" So leaping off his back, and kicking
off one boot into this ditch and t’other into that I'll take a
dance,” said I, "so stay you here.
off one boot into this ditch and t’other into that I'll take a
dance,” said I, "so stay you here.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v24 - Sta to Tal
No.
I AM
so impatient to return to my own story that what
remains of young Le Fevre's — that is, from this turn of his
fortune to the time my Uncle Toby recommended him for my
preceptor — shall be told in a very few words in the next chapter.
All that is necessary to be added to this chapter is as follows:--
That my Uncle Toby, with young Le Fevre in his hand,
attended the poor lieutenant as chief mourners to his grave.
THE START
From A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy)
(
'THEY
"
(
HEY order,” said I, “this matter better in France - »
“You have been in France ? ” said my gentleman, turn-
ing quick upon me, with the most civil triumph in the
world.
« Strange ! » quoth I, debating the matter with myself, “that
one-and-twenty miles' sailing (for 'tis absolutely no further from
Dover to Calais) should give a man these rights — I'll look into
them: so, giving up the argument, I went straight to my
lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk
-
1
1
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LAURENCE STERNE
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breeches — “the coat I have on,” said I, looking at the sleeve,
“will do ” — took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet sail-
ing at nine the next morning, by three I had got sat down to
my dinner upon a fricasseed chicken, so incontestably in France
that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world
could not have suspended the effects of the droits d'aubaine:
my shirts, and black pair of silk breeches, portmanteau, and all,
must have gone to the King of France; even the little picture
which I have so long worn, and so often have told thee, Eliza,
I would carry with me to my grave, would have been torn from
my neck. –Ungenerous! — to seize upon the wreck of an unwary
passenger, whom your subjects had beckoned to their coast! -
by heaven! sire, it is not well done; and much does it grieve
me, 'tis the monarch of a people so civilized and courteous, and
so renowned for sentiment and fine feelings, that I have to rea-
son with
But I have scarce set foot in your dominions,
-
(
When I had finished my dinner, and drank the King of
France's health, to satisfy my mind that I bore him no spleen,
but on the contrary, high honor for the humanity of his temper,
I rose up an inch taller for the accommodation.
– “No," said I, “the Bourbon is by no means a cruel race:
they may be misled, like other people, but there is a mildness
in their blood. ” As I acknowledged this, I felt a suffusion of a
finer kind upon my cheek, more warm and friendly to man than
what burgundy (at least of two livres a bottle, which was such
as I had been drinking) could have produced.
-"Just God! ” said I, kicking my portmanteau aside, “what
is there in this world's goods which should sharpen our spirits.
and make so many kind-hearted brethren of us fall out so cruelly
as we do by the way?
When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a
feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand! He pulls out his
purse, and holding it airily and uncompressed, looks round him
as if he sought for an object to share it with. In doing this, I
felt every vessel in my frame dilate — the arteries beat all . cheer-
ily together - and every power which sustained life performed
it with so little friction that 'twould have confounded the most
physical précieuse in France: with all her materialism, she could
scarce have called me a machine-
## p. 13914 (#100) ##########################################
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LAURENCE STERNE
"I'm confident," said I to myself, “I should have overset her
creed. ”
The accession of that idea carried Nature, at that time, as
high as she could go. — I was at peace with the world before,
and this finished the treaty with myself -
“Now, was I a King of France, cried I, what a moment
for an orphan to have begged his father's portmanteau of me! ”
((
1
THE MONK
1
1
From (A Sentimental Journey)
HAD scarce uttered the words, when a poor monk of the order
I to
convent.
The moment I cast my eyes upon him, I was predeter-
mined not to give him a single sous; and accordingly I put
up my purse into my pocket, buttoned it up, set myself a little
more upon my centre, and advanced up gravely to him; there
was something, I fear, forbidding in my look: I have his figure
this moment before my eyes, and think there was that in it
which deserved better.
The monk, as I judged from the break in his tonsure (a few
scattered white hairs upon his temples being all that remained
of it), might be about seventy; but from his eyes, and that sort
of fire which was in them, which seemed more tempered by
courtesy than years, could be no more than sixty;— truth might
lie between; — he was certainly sixty-five; and the general air
of his countenance, notwithstanding something seemed to have
been planting wrinkles in it before their time, agreed to the
account.
It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted, -
mild, pale, penetrating,- free from all commonplace ideas of fat
–
contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth, -it
looked forwards; but looked as if it looked at something beyond
this world. How one of his order came by it, Heaven above,
who let it fall upon a monk's shoulders, best knows; but it would
have suited a Brahmin; and had I met it upon the plains of Hin-
dostan, I had reverenced it.
The rest of his outline may be given in a few strokes; one
might put it into the hands of any one to design, for 'twas
## p. 13915 (#101) ##########################################
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neither elegant nor otherwise, but as character and expression
made it so: it was a thin, spare form, something above the com-
mon size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forward in the
figure — but it was the attitude of entreaty; and as it now stands
presented to my imagination, it gained more than it lost by it.
When he had entered the room three paces, he stood still;
and laying his left hand upon his breast (a slender white staff
with which he journeyed being in his right), when I had got
close up to him he introduced himself with the little story of the
wants of his convent, and the poverty of his order; and did it
with so simple a grace, and such an air of deprecation was there
in the whole cast of his look and figure, I was bewitched not to
have been struck with it. "
A better reason was, I had predetermined not to give him a
single sous.
>>
“'Tis very true," said I, replying to a cast upwards with his
eyes, with which he had concluded his address — "'tis very true
and Heaven be their resource who have no other but the char.
ity of the world; the stock of which, I fear, is no way sufficient
for the many great claims which are hourly made upon it. ”
As I pronounced the words "great claims,” he gave a slight
glance with his eye downward upon the sleeve of his tunic. - I
felt the full force of the appeal. — “I acknowledge it,” said I; "a
coarse habit, and that but once in three years, with meagre diet,
are no great matters: and the true point of pity is, as they can
be earned in the world with so little industry, that your order
should wish to procure them by pressing upon a fund which
is the property of the lame, the blind, the aged, and the infirm;
the captive who lies down counting over and over again the
days of his afflictions, languishes also for his share of it;-and
had you been of the order of mercy instead of the order of St.
Francis, poor as I am,” continued I, pointing to my portmanteau,
“full cheerfully should it have been opened to you for the ran-
som of the unfortunate. ” — The monk made me a bow. But
of all others,” resumed I, “the unfortunate of our own country
surely have the first rights; and I have left thousands in dis-
tress upon our own shore. ” — The monk gave a cordial wave with
his head, as much as to say, "No doubt there is misery enough
in every corner of the world, as well as within our convent. ”.
But we distinguish,” said I, laying my hand upon the sleeve
of his tunic, in return for his appeal, — “we distinguish, my good
(
>
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father, betwixt those who wish only to eat the bread of their own
labors, and those who eat the bread of other people's, and have
no other plan in life but to get through it in sloth and ignorance
for the love of God. ”
The poor Franciscan made no reply:- a hectic of a moment
passed across his cheek, but could not tarry;— Nature seemed to
have had done with her resentments in him:— he showed none;
but letting his staff fall within his arm, he pressed both his
hands with resignation upon his breast, and retired.
My heart smote me the moment he shut the door. — “Pshaw! ”
said I, with an 'air of carelessness, three several times,– but it
would not do; every ungracious syllable I had uttered crowded
back into my imagination. I reflected, I had no right over the
poor Franciscan but to deny him; and that the punishment of
that was enough to the disappointed without the addition of
unkind language. - I considered his gray hairs; his courteous
figure seemed to re-enter, and gently ask me what injury he had
done me, and why I could use him thus: I would have given
twenty livres for an advocate. - "I have behaved very ill,” said I
within myself; “but I have only just set out upon my travels,
and shall learn better manners as I get along. ”
I feel a damp upon my spirits, as I am going to add that in
my last return through Calais, upon inquiring after Father Lo-
renzo, I heard that he had been dead near three months; and was
buried, not in his convent, but according to his desire, in a little
cemetery belonging to it, about two leagues off.
I had a strong
desire to see where they had laid him— when, upon pulling out
his little horn box, as I sat by his grave, and plucking up a
nettle or two at the head of it, which had no business to grow
there, they all struck together so forcibly upon my affections,
that I burst into a flood of tears: but I am as weak as a woman;
and I beg the world not to smile, but pity me.
C
THE DEAD ASS
From "A Sentimental Journey)
>
((
“AND
(
ND this,” said he, putting the remains of a crust into his
wallet, and this should have been thy portion, said
he, "hadst thou been alive to have shared it with me. ” I Ι
thought, by the accent, it had been an apostrophe to his child;
but 'twas to his ass, and to the very ass we had seen dead in
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the road, which had occasioned La Fleur's misadventure. The
man seemed to lament it much: and it instantly brought into
my mind Sancho's lamentation for his; but he did it with more
true touches of nature.
The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door,
with the ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took
up from time to time — then laid them down — looked at them,
and shook his head. He then took his crust of bread out of his
wallet again, as if to eat it; held it some time in his hand; then
laid it upon the bit of his ass's bridle, looked wistfully at the
little arrangement he had made, and then gave a sigh.
The simplicity of his grief drew numbers about him, and La
Fleur amongst the rest, whilst the horses were getting ready: as
I continued sitting in the post-chaise, I could see and hear over
their heads.
He said he had come last from Spain, where he had been
from the furthest borders of Franconia; and had got so far on
his return home, when his ass died. Every one seemed desirous
to know what business could have taken so old and poor a man
so far a journey from his own home.
It had pleased Heaven, he said, to bless him with three sons,
the finest lads in all Germany; but having in one week lost two
of the eldest of them by the small-pox, and the youngest falling
ill of the same distemper, he was afraid of being bereft of them
all; and made a vow, if Heaven would not take him from him
also, he would go in gratitude to St. Iago in Spain.
When the mourner got thus far on his story, he stopped to
pay nature his tribute, and wept bitterly.
He said Heaven had accepted the conditions; and that he had
set out from his cottage with this poor creature, which had been
a patient partner of his journey; that it had ate the same bread
with him all the way, and was unto him as a friend.
Everybody who stood about heard the poor fellow with con-
cern. La Fleur offered him money. The mourner said he did
not want it: it was not the value of the ass, but the loss of him.
The ass, he said, he was assured, loved him: and upon this, told
them a long story of a mischance upon their passage over the
Pyrenean mountains, which had separated them from each other
three days; during which time the ass had sought him as much
as he had sought the ass, and that they had scarce either ate or
drank till they met.
## p. 13918 (#104) ##########################################
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LAURENCE STERNE
>
!
“Thou hast one comfort, friend,” said I, at least, in the loss
of thy poor beast: I'm sure thou hast been a merciful master to
him. ” — “Alas! ” said the mourner, “I thought so when he was
alive: but now that he is dead, I think otherwise; I fear that
the weight of myself and my afflictions together have been too
much for him,- they have shortened the poor creature's days,
and I fear I have them to answer for. ” — “Shame on the world! »
said I to myself. « Did we but love each other as this poor
soul loved his ass - 'twould be something. "
THE PULSE
PARIS
From A Sentimental Journey)
H
Ail, ye small sweet courtesies of life! for smooth do ye make
the road of it; like grace and beauty, which beget inclina-
tions to love at first sight: 'tis ye who open this door, and
let the stranger in.
-"Pray, madam,” said I, have the goodness to tell me which
-
way I must turn to go to the Opéra Comique ? ”
“Most willingly, monsieur,” said she, laying aside her work.
I had given a cast with my eye into half a dozen shops as
I came along, in search of a face not likely to be disordered
by such an interruption; till at last, this hitting my fancy, I had
walked in.
She was working a pair of ruffles as she sat in a low chair
on the far side of the shop, facing the door.
“Très volontiers — most willingly,” said she, laying her work
down upon a chair next her, and rising up from the low chair
she was sitting in, with so cheerful a movement and so cheerful
a look that had I been laying out fifty louis d'ors with her, I
should have said, “That woman is grateful. ”
“You must turn, monsieur,” said she, going with me to the
door of the shop, and pointing the way down the street I was
to take — "you must turn first to your right hand, - mais prenez
garde, there are two turns, and be so good as to take the second,
then go down a little way, and you'll see a church; and when
you are past it, give yourself the trouble to turn directly to the
right, and that will lead you to the foot of the Pont-Neuf, which
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you must cross, and there any one will do himself the pleasure
to show you. "
She repeated her instructions three times over to me, with the
same good-natured patience the third time as the first; and if
tones and manners have a meaning,— which certainly they have,
unless to hearts which shut them out, — she seemed really inter-
ested that I should not lose myself.
I will not suppose it was the woman's beauty (notwithstand-
ing she was the handsomest grisette, I think, I ever saw) which
had much to do with the sense I had of her courtesy; only I
remember when I told her how much I was obliged to her, that
I looked very full in her eyes, and that I repeated my thanks as
often as she had done her instructions.
I had not got ten paces from the door, before I found I had
forgot every tittle of what she had said; so looking back, and
seeing her still standing in the door of the shop, as if to look
whether I went right or not, I returned back to ask her whether
the first turn was to my right or left, for that I had absolutely
forgot.
"It is impossible! ” said she, half laughing.
«O'Tis very possible,” replied I, “when a man is thinking
more of a woman than of her good advice. ”
As this was the real truth, she took it, as every woman takes
a matter of right, with a slight courtesy.
- "Attendez ! ” said she, laying her hand' upon my arm to
detain me, whilst she called a lad out of the back shop to get
ready a parcel of gloves. "I am just going to send him," said
she, with a packet into that quarter; and if you will have the
complaisance to step in, it will be ready in a moment, and he
shall attend you to the place. ”
So I walked in with her to the far side of the shop; and tak-
ing up the ruffle in my hand which she laid upon the chair, as
if I had a mind to sit, she sat down herself in her low chair, and
I instantly sat myself down beside her.
-"He will be ready, monsieur,” said she, “in a moment. ”
"And in that moment,” replied I, “most willingly would I say
something very civil to you for all these courtesies. Any one
may do a casual act of good-nature, but a continuation of them
shows it is a part of the temperature; and certainly,” added
I, “if it is the same blood which comes from the heart which
>
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>
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## p. 13920 (#106) ##########################################
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LAURENCE STERNE
»
>>
(
)
descends to the extremes” (touching her wrist), "I am sure you
must have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world. ”
“Feel it,” said she, holding out her arm.
So laying down my hat, I took hold of her fingers in one
hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery.
Would to Heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed
by and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lackadai-
sical manner counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much
true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebbor
flow of her fever: how wouldst thou have laughed and moralized
upon my new profession! - and thou shouldst have laughed and
moralized on. Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said,
« There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's
pulse. “But a grisette's! thou wouldst have said; "and in an
open shop! Yorick » –
“So much the better: for when my views are direct, Eu-
genius, I care not if all the world saw me feel it. ”
I had counted twenty pulsations, and was going on fast to-
wards the fortieth, when her husband, coming unexpected from a
back parlor into the shop, put me a little out of my reckoning.
« 'Twas nobody but her husband,” she said; — so I began a fresh
score.
Monsieur is so good,” quoth she as he passed by us, "as to
give himself the trouble of feeling my pulse. ”
The husband took off his hat, and making me a bow, said I
did him too much honor; and having said that, he put on his
hat and walked out.
«Good God! ” said I to myself as he went out, “and can this
man be the husband of this woman ? »
Let it not torment the few who know what must have been
the grounds of this exclamation, if I explain it to those who do
not.
In London, a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper's wife seem to be
one bone and one flesh: in the several endowments of mind and
body, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, has it, so as in
general to be upon a par, and to tally with each other as nearly
as man and wife need to do.
In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different:
for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting
in the husband, he seldom comes there; in some dark and dismai
»
.
## p. 13921 (#107) ##########################################
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room behind, he sits commerceless in his thrum nightcap, the
same rough son of Nature that Nature left him.
The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is
salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally
to the women,— by a continual higgling with customers of all
ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough peb-
bles shook along together in a bag, by amicable collisions they
have worn down their asperities and sharp angles, and not only
become round and smooth, but will receive, some of them, a
polish like a brilliant;— Monsieur le Mari is little better than
the stone under your foot.
- Surely, surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone;
thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings; and
this improvement of our natures from it I appeal to as my evi-
dence.
"And how does it beat, monsieur ? ” said she.
«With all the benignity,” said I, looking quietly in her eyes,
« that I expected. ”
She was going to say something civil in return, but the lad
came into the shop with the gloves.
«Apropos,” said I, “I want a couple of pairs myself. ”
»
THE STARLING
From (A Sentimental Journey)
I
WAS interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice
which I took to be that of a child, which complained it could
not get out. I looked up and down the passage, and seeing
neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further atten-
tion.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same
words repeated twice over, and looking up, I saw it was a star-
ling hung in a little cage. "I can't get out! I can't get out! ”
said the starling.
I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came
through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which
they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity.
"I can't get out! ” said the starling.
“God help thee! ” said I, “but I'll help thee out, cost what it
will;" so I turned about the cage to get to the door; - it was
XXIV–871
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## p. 13922 (#108) ##########################################
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>
(
(
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twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no get-
ting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both
hands to it.
The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliv-
erance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his
breast against it as if impatient.
"I fear, poor creature,” said I, "I cannot set thee at liberty. ”
"No," said the starling; "I can't get out! I can't get out! ”
said the starling.
I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened;
nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated
spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly
called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune
to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew
all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily
walked up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down
them.
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery,” said I, - still
thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have
been made to drink thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.
'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess," addressing myself
to Liberty, “whom all in public or in private worship; whose
taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall
change. No tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chemic
power turn thy sceptre into iron; with thee to smile upon him
as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch
from whose court thou art exiled. Gracious Heaven! » cried I,
kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, “grant
me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give me but this
fair goddess as my companion; and shower down thy mitres, if
it seems good unto thy Divine providence, upon those heads
which are aching for them. ”
The bird in his cage pursued me into my room. I sat down
close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began
to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right
frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my imagination.
I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures
born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting
the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that
the multitudes of sad groups in it did but distract me,- I took a
single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I
1
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I
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## p. 13923 (#109) ##########################################
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13923
then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his
picture.
I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and
confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of heart it is which
arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer, I saw him pale
and feverish: in thirty years, the western breeze had not once
fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time,
nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his
lattice! — his children
But here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on
with another part of the portrait.
He was sitting upon the ground, upon a little straw in the
furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair
and bed: a little calendar of small sticks was laid at the head,
notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed
there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a
rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the
heap.
As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless
eye towards the door; then cast it down, shook his head, and went
on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs,
as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle.
He gave a deep sigh. — I saw the iron enter into his soul!
- I burst into tears. — I could not sustain the picture of con-
finement which my fancy had drawn. I started up from my
chair, and calling La Fleur, I bid him bespeak me a remise, and
have it ready at the door of the hotel by nine in the morning.
“I'll go directly,” said I to myself, «to Monsieur le Duc le
Choiseul. ”
La Fleur would have put me to bed; but not willing he should
see anything upon my cheek which would cost the honest fellow
a heartache, I told him I would go to bed myself, and bid him
do the same.
I got into my remise the hour I proposed; La Fleur got up
behind, and I bid the coachman make the best of his way to
Versailles.
As there was nothing in this road, or rather nothing which I
look for in traveling, I cannot fill up the blank better than with
a short history of this selfsame bird, which became the subject
of the last chapter.
## p. 13924 (#110) ##########################################
13924
LAURENCE STERNE
.
Whilst the Honorable Mr. was waiting for a wind at
Dover, it had been caught upon the cliffs, before it could well
fly, by an English lad who was his groom: who not caring to
destroy it, had taken it in his breast into the packet; and by
course of feeding it, and taking it once under his protection, in a
day or two grew fond of it, and got it safe along with him to
Paris.
At Paris, the lad had laid out a livre in a little cage for the
starling; and as he had little to do better, the five months his
master stayed there, he taught it in his mother's tongue the four
simple words and no more) to which I owed myself so much its
debtor.
Upon his master's going on for Italy the lad had given it to
the master of the hotel.
But his little song for liberty being in an unknown language
at Paris, the bird had little or no store set by him; so La Fleur
bought him and his cage for me for a bottle of burgundy.
In my return from Italy, I brought him with me to the coun-
try in whose language he had learned his notes; and telling the
story of him to Lord A, Lord A begged the bird of me; in a
week Lord A gave him to Lord B; Lord B made a present of
him to Lord C; and Lord C's gentleman sold him to Lord D's
for a shilling; Lord D gave him to Lord E; and so on - half
-
round the alphabet. From that rank he passed into the lower
house, and passed the hands of as many commoners. But as all
these wanted to get in, and my bird wanted to get out, he had
almost as little store set by him in London as at Paris.
It is impossible but many of my readers must have heard of
him; and if any by mere chance have ever seen him, I beg leave
to inform them that that bird was my bird, or some vile copy
set up to represent him.
I have nothing farther to add upon him, but that from that
time to this I have borne this poor starling as the crest to my
And let the herald's officers twist his neck about if they
dare.
arms:
1
## p. 13925 (#111) ##########################################
LAURENCE STERNE
13925
IN LANGUEDOC: AN IDYL
From A Sentimental Journey)
T".
»
>
-
WAS in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is
the best Muscatto wine in all France - and which, by-the-
by, belongs to the honest canons of Montpellier; and foul
befall the man who has drank it at their table, who grudges
them a drop of it.
The sun was set — they had done their work; the nymphs had
tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a
carousal. My mule made a dead point. - «'Tis the fife and
tambourin,” said I. — “ I'm frightened to death,” quoth he. -
“They are running at the ring of pleasure," said I, giving him a
prick. — "By St. Boogar, and all the saints at the back-side of the
door of purgatory,” said he (making the same resolution with the
Abbess of Andouillets), “I'll not go a step further. ” — « 'Tis very
well, sir,” said I: “I will never argue a point with one of your
family as long as I live.
" So leaping off his back, and kicking
off one boot into this ditch and t’other into that I'll take a
dance,” said I, "so stay you here. ”
A sunburnt daughter of labor rose up from the group to
meet me, as I advanced towards them; her hair - which was
a dark chestnut, approaching rather to a black — was tied up in a
knot, all but a single tress.
“We want a cavalier,” said she, holding out both her hands
as if to offer them. — “And a cavalier ye shall have,” said I,
taking hold of both of them.
“ Hadst thou, Nannette, been arrayed like a duchess! But
that cursed slit in thy petticoat! ”
Nannette cared not for it.
« We could not have done without you,” said she, letting go
one hand, with self-taught politeness, leading me up with the
other.
A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe,
and to which he had added a tambourin of his own accord, ran
sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank. - "Tie me up
this tress instantly,” said Nannette, putting a piece of string into
my hand. It taught me to forget I was a stranger. — The whole
knot fell down. We had been seven years acquainted.
.
(
## p. 13926 (#112) ##########################################
13926
LAURENCE STERNE
The youth struck the note upon the tambourin, his pipe fol-
lowed, and off we bounded. — «The deuce take that slit! ”
The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven
sung alternately with her brother, 'twas a Gascoigne roundelay -
Viva la joia!
Fidon la tristessa!
The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below
them.
I would have given a crown to have it sewed up: Nannette
would not have given a sous; l'iva la joia! was in her lips —
Viva la joia! was in her eyes. A transient spark of amity shot
across the space betwixt us. She looked amiable. Why could I
not live and end my days thus ? "Just Disposer of our joys and
sorrows,” cried I, “why could not a man sit down in the lap of
content here, and dance and sing, and say his prayers, and go to
heaven with this nut-brown maid ? Capriciously did she bend
her head on one side, and dance up insidious. ( Then 'tis time
to dance off," quoth I.
## p. 13927 (#113) ##########################################
13927
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(1850-1894)
BY ROBERT BRIDGES
N his illuminating essay "The Lantern-Bearers,' which in a
very few pages seems to bear the secret of Robert Louis
Stevenson's life and art, he puts the kernel of it in the sen-
tence: «No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids;
but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the
painted windows and the storied walls. ” If he was the most loved
writer of his generation, it was because he
freely gave his readers access to this warm
phantasmagoric chamber. His
« winning
personality” is the phrase which his admir-
ers use oftenest to express his charm. One
of the most acute of these, Mr. Henry James,
has still further defined this charm as the
perpetual boy in him. He never outgrew
the boy's delight in make-believe. ” He
tells how the cardboard scenery and plays
of Skelt, "A Penny Plain, 2d. Colored,” which
fascinated him as a boy, had given him the
very spirit of my life's enjoyment. ” Boy
and man, all that he needed for delight was R. 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.
I AM
so impatient to return to my own story that what
remains of young Le Fevre's — that is, from this turn of his
fortune to the time my Uncle Toby recommended him for my
preceptor — shall be told in a very few words in the next chapter.
All that is necessary to be added to this chapter is as follows:--
That my Uncle Toby, with young Le Fevre in his hand,
attended the poor lieutenant as chief mourners to his grave.
THE START
From A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy)
(
'THEY
"
(
HEY order,” said I, “this matter better in France - »
“You have been in France ? ” said my gentleman, turn-
ing quick upon me, with the most civil triumph in the
world.
« Strange ! » quoth I, debating the matter with myself, “that
one-and-twenty miles' sailing (for 'tis absolutely no further from
Dover to Calais) should give a man these rights — I'll look into
them: so, giving up the argument, I went straight to my
lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk
-
1
1
## p. 13913 (#99) ###########################################
LAURENCE STERNE
13913
breeches — “the coat I have on,” said I, looking at the sleeve,
“will do ” — took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet sail-
ing at nine the next morning, by three I had got sat down to
my dinner upon a fricasseed chicken, so incontestably in France
that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world
could not have suspended the effects of the droits d'aubaine:
my shirts, and black pair of silk breeches, portmanteau, and all,
must have gone to the King of France; even the little picture
which I have so long worn, and so often have told thee, Eliza,
I would carry with me to my grave, would have been torn from
my neck. –Ungenerous! — to seize upon the wreck of an unwary
passenger, whom your subjects had beckoned to their coast! -
by heaven! sire, it is not well done; and much does it grieve
me, 'tis the monarch of a people so civilized and courteous, and
so renowned for sentiment and fine feelings, that I have to rea-
son with
But I have scarce set foot in your dominions,
-
(
When I had finished my dinner, and drank the King of
France's health, to satisfy my mind that I bore him no spleen,
but on the contrary, high honor for the humanity of his temper,
I rose up an inch taller for the accommodation.
– “No," said I, “the Bourbon is by no means a cruel race:
they may be misled, like other people, but there is a mildness
in their blood. ” As I acknowledged this, I felt a suffusion of a
finer kind upon my cheek, more warm and friendly to man than
what burgundy (at least of two livres a bottle, which was such
as I had been drinking) could have produced.
-"Just God! ” said I, kicking my portmanteau aside, “what
is there in this world's goods which should sharpen our spirits.
and make so many kind-hearted brethren of us fall out so cruelly
as we do by the way?
When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a
feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand! He pulls out his
purse, and holding it airily and uncompressed, looks round him
as if he sought for an object to share it with. In doing this, I
felt every vessel in my frame dilate — the arteries beat all . cheer-
ily together - and every power which sustained life performed
it with so little friction that 'twould have confounded the most
physical précieuse in France: with all her materialism, she could
scarce have called me a machine-
## p. 13914 (#100) ##########################################
13914
LAURENCE STERNE
"I'm confident," said I to myself, “I should have overset her
creed. ”
The accession of that idea carried Nature, at that time, as
high as she could go. — I was at peace with the world before,
and this finished the treaty with myself -
“Now, was I a King of France, cried I, what a moment
for an orphan to have begged his father's portmanteau of me! ”
((
1
THE MONK
1
1
From (A Sentimental Journey)
HAD scarce uttered the words, when a poor monk of the order
I to
convent.
The moment I cast my eyes upon him, I was predeter-
mined not to give him a single sous; and accordingly I put
up my purse into my pocket, buttoned it up, set myself a little
more upon my centre, and advanced up gravely to him; there
was something, I fear, forbidding in my look: I have his figure
this moment before my eyes, and think there was that in it
which deserved better.
The monk, as I judged from the break in his tonsure (a few
scattered white hairs upon his temples being all that remained
of it), might be about seventy; but from his eyes, and that sort
of fire which was in them, which seemed more tempered by
courtesy than years, could be no more than sixty;— truth might
lie between; — he was certainly sixty-five; and the general air
of his countenance, notwithstanding something seemed to have
been planting wrinkles in it before their time, agreed to the
account.
It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted, -
mild, pale, penetrating,- free from all commonplace ideas of fat
–
contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth, -it
looked forwards; but looked as if it looked at something beyond
this world. How one of his order came by it, Heaven above,
who let it fall upon a monk's shoulders, best knows; but it would
have suited a Brahmin; and had I met it upon the plains of Hin-
dostan, I had reverenced it.
The rest of his outline may be given in a few strokes; one
might put it into the hands of any one to design, for 'twas
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neither elegant nor otherwise, but as character and expression
made it so: it was a thin, spare form, something above the com-
mon size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forward in the
figure — but it was the attitude of entreaty; and as it now stands
presented to my imagination, it gained more than it lost by it.
When he had entered the room three paces, he stood still;
and laying his left hand upon his breast (a slender white staff
with which he journeyed being in his right), when I had got
close up to him he introduced himself with the little story of the
wants of his convent, and the poverty of his order; and did it
with so simple a grace, and such an air of deprecation was there
in the whole cast of his look and figure, I was bewitched not to
have been struck with it. "
A better reason was, I had predetermined not to give him a
single sous.
>>
“'Tis very true," said I, replying to a cast upwards with his
eyes, with which he had concluded his address — "'tis very true
and Heaven be their resource who have no other but the char.
ity of the world; the stock of which, I fear, is no way sufficient
for the many great claims which are hourly made upon it. ”
As I pronounced the words "great claims,” he gave a slight
glance with his eye downward upon the sleeve of his tunic. - I
felt the full force of the appeal. — “I acknowledge it,” said I; "a
coarse habit, and that but once in three years, with meagre diet,
are no great matters: and the true point of pity is, as they can
be earned in the world with so little industry, that your order
should wish to procure them by pressing upon a fund which
is the property of the lame, the blind, the aged, and the infirm;
the captive who lies down counting over and over again the
days of his afflictions, languishes also for his share of it;-and
had you been of the order of mercy instead of the order of St.
Francis, poor as I am,” continued I, pointing to my portmanteau,
“full cheerfully should it have been opened to you for the ran-
som of the unfortunate. ” — The monk made me a bow. But
of all others,” resumed I, “the unfortunate of our own country
surely have the first rights; and I have left thousands in dis-
tress upon our own shore. ” — The monk gave a cordial wave with
his head, as much as to say, "No doubt there is misery enough
in every corner of the world, as well as within our convent. ”.
But we distinguish,” said I, laying my hand upon the sleeve
of his tunic, in return for his appeal, — “we distinguish, my good
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father, betwixt those who wish only to eat the bread of their own
labors, and those who eat the bread of other people's, and have
no other plan in life but to get through it in sloth and ignorance
for the love of God. ”
The poor Franciscan made no reply:- a hectic of a moment
passed across his cheek, but could not tarry;— Nature seemed to
have had done with her resentments in him:— he showed none;
but letting his staff fall within his arm, he pressed both his
hands with resignation upon his breast, and retired.
My heart smote me the moment he shut the door. — “Pshaw! ”
said I, with an 'air of carelessness, three several times,– but it
would not do; every ungracious syllable I had uttered crowded
back into my imagination. I reflected, I had no right over the
poor Franciscan but to deny him; and that the punishment of
that was enough to the disappointed without the addition of
unkind language. - I considered his gray hairs; his courteous
figure seemed to re-enter, and gently ask me what injury he had
done me, and why I could use him thus: I would have given
twenty livres for an advocate. - "I have behaved very ill,” said I
within myself; “but I have only just set out upon my travels,
and shall learn better manners as I get along. ”
I feel a damp upon my spirits, as I am going to add that in
my last return through Calais, upon inquiring after Father Lo-
renzo, I heard that he had been dead near three months; and was
buried, not in his convent, but according to his desire, in a little
cemetery belonging to it, about two leagues off.
I had a strong
desire to see where they had laid him— when, upon pulling out
his little horn box, as I sat by his grave, and plucking up a
nettle or two at the head of it, which had no business to grow
there, they all struck together so forcibly upon my affections,
that I burst into a flood of tears: but I am as weak as a woman;
and I beg the world not to smile, but pity me.
C
THE DEAD ASS
From "A Sentimental Journey)
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“AND
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ND this,” said he, putting the remains of a crust into his
wallet, and this should have been thy portion, said
he, "hadst thou been alive to have shared it with me. ” I Ι
thought, by the accent, it had been an apostrophe to his child;
but 'twas to his ass, and to the very ass we had seen dead in
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the road, which had occasioned La Fleur's misadventure. The
man seemed to lament it much: and it instantly brought into
my mind Sancho's lamentation for his; but he did it with more
true touches of nature.
The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door,
with the ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took
up from time to time — then laid them down — looked at them,
and shook his head. He then took his crust of bread out of his
wallet again, as if to eat it; held it some time in his hand; then
laid it upon the bit of his ass's bridle, looked wistfully at the
little arrangement he had made, and then gave a sigh.
The simplicity of his grief drew numbers about him, and La
Fleur amongst the rest, whilst the horses were getting ready: as
I continued sitting in the post-chaise, I could see and hear over
their heads.
He said he had come last from Spain, where he had been
from the furthest borders of Franconia; and had got so far on
his return home, when his ass died. Every one seemed desirous
to know what business could have taken so old and poor a man
so far a journey from his own home.
It had pleased Heaven, he said, to bless him with three sons,
the finest lads in all Germany; but having in one week lost two
of the eldest of them by the small-pox, and the youngest falling
ill of the same distemper, he was afraid of being bereft of them
all; and made a vow, if Heaven would not take him from him
also, he would go in gratitude to St. Iago in Spain.
When the mourner got thus far on his story, he stopped to
pay nature his tribute, and wept bitterly.
He said Heaven had accepted the conditions; and that he had
set out from his cottage with this poor creature, which had been
a patient partner of his journey; that it had ate the same bread
with him all the way, and was unto him as a friend.
Everybody who stood about heard the poor fellow with con-
cern. La Fleur offered him money. The mourner said he did
not want it: it was not the value of the ass, but the loss of him.
The ass, he said, he was assured, loved him: and upon this, told
them a long story of a mischance upon their passage over the
Pyrenean mountains, which had separated them from each other
three days; during which time the ass had sought him as much
as he had sought the ass, and that they had scarce either ate or
drank till they met.
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!
“Thou hast one comfort, friend,” said I, at least, in the loss
of thy poor beast: I'm sure thou hast been a merciful master to
him. ” — “Alas! ” said the mourner, “I thought so when he was
alive: but now that he is dead, I think otherwise; I fear that
the weight of myself and my afflictions together have been too
much for him,- they have shortened the poor creature's days,
and I fear I have them to answer for. ” — “Shame on the world! »
said I to myself. « Did we but love each other as this poor
soul loved his ass - 'twould be something. "
THE PULSE
PARIS
From A Sentimental Journey)
H
Ail, ye small sweet courtesies of life! for smooth do ye make
the road of it; like grace and beauty, which beget inclina-
tions to love at first sight: 'tis ye who open this door, and
let the stranger in.
-"Pray, madam,” said I, have the goodness to tell me which
-
way I must turn to go to the Opéra Comique ? ”
“Most willingly, monsieur,” said she, laying aside her work.
I had given a cast with my eye into half a dozen shops as
I came along, in search of a face not likely to be disordered
by such an interruption; till at last, this hitting my fancy, I had
walked in.
She was working a pair of ruffles as she sat in a low chair
on the far side of the shop, facing the door.
“Très volontiers — most willingly,” said she, laying her work
down upon a chair next her, and rising up from the low chair
she was sitting in, with so cheerful a movement and so cheerful
a look that had I been laying out fifty louis d'ors with her, I
should have said, “That woman is grateful. ”
“You must turn, monsieur,” said she, going with me to the
door of the shop, and pointing the way down the street I was
to take — "you must turn first to your right hand, - mais prenez
garde, there are two turns, and be so good as to take the second,
then go down a little way, and you'll see a church; and when
you are past it, give yourself the trouble to turn directly to the
right, and that will lead you to the foot of the Pont-Neuf, which
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you must cross, and there any one will do himself the pleasure
to show you. "
She repeated her instructions three times over to me, with the
same good-natured patience the third time as the first; and if
tones and manners have a meaning,— which certainly they have,
unless to hearts which shut them out, — she seemed really inter-
ested that I should not lose myself.
I will not suppose it was the woman's beauty (notwithstand-
ing she was the handsomest grisette, I think, I ever saw) which
had much to do with the sense I had of her courtesy; only I
remember when I told her how much I was obliged to her, that
I looked very full in her eyes, and that I repeated my thanks as
often as she had done her instructions.
I had not got ten paces from the door, before I found I had
forgot every tittle of what she had said; so looking back, and
seeing her still standing in the door of the shop, as if to look
whether I went right or not, I returned back to ask her whether
the first turn was to my right or left, for that I had absolutely
forgot.
"It is impossible! ” said she, half laughing.
«O'Tis very possible,” replied I, “when a man is thinking
more of a woman than of her good advice. ”
As this was the real truth, she took it, as every woman takes
a matter of right, with a slight courtesy.
- "Attendez ! ” said she, laying her hand' upon my arm to
detain me, whilst she called a lad out of the back shop to get
ready a parcel of gloves. "I am just going to send him," said
she, with a packet into that quarter; and if you will have the
complaisance to step in, it will be ready in a moment, and he
shall attend you to the place. ”
So I walked in with her to the far side of the shop; and tak-
ing up the ruffle in my hand which she laid upon the chair, as
if I had a mind to sit, she sat down herself in her low chair, and
I instantly sat myself down beside her.
-"He will be ready, monsieur,” said she, “in a moment. ”
"And in that moment,” replied I, “most willingly would I say
something very civil to you for all these courtesies. Any one
may do a casual act of good-nature, but a continuation of them
shows it is a part of the temperature; and certainly,” added
I, “if it is the same blood which comes from the heart which
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descends to the extremes” (touching her wrist), "I am sure you
must have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world. ”
“Feel it,” said she, holding out her arm.
So laying down my hat, I took hold of her fingers in one
hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery.
Would to Heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed
by and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lackadai-
sical manner counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much
true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebbor
flow of her fever: how wouldst thou have laughed and moralized
upon my new profession! - and thou shouldst have laughed and
moralized on. Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said,
« There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's
pulse. “But a grisette's! thou wouldst have said; "and in an
open shop! Yorick » –
“So much the better: for when my views are direct, Eu-
genius, I care not if all the world saw me feel it. ”
I had counted twenty pulsations, and was going on fast to-
wards the fortieth, when her husband, coming unexpected from a
back parlor into the shop, put me a little out of my reckoning.
« 'Twas nobody but her husband,” she said; — so I began a fresh
score.
Monsieur is so good,” quoth she as he passed by us, "as to
give himself the trouble of feeling my pulse. ”
The husband took off his hat, and making me a bow, said I
did him too much honor; and having said that, he put on his
hat and walked out.
«Good God! ” said I to myself as he went out, “and can this
man be the husband of this woman ? »
Let it not torment the few who know what must have been
the grounds of this exclamation, if I explain it to those who do
not.
In London, a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper's wife seem to be
one bone and one flesh: in the several endowments of mind and
body, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, has it, so as in
general to be upon a par, and to tally with each other as nearly
as man and wife need to do.
In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different:
for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting
in the husband, he seldom comes there; in some dark and dismai
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room behind, he sits commerceless in his thrum nightcap, the
same rough son of Nature that Nature left him.
The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is
salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally
to the women,— by a continual higgling with customers of all
ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough peb-
bles shook along together in a bag, by amicable collisions they
have worn down their asperities and sharp angles, and not only
become round and smooth, but will receive, some of them, a
polish like a brilliant;— Monsieur le Mari is little better than
the stone under your foot.
- Surely, surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone;
thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings; and
this improvement of our natures from it I appeal to as my evi-
dence.
"And how does it beat, monsieur ? ” said she.
«With all the benignity,” said I, looking quietly in her eyes,
« that I expected. ”
She was going to say something civil in return, but the lad
came into the shop with the gloves.
«Apropos,” said I, “I want a couple of pairs myself. ”
»
THE STARLING
From (A Sentimental Journey)
I
WAS interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice
which I took to be that of a child, which complained it could
not get out. I looked up and down the passage, and seeing
neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further atten-
tion.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same
words repeated twice over, and looking up, I saw it was a star-
ling hung in a little cage. "I can't get out! I can't get out! ”
said the starling.
I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came
through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which
they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity.
"I can't get out! ” said the starling.
“God help thee! ” said I, “but I'll help thee out, cost what it
will;" so I turned about the cage to get to the door; - it was
XXIV–871
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twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no get-
ting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both
hands to it.
The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliv-
erance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his
breast against it as if impatient.
"I fear, poor creature,” said I, "I cannot set thee at liberty. ”
"No," said the starling; "I can't get out! I can't get out! ”
said the starling.
I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened;
nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated
spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly
called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune
to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew
all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily
walked up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down
them.
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery,” said I, - still
thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have
been made to drink thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.
'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess," addressing myself
to Liberty, “whom all in public or in private worship; whose
taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall
change. No tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chemic
power turn thy sceptre into iron; with thee to smile upon him
as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch
from whose court thou art exiled. Gracious Heaven! » cried I,
kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, “grant
me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give me but this
fair goddess as my companion; and shower down thy mitres, if
it seems good unto thy Divine providence, upon those heads
which are aching for them. ”
The bird in his cage pursued me into my room. I sat down
close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began
to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right
frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my imagination.
I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures
born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting
the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that
the multitudes of sad groups in it did but distract me,- I took a
single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I
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then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his
picture.
I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and
confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of heart it is which
arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer, I saw him pale
and feverish: in thirty years, the western breeze had not once
fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time,
nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his
lattice! — his children
But here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on
with another part of the portrait.
He was sitting upon the ground, upon a little straw in the
furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair
and bed: a little calendar of small sticks was laid at the head,
notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed
there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a
rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the
heap.
As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless
eye towards the door; then cast it down, shook his head, and went
on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs,
as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle.
He gave a deep sigh. — I saw the iron enter into his soul!
- I burst into tears. — I could not sustain the picture of con-
finement which my fancy had drawn. I started up from my
chair, and calling La Fleur, I bid him bespeak me a remise, and
have it ready at the door of the hotel by nine in the morning.
“I'll go directly,” said I to myself, «to Monsieur le Duc le
Choiseul. ”
La Fleur would have put me to bed; but not willing he should
see anything upon my cheek which would cost the honest fellow
a heartache, I told him I would go to bed myself, and bid him
do the same.
I got into my remise the hour I proposed; La Fleur got up
behind, and I bid the coachman make the best of his way to
Versailles.
As there was nothing in this road, or rather nothing which I
look for in traveling, I cannot fill up the blank better than with
a short history of this selfsame bird, which became the subject
of the last chapter.
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.
Whilst the Honorable Mr. was waiting for a wind at
Dover, it had been caught upon the cliffs, before it could well
fly, by an English lad who was his groom: who not caring to
destroy it, had taken it in his breast into the packet; and by
course of feeding it, and taking it once under his protection, in a
day or two grew fond of it, and got it safe along with him to
Paris.
At Paris, the lad had laid out a livre in a little cage for the
starling; and as he had little to do better, the five months his
master stayed there, he taught it in his mother's tongue the four
simple words and no more) to which I owed myself so much its
debtor.
Upon his master's going on for Italy the lad had given it to
the master of the hotel.
But his little song for liberty being in an unknown language
at Paris, the bird had little or no store set by him; so La Fleur
bought him and his cage for me for a bottle of burgundy.
In my return from Italy, I brought him with me to the coun-
try in whose language he had learned his notes; and telling the
story of him to Lord A, Lord A begged the bird of me; in a
week Lord A gave him to Lord B; Lord B made a present of
him to Lord C; and Lord C's gentleman sold him to Lord D's
for a shilling; Lord D gave him to Lord E; and so on - half
-
round the alphabet. From that rank he passed into the lower
house, and passed the hands of as many commoners. But as all
these wanted to get in, and my bird wanted to get out, he had
almost as little store set by him in London as at Paris.
It is impossible but many of my readers must have heard of
him; and if any by mere chance have ever seen him, I beg leave
to inform them that that bird was my bird, or some vile copy
set up to represent him.
I have nothing farther to add upon him, but that from that
time to this I have borne this poor starling as the crest to my
And let the herald's officers twist his neck about if they
dare.
arms:
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13925
IN LANGUEDOC: AN IDYL
From A Sentimental Journey)
T".
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-
WAS in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is
the best Muscatto wine in all France - and which, by-the-
by, belongs to the honest canons of Montpellier; and foul
befall the man who has drank it at their table, who grudges
them a drop of it.
The sun was set — they had done their work; the nymphs had
tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a
carousal. My mule made a dead point. - «'Tis the fife and
tambourin,” said I. — “ I'm frightened to death,” quoth he. -
“They are running at the ring of pleasure," said I, giving him a
prick. — "By St. Boogar, and all the saints at the back-side of the
door of purgatory,” said he (making the same resolution with the
Abbess of Andouillets), “I'll not go a step further. ” — « 'Tis very
well, sir,” said I: “I will never argue a point with one of your
family as long as I live.
" So leaping off his back, and kicking
off one boot into this ditch and t’other into that I'll take a
dance,” said I, "so stay you here. ”
A sunburnt daughter of labor rose up from the group to
meet me, as I advanced towards them; her hair - which was
a dark chestnut, approaching rather to a black — was tied up in a
knot, all but a single tress.
“We want a cavalier,” said she, holding out both her hands
as if to offer them. — “And a cavalier ye shall have,” said I,
taking hold of both of them.
“ Hadst thou, Nannette, been arrayed like a duchess! But
that cursed slit in thy petticoat! ”
Nannette cared not for it.
« We could not have done without you,” said she, letting go
one hand, with self-taught politeness, leading me up with the
other.
A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe,
and to which he had added a tambourin of his own accord, ran
sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank. - "Tie me up
this tress instantly,” said Nannette, putting a piece of string into
my hand. It taught me to forget I was a stranger. — The whole
knot fell down. We had been seven years acquainted.
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The youth struck the note upon the tambourin, his pipe fol-
lowed, and off we bounded. — «The deuce take that slit! ”
The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven
sung alternately with her brother, 'twas a Gascoigne roundelay -
Viva la joia!
Fidon la tristessa!
The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below
them.
I would have given a crown to have it sewed up: Nannette
would not have given a sous; l'iva la joia! was in her lips —
Viva la joia! was in her eyes. A transient spark of amity shot
across the space betwixt us. She looked amiable. Why could I
not live and end my days thus ? "Just Disposer of our joys and
sorrows,” cried I, “why could not a man sit down in the lap of
content here, and dance and sing, and say his prayers, and go to
heaven with this nut-brown maid ? Capriciously did she bend
her head on one side, and dance up insidious. ( Then 'tis time
to dance off," quoth I.
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13927
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(1850-1894)
BY ROBERT BRIDGES
N his illuminating essay "The Lantern-Bearers,' which in a
very few pages seems to bear the secret of Robert Louis
Stevenson's life and art, he puts the kernel of it in the sen-
tence: «No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids;
but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the
painted windows and the storied walls. ” If he was the most loved
writer of his generation, it was because he
freely gave his readers access to this warm
phantasmagoric chamber. His
« winning
personality” is the phrase which his admir-
ers use oftenest to express his charm. One
of the most acute of these, Mr. Henry James,
has still further defined this charm as the
perpetual boy in him. He never outgrew
the boy's delight in make-believe. ” He
tells how the cardboard scenery and plays
of Skelt, "A Penny Plain, 2d. Colored,” which
fascinated him as a boy, had given him the
very spirit of my life's enjoyment. ” Boy
and man, all that he needed for delight was R. 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.
