comparative kind, that shows how far short of
certain great names he fell in certain accepted characteristics. It is
easy to pile up the strong and effective literary qualities that he
does not possess.
But he has a right to be judged from his own plat-
form: what did he try to do, and did he do it?
He was once asked why he did not write more pretty tales like
(Will o' the Mill," why he had abandoned the “honey-dripping” style
## p. 13932 (#118) ##########################################
13932
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
of his earlier essays and tales ? “It's a thing I have often thought
over,” he said, — «the problem of what to do with one's talents. ”
His own gift, he averred, lay in the grim and terrible. ” He added
that some writers touch the heart; he clutched at the throat. If
his romances are full of grim and terrible scenes, it is because he
believed that he could do that kind of writing best. He wanted to
make the most of his best talent. Alan Breck's great fight in the
round-house, the duel scene in "The Master of Ballantrae,' the terri-
ble slaughter on shipboard in The Wrecker,' are convincing proof
that he did not misjudge the bent of his genius. He was the leader
in the revival of romantic writing, and yet he proclaims that he is
essentially a realist. Life is what he was after: "Life is all in all. ”
If there is grimness and horror in his books, it is because he saw it
in life. This is a strange paradox in one who declared that joy in
life was the essential thing. Yet if you analyze any one of Steven-
son's terrible episodes, you will find that some character is giving
the freest expression to his nature in that scene. Alan Breck gloried
in the delight of battle. Wiltshire found barbaric joy in the slaughter
of his enemy.
A scene in Stevenson may be dire and terrible,
but in it some barbaric passion is finding its fullest relief.
In a letter written in 1892 he passes this judgment on his work:
<< < Falesá' and David Balfour) seem to me to be nearer what I mean
than anything I have ever done — nearer what I mean by fiction; the
nearest thing before was Kidnapped. I am not forgetting the Mas-
ter of Ballantrae); but that lacked all pleasurableness, and hence
was imperfect in essence. ” And in another place — «David himself I
refuse to discuss; he is.
Tod Lapraik is a piece of living
Scots; if I had never writ anything but that and Thrawn Janet, still
I'd have been a writer. »
There you get at his art as he saw it. David and Wiltshire and
Alan and Janet are vital. When they acted, it was from the primi-
tive passions; the direct, simple emotions that are not dependent on
culture and civilization for existence and for strength. Civilized men
still retain them, but they are well covered up with conventionalities.
That is why Stevenson loved vagabonds and savages: they showed
him the basic passions at work. The old King of Apemama became
his brother, and the rebel chiefs of Samoa were his devoted admir-
But he had no affection for them unless he found that among
their barbaric emotions they cherished a certain ideal of conduct.
The Road of the Loving Heart repaid him for all his worries about
the Samoan rebels.
While the vitality of a character was its main fascination for Ste-
venson, in either real life or fiction, he followed Scott and Dumas in
the belief that the best way to reveal character in a romance is by
ers.
## p. 13933 (#119) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13933
incident:- «It is not character but incident that wooes us out of
our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to
ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is
realized in the story with enticing or appropriate details. Then we
forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge
into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience: and
then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. ”
By this method, things which are not even pleasurable become inter-
esting. “It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic
import, in which every incident, detail, and trick of circumstances
shall be welcome to the reader's thought. ”
How he labored to make every incident fit into his general
scheme is shown in many of his letters. To a suggestion that he
change a certain ending, he replied that every incident in the story
had led up to that. An invalid for half his years, he looked on life and
art with the eye of a man of action. The psychology of a character
interested him, as it naturally would the descendant of the meta-
physical Balfours. But no amount of analysis was sufficient in Ste-
venson's view to reveal a character to his readers. Action was the
mirror in which it was reflected.
Measured by this, his own highest standard, there can be little
question that Stevenson's highest achievement as a writer of romance
remains where he placed it, with Kidnapped' and (David Balfour'
(called in England Catriona'). In these stories the grim, the ter-
rible, and the eccentric, fall into their proper places in the devel-
opment of the characters. Their reality, their appeal to what is
universal and human, is never obscured by the barbaric. And near to
them as a work of literary art is the finest product of his South Sea
experiences, (The Beach of Falesá' - a story which is so original in
setting, character, and construction, so exquisite in its workmanship,
that it may well be called a masterpiece. The magnificent frag-
ment which he left in Weir of Hermiston justifies many of his own
predictions that it was to be his best work. His style certainly
was never more a flexible instrument in his dexterous hand. There
is nothing which he cannot do easily with it. Words and phrases
strike you with a new beauty and force. Even when the artificial
note of style is too persistent, his vision of the characters remains
clear, vivid, and simple. Lord Braxfield had been in his imagination
for many years — ever since he saw Raeburn's portrait of him and
wrote about it. In Hermiston the long-conjured vision is materi-
alized: and with him two fascinating women, the elder and the
younger Kirstie; a last convincing proof that Stevenson could tri-
umphantly create — what he had so long avoided in his stories
thoroughly charming woman. (Barbara Grant' had led the way to
this success, and had given him confidence.
a
## p. 13934 (#120) ##########################################
13934
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Like all expert craftsmen, he was fond of trying experiments in
his art. He exhibited in them a less strenuous manifestation of his
genius than in the great romances by which he wanted his achieve-
ment to be judged. 'Treasure Island' - a boy's tale of adventure, and
one of the most perfect in workmanship — had a grown-up successor
in «The Wrecker,' which was avowed to be a tale of incident pure and
simple; it was Treasure Island made real by his own experience
of voyaging among the islands of the Pacific. 'The Wrong Box)
(devised with Mr. Osbourne) was his idea of a mystery tale, with the
stage machinery of a farce often painfully present. His ingenious
fancy at play showed its best traits in the fantastic tales of the
(New Arabian Nights,' and “The Dynamiter' (in which Mrs. Steven-
son took part). Prince Otto' is a fantasy written under the inspira-
tion of George Meredith; and it contains some of the most graceful
and melodious prose that is to be found in Stevenson's writings.
Whatever form of literary play his exuberant fancy led him into, it
was always marked with originality of expression. Often it was arti-
ficial, but never labored or dull. His vivacity, his untiring interest in
new things, led him occasionally into trivial and even disappointing
experiments; but he carried them off with that gay air which never
quite let the reader forget that he was a precocious boy doing his
tricks.
The unfailing delight that he got out of his journey through the
world is shown most vividly in his volumes of Essays and Travel,
from which we have so freely quoted his own expressions of his
likes and dislikes, his aspirations and his ideals. To these, readers
will always turn for renewed acquaintance with Stevenson the man.
His literary essays are cordial appreciations and interpretations by a
fellow-craftsman, who knew the difficulties of doing the best work.
His other essays are similar appreciations of characters in real life.
His travels also resolve themselves into this. Wherever he went
he was looking for men who touched some part of his vigorous ideal
of manhood,— the chief factors in which were always "courage and
intelligence. ” It had many phases; but at the bottom there was a
certain loyalty that was the supreme test for vagabond or nobleman.
When he found that, much was forgiven. He believed in an “ulti-
mate decency of things; aye, and if I woke in hell, I should still
believe it!
The lyrical expression of this attitude is the inspiration of his
To use his own figure of music, his ideal of a prose style
was harmony; of a poetic style was melody. In his verse the strain
is extremely simple, but it always sings. While he believed that the
"grim and terrible ” was the best subject for his prose, in his poetry
he allowed beauty to lead him. All the gentler emotions that made
him so loved by his friends found voice in his verse. Many of them
poems.
## p. 13935 (#121) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13935
were directly inspired by personal friendships. Loyalty to his coun-
try and his friends evokes the sweetest music:-
« It's an owercome sooth for age an' youth,
And it brooks wi' nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends,
And the young are just on trial. ”
While his deepest feelings are expressed in Underwoods,' his ten-
derest are found in A Child's Garden of Verses. ' Its simplicity, and
the delicate truth with which it images a child's fancies, have made
it a classic of childhood. The conscious artist is never evident in it.
It seems to be the spontaneous expression of a child's mind.
The place that Stevenson will take in literature is surely not to
be made evident so long as the glamour of his personality remains
over those who were his contemporaries. And with this personality
so fully interwoven with his works, it seems hard to believe that the
glamour can soon fade away. It is easy to imagine that, like Charles
Lamb, he can never become wholly a “figure in literature,” but will
remain vividly present to many generations of readers as a gifted
child of genius who is to be fervently loved.
Robert Bridges,
(
Broch. )
BED IN SUMMER
From Poems and Ballads. ? By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
I
N WINTER I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
## p. 13936 (#122) ##########################################
13936
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TRAVEL
From (Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
1
SHOULD like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie,
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats;-
Where in sunshine reaching out,
Eastern cities, miles about,
Are with mosque and minaret
Among sandy gardens set,
And the rich goods from near and far
Hang for sale in the bazaar;
Where the Great Wall round China goes,
And on one side the desert blows,
And with bell and voice and drum,
Cities on the other hum;
Where are forest, hot as fire,
Wide as England, tall as a spire,
Full of apes and cocoanuts
And the negro hunters' huts; –
Where the knotty crocodile
Lies and blinks in the Nile,
And the red flamingo flies
Hunting fish before his eyes;-
Where in jungles, near and far,
Man-devouring tigers are,
Lying close and giving ear
Lest the hunt be drawing near,
Or a comer-by be seen
Swinging in a palanquin;-
Where among the desert sands
Some deserted city stands,
All its children, sweep and prince,
Grown to manhood ages since,
Not a foot in street or house,
Not a stir of child or mouse,
And when kindly falls the night,
In all the town no spark of light.
There I'll come when I'm a man,
With a camel caravan;
## p. 13937 (#123) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13937
Light a fire in the gloom
Of some dusty dining-room;
See the pictures on the walls,
Heroes, fights, and festivals;
And in a corner find the toys
Of the old Egyptian boys.
THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
"HEN I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.
WHEN
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bedclothes, through the hills.
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant Land of Counterpane.
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Suns
I.
GOOD-NIGHT
HEN the bright lamp is carried in,
The sunless hours again begin;
O'er all without, in field and lane,
The haunted night returns again.
W"
Now we behold the embers flee
About the firelit hearth; and see
XXIV-872
## p. 13938 (#124) ##########################################
13938
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Our faces painted as we pass,
Like pictures, on the window-glass.
Must we to bed indeed ? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
Farewell, O brother, sister, sire!
O pleasant party round the fire!
The songs you sing, the tales you tell,
Till far to-morrow, fare ye well!
II.
SHADOW MARCH
All round the house is the jet-black night:
It stares through the window-pane;
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light,
And it moves with the moving flame.
Now my little heart goes a-beating like a drum,
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;
And all round the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.
The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed, -
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.
III.
IN PORT
Last, to the chamber where I lie
My fearful footsteps patter nigh,
And come from out the cold and gloom
Into my warm and cheerful room.
There, safe arrived, we turn about
To keep the coming shadows out,
And close the happy door at last
On all the perils that we past.
Then, when mamma goes by to bed,
She shall come in with tiptoe tread,
And see me lying warm and fast
And in the Land of Nod at last.
## p. 13939 (#125) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13939
<IF THIS WERE FAITH »
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
G
OD, if this were enough,
That I see things bare to the buff
And up to the buttocks in mire;
That I ask nor hope nor hire,
Not in the husk,
Nor dawn beyond the dusk,
Nor life beyond death:
God, if this were faith?
Having felt thy wind in my face
Spit sorrow and disgrace,
Having seen thine evil doom
In Golgotha and Khartoum,
And the brutes, the work of thine hands,
Fill with injustice lands
And stain with blood the sea:
If still in my veins the glee
Of the black night and the sun
And the lost battle, run;
If, an adept,
The iniquitous lists I still accept
With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,
And still to battle and perish for a dream of good:
God, if that were enough?
If to feel, in the ink of the slough
And the sink of the mire,
Veins of glory and fire
Run through and transpierce and transpire,
And a secret purpose of glory in every part,
And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;
To thrill with the joy of girded men
To go on for ever and fail and go on again,
And be mauled to the earth and arise,
And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the
eyes:
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough?
## p. 13940 (#126) ##########################################
13940
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
REQUIEM
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
UM
NDER the wide and starry sky,
Dig the 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.
TO WILL. H. LOW
From "Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
You
OUTH now flees on feathered foot,
Faint and fainter sounds the flute,
Rarer songs of gods; and still
Somewhere on the sunny hill,
Or along the winding stream,
Through the willows, flits a dream;
Flits, but shows a smiling face,
Flees, but with so quaint a grace,
Nor can choose to stay at home, -
All must follow, all must roam.
This is unborn beauty: she
Now in air floats high and free,
Takes the sun and breaks the blue;-
Late with stooping pinion flew
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet
Her wing in silver streams, and set
Shining foot on temple roof:
Now again she flies aloof,
Coasting mountain clouds and kist
By the evening's amethyst.
In wet wood and miry lane,
Still we pant and pound in vain;
Still with leaden foot we chase
Waning pinion, fainting face;
## p. 13941 (#127) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13941
Still with gray hair we stumble on,
Till, behold, the vision gone!
Where hath fleeting beauty led ?
To the doorway of the dead.
Life is over, life was gay:
We have come the primrose way.
(THE TROPICS VANISH »
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
T.
He tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,
New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.
There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-incrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence. Continents
And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain. The voice of generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And all mutation over, stretch me down
In that denoted city of the dead.
ΑΡΕΜΑΜΑ.
## p. 13942 (#128) ##########################################
13942
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TROPIC RAIN
From Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
S THE single pang of the blow, when the metal is mingled well,
Rings and lives and resounds in all the bounds of the bell:
So the thunder above spoke with a single tongue,
So in the heart of the mountain the sound of it rumbled and clung.
A
Sudden the thunder was drowned — quenched was the levin light-
And the angel spirit of rain laughed out loud in the night.
Loud as the maddened river raves in the cloven glen,
Angel of rain! you laughed and leaped on the roofs of men;
And the sleepers sprang in their beds, and joyed and feared as you
fell.
You struck, and my cabin quailed; the roof of it roared like a bell.
You spoke, and at once the mountain shouted and shook with brooks.
You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.
VAILIMA.
CHRISTMAS AT SEA
From (Poems and Ballads. By permission of the authorized publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons
T"
а
seaman
He sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where
scarce could
stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.
They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.
All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the
North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
## p. 13943 (#129) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13943
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.
We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So 's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coast-guard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.
The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'longshore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.
The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coast-guard's was the house where I was
born.
Oh! well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.
And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And oh the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.
They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
"All hands to loose topgallant sails,” I heard the captain call.
"By the Lord, she'll never stand it,” our first mate, Jackson, cried. -
"It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,” he replied.
She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.
And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.
## p. 13944 (#130) ##########################################
13944
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
A FABLE
From "The Lantern-Bearers)
T"?
HERE is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:
the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard
a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and
found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates; for
he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there
survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods
that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there.
A11 life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two
strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just
this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so
incommunicable; and just a knowledge of this, and a remem-
brance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to
us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of
the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far
as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap
fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which
we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-
devouring nightingale we hear no news.
STRIVING AND FAILING
From A Christmas Sermon)
He goes
L"
IFE is not designed to minister to a man's vanity.
upon his long business most of the time with a hanging
head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards
and pleasures as it is, — so that to see the day break, or the
moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner call when
he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys, - this world is yet
for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails,
weariness assails him; year after year he must thumb the hardly
varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly
process of detachment.
When the time comes that he should
go, there need be few illusions left about himself. « Here lies
one who meant well, tried a little, failed much,” — surely that may
be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
## p. 13945 (#131) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13945
1
WE PASS THE FORTH
From Kidnapped. By permission of the authorized publishers, Charles
Scribner's Sons
T"
he month, as I have said, was not yet out, but it was already
far through August, and beautiful warm weather, with every
sign of an early and great harvest, when I was pronounced
able for my journey. Our money was now run to so low an
ebb that we must think first of all on speed; for if we came not
soon to Mr. Rankeillor's, or if when we came there he should fail
to help me, we must surely starve. In Alan's view, besides, the
hunt must have now greatly slackened; and the line of the Forth,
and even Stirling Bridge which is the main pass over that river,
would be watched with little interest.
“It's a chief principle in military affairs,” said he, “to go
where ye are least expected. Forth is our trouble; ye ken the
saying, 'Forth bridles the wild Hielandman. Well, if we seek
to creep round about the head of that river and come down
by Kippen or Balfron, it's just precisely there that they'll be
looking to lay hands on us. But if we stave on straight to the
auld Brig' of Stirling, I'll lay my sword they let us pass unchal-
lenged. ”
The first night, accordingly, we pushed to the house of a
Maclaren in Strathire, a friend of Duncan's, where we slept the
twenty-first of the month, and whence we set forth again about
the fall of night to make another easy stage. The twenty-second
we lay in a heather-bush on a hillside in Uam Var, within view
of a herd of deer,- the happiest ten hours of sleep in a fine,
breathing sunshine, and on bone-dry ground, that I have ever
tasted. That night we struck Allan Water, and followed it down;
and coming to the edge of the hills saw the whole Carse of
Stirling underfoot, as flat as a pancake, with the town and castle
on a hill in the midst of it, and the moon shining n the Links
of Forth.
"Now,” said Alan, “I kenna if ye care, but ye're in your own
land again. We passed the Hieland Line in the first hour; and
now if we could but pass yon crooked water, we might cast our
bonnets in the air. ”
In Allan Water, near by where it falls into the Forth, we
found a little sandy islet, overgrown with burdock, butterbur, and
the like low plants, that would just cover us if we lay flat. Here
-
»
## p. 13946 (#132) ##########################################
13946
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
it was we made our camp, within plain view of Stirling Castle;
whence we could hear the drums beat as some part of the gar-
rison paraded. Shearers worked all day in a field on one side
of the river; and we could hear the stones going on the hooks,
and the voices and even the words of the men talking. It be-
hoved to lie close and keep silent. But the sand of the little
isle was sun-warm, the green plants gave us shelter for our
heads, we had food and drink in plenty; and to crown all, we
were within sight of safety.
As soon as the shearers quit their work and the dusk began
to fall, we waded ashore and struck for the Bridge of Stirling,
keeping to the fields and under the field fences.
The bridge is close under the castle hill; an old, high, narrow
bridge with pinnacles along the parapet: and you may conceive
with how much interest I looked upon it, not only as a place
famous in history, but as the very doors of salvation to Alan and
myself. The moon was not yet up when we came there; a few
lights shone along the front of the fortress, and lower down a
few lighted windows in the town; but it was all mighty still, and
there seemed to be no guard upon the passage,
I was for pushing straight across; but Alan was more wary.
" It looks unco' quiet,” said he; but for all that, we'll lie
down here cannily behind a dike and make sure. ”
So we lay for about a quarter of an hour, whiles whispering,
whiles lying still and hearing nothing earthly but the washing of
the water on the piers. At last there came by an old, hobbling
woman with a crutch stick: who first stopped a little, close to
where we lay, and bemoaned herself and the long way she had
traveled; and then set forth again up the steep spring of the
bridge. The woman was so little, and the night still so dark,
that we soon lost sight of her; only heard the sound of her steps,
and her stick, and a cough that she had by fits, draw slowly
further away.
« She's bound to be across now, I whispered.
“Na,” said Alan, her foot still sounds boss * upon the bridge. ”
“
. ”
And just then - «Who goes ? » cried a voice, and we heard
the butt of a musket rattle on the stones. I must suppose the
sentry had been sleeping, so that had we tried we might have
passed unseen; but he was awake now, and the chance forfeited.
(
(C
* Hollow: pronounced bose.
## p. 13947 (#133) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13947
»
“This'll never do,” said Alan. “This'll never, never do for
us, David. ”
And without another word he began to crawl away through
the fields; and a little after, being well out of eye-shot, got to
his feet again, and struck along a road that led to the eastward.
I could not conceive what he was doing; and indeed I was so
sharply cut by the disappointment, that I was little likely to be
pleased with anything. A moment back, and I had seen myself
knocking at Mr. Rankeillor's door to claim my inheritance, like
a hero in a ballad; and here was I back again, a wandering,
hunted blackguard, on the wrong side of Forth.
« Well ? » said I.
“Well,” said Alan, “what would ye have? They're none such
fools as I took them for. We have still the Forth to pass, Davie
- weary fall the rains that fed and the hillsides that guided it! ”
"And why go east ? ” said I.
Ou, just upon the chance! ” said he. “If we cannae pass
the river, we'll have to see what we can do for the firth. ”
« There are fords upon the river, and none upon the firth,”
said I.
“To be sure there are fords, and a bridge forbye,) quoth
Alan; "and of what service, when they are watched ? »
“Well,” said I, “but a river can be swum. ”
"By them that have the skill of it,” returned he: “but I have
yet to hear that either you or me is much of a hand at that
exercise; and for my own part, I swim like a stone. ”
"I'm not up to you in talking back, Alan," I said; but I
can see we're making bad worse. If it's hard to pass a river, it
stands to reason it must be worse to pass a sea. ”
"But there's such a thing as a boat,” says Alan, “or I'm the
more deceived. ”
“Ay, and such a thing as money,” says I.
< But for us that
have neither one nor other, they might just as well not have
been invented. ”
« Ye think so ? said Alan.
“I do that,” said I.
" David,” says he, "ye're a man of small invention and less
faith. But let me set my wits upon the hone, and if I cannae
beg, borrow, nor yet steal a boat, I'll make one! ”
"I think I see ye! ” said I. "And what's more than all that:
if ye pass a bridge, it can tell no tales; but if we pass the firth,
(
(
»
C
(
(
## p. 13948 (#134) ##########################################
13948
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
there's the boat on the wrong side - somebody must have brought
it — the countryside will all be in a bizz
Man ! » cried Alan, “if I make a boat, I'll make a body to
take it back again! So deave me with no more of your non-
sense, but walk (for that's what you've got to do) — and let Alan
think for ye.
All night, then, we walked through the north side of the Carse
under the high line of the Ochil mountains; and by Alloa and
Clackmannan and Culross, all of which we avoided: and about
ten in the morning, mighty hungry and tired, came to the little
clachan of Limekilns. This is a place that sits near in by the
water-side, and looks across the Hope to the town of the Queens-
ferry. Smoke went up from both of these, and from other vil-
lages and farms upon all hands. The fields were being reaped;
two ships lay anchored, and boats were coming and going on the
Hope. It was altogether a right pleasant sight to me; and I
could not take my fill of gazing at these comfortable, green, cul- .
tivated hills, and the busy people both of the field and sea.
For all that, there was Mr. Rankeillor's house on the south
shore, where I had no doubt wealth awaited me; and here was
I upon the north, clad in poor enough attire of an outlandish
fashion, with three silver shillings left to me of all my fortune,
a price set upon my head, and an outlawed man for my sole
company
“O Alan! ” said I, “to think of it! Over there, there's all
that heart could want waiting me; and the birds go over, and
the boats go over - all that please can go, but just me only! 0
man, but it's a heart-break! »
In Limekilns we entered a small change-house, which we only
knew to be a public by the wand over the door, and bought
some bread and cheese from a good-looking lass that was the
servant. This we carried with us in a bundle, meaning to sit
and eat it in a bush of wood on the sea-shore, that we saw some
third part of a mile in front. As we went, I kept looking across
the water and sighing to myself; and though I took no heed
of it, Alan had fallen into a muse. At last he stopped in the
way.
“Did ye take heed of the lass we bought this of? ” says he,
tapping on the bread and cheese.
“To be sure," said I, "and a bonny lass she was. ”
“Ye thought that ? ” cries he. “Man David, that's good news. ”
(
»
## p. 13949 (#135) ##########################################
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
13949
ye,
“In the name of all that's wonderful, why so ? ” says I. . “What
good can that do ? »
"Well,” said Alan, with one of his droll looks, "I was rather
in hopes it would maybe get us that boat. ”
"If it were the other way about, it would be liker it,” said I.
“That's all that you ken, ye see,” said Alan. “I don't want
the lass to fall in love with ye, I want her to be sorry for
David; to which end, there is no manner of need that she should
take you for a beauty. Let me see” (looking me curiously over).
"I wish ye were a wee thing paler; but apart from that ye'll do
fine for my purpose - ye have a fine, hang-dog, rag-and-tatter,
clappermaclaw kind of a look to ye, as if ye had stolen the coat
from a potato-bogle. Come: right about, and back to the change-
house for that boat of ours. ”
I followed him laughing.
« David Balfour,” said he, "ye're a very funny gentleman by
your way of it, and this is a very funny employ for ye, no doubt.
For all that, if ye have any affection for my neck (to say noth-
ing of your own), ye will perhaps be kind enough to take this
matter responsibly. I am going to do a bit of play-acting, the
bottom ground of which is just exactly as serious as the gallows
for the pair of us. So bear it, if ye please, in mind, and conduct
yourself according. ”
« Well, well,” said I, have it as you will. ”
As we got near the clachan, he made me take his arm and
hang upon it like one almost helpless with weariness; and by
the time he pushed open the change-house door, he seemed to
be half carrying me. The maid appeared surprised (as well she
might be) at our speedy return: but Alan had no words to spare
for her in explanation, helped me to a chair, called for a tass of
brandy with which he fed me in little sips, and then breaking
up the bread and cheese helped me to eat it like a nursery-lass;
the whole with that grave, concerned, affectionate countenance,
that might have imposed upon a judge.
