Read Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Online
Authors: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1049 page)
“The Land Commission and the Chief Justice will soon have ended their labours. Much of your land will be restored to you, to do what you can with. Now is the time the messenger is come into your villages to summon you; the man is come with the measuring rod; the fire is lighted in which you shall be tried, whether you are gold or dross. Now is the time for the true champions of Samoa to stand forth. And who is the true champion of Samoa? It is not the man who blackens his face, and cuts down trees, and kills pigs and wounded men. It is the man who makes roads, who plants food trees, who gathers harvests, and is a profitable servant before the Lord, using and improving that great talent that has been given him in trust. That is the brave soldier; that is the true champion; because all things in a country hang together like the links of the anchor cable, one by another: but the anchor itself is industry.
“There is a friend of most of us, who is far away; not to be forgotten where I am, where Tupuola is, where Poè Lelei, Mataafa, Solevao, Poè Teleso, Tupuola Lotofaga, Tupuolo Amaile, Muliaiga, Ifopo, Fatialofa, Lemusu are. He knew what I am telling you; no man better. He saw the day was come when Samoa had to walk in a new path, and to be defended not only with guns and blackened faces, and the noise of men shouting, but by digging and planting, reaping and sowing. When he was still here amongst us, he busied himself planting cacao; he was anxious and eager about agriculture and commerce, and spoke and wrote continually; so that when we turn our minds to the same matters, we may tell ourselves that we are still obeying Mataafa. Ua tautala mai pea o ia ua mamao.
“I know that I do not speak to idle or foolish hearers. I speak to those who are not too proud to work for gratitude. Chiefs! You have worked for Tusitala, and he thanks you from his heart. In this, I could wish you could be an example to all Samoa — I wish every chief in these islands would turn to, and work, and build roads, and sow fields, and plant food trees, and educate his children and improve his talents — not for love of Tusitala, but for the love of his brothers, and his children, and the whole body of generations yet unborn.
“Chiefs! On this road that you have made many feet shall follow. The Romans were the bravest and greatest of people! mighty men of their hands, glorious fighters and conquerors. To this day in Europe you may go through parts of the country where all is marsh and bush, and perhaps after struggling through a thicket, you shall come forth upon an ancient road, solid and useful as the day it was made. You shall see men and women bearing their burdens along that even way, and you may tell yourself that it was built for them perhaps fifteen hundred years before, — perhaps before the coming of Christ, — by the Romans. And the people still remember and bless 467 them for that convenience, and say to one another, that as the Romans were the bravest men to fight, so they were the best at building roads.
“Chiefs! Our road is not built to last a thousand years, yet in a sense it is. When a road is once built, it is a strange thing how it collects traffic, how every year, as it goes on, more and more people are found to walk thereon and others are raised up to repair and perpetuate it and keep it alive; so that perhaps even this road of ours may, from reparation to reparation, continue to exist and be useful hundreds and hundreds of years after we are mingled in the dust. And it is my hope that our far-away descendants may remember and bless those who laboured for them to-day.”
The Biographies
Stevenson, aged 15
THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON By Sir Graham Balfour
Sir Graham Balfour was an educationist, who published a well-received biography of his cousin Robert Louis Stevenson in 1901. Balfour lived in Vailima with the Stevenson family during the last two and a half years of his cousin’s life. While some critics see the biography as well-written and useful, it has also been criticised for authorial control that Stevenson’s wife Fanny had over the biography. Both volumes of the biography are made available to the reader.
Please note:
the original footnotes have been preserved to aid your reading.
Balfour, Stevenson’s cousin and first biographer
CONTENTS
INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD — 1850-59
LIFE AT FIVE-AND-TWENTY — 1873-76
DAVOS AND THE HIGHLANDS — 1880-82
SOUTH SEA CRUISES — THE EASTERN PACIFIC, JUNE, l888 — JUNE, 1889
SOUTH SEA CRUISES — THE CENTRAL PACIFIC, JUNE, 1889 — APRIL, 1891
PREFACE
This book is intended to supplement the volumes of Stevenson’s Letters already published. Originally it was to have been written by Mr. Colvin, and to have appeared simultaneously with the two volumes of correspondence, so admirably edited by him; but when health and opportunity unfortunately failed him, Mrs. Stevenson requested me to undertake the task. The reason for this selection was that during the last two years and a half of my cousin’s life, I had on his invitation made Vailima my home and the point of departure for my journeys; and, apart from the members of his own family, had been throughout that period the only one of his intimate friends in contact with every side of his life.
In Stevenson’s case, if anywhere, the rule holds, that all biography would be autobiography if it could, and I have availed myself as far as possible of the writings in which he has referred to himself and his past experience. To bring together the passing allusions to himself scattered widely throughout his works was an obvious duty; at the same time my longer quotations, except in two or three manifest and necessary instances, have been taken almost entirely from the material which was hitherto either unpublished or issued only in the limited Edinburgh Edition. Whenever I found any passage in his manuscripts or ephemeral work bearing upon his life or development, I employed it no less readily than I should have used a letter or a hasty note, and in exactly the same fashion, regarding it as a piece of direct evidence from the best possible source. Such use of documents, I need hardly point out, differs entirely from challenging admiration for the literary form of immature or unfinished compositions. Where so much taste and discretion have been shown in preparing the final edition of his works, I should be the last to transgress the bounds imposed upon publication.
Since autobiography is wont to deal at some length with the first memories of its author, there seemed no occasion unduly to restrain this tendency in the case of the singer and interpreter of childhood, whose account of his early years is not only interesting in itself, but also of additional value for its illustration of his poems and essays. Again, in the representation of his adolescence, it must be remembered that he never wholly ceased to be a boy, that much that belonged to him in early youth remained with him in after-life, and that enthusiasms and generous impulses would sweep in and carry him away till the end.
Much of course he did outgrow, and that almost entirely his worse part. I feel that I should have done him a very ill service if I had refrained from showing the faults of the immaturity from which the character and genius of his manhood emerged. He had many failings, but few or none that made his friends think worse of him or love him any the less. To be the writer that he was, amounted to a great exploit and service to humanity; to become the man that in the end he became, seems to me an achievement equally great, an example no less eloquent.
Many persons, both friends and strangers to me, have rendered my task far easier than I could have hoped. There is hardly one of Stevenson’s intimate friends but has helped me in a greater or less degree, and if I were here to repeat my thanks to all to whom I am indebted for information, I should have to record more than sixty names. Those to whom we owe most are often those whom formally we thank the least; and to Mrs. Stevenson and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne I can never express my indebtedness for their suggestions and their knowledge, their confidence, their patience, and their encouragement. But, of course, for everything that is here printed I alone am responsible.
The references to Stevenson’s writings are necessarily to the pages of the Edinburgh Edition, as being the most complete collection of his works.
THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
HIS ANCESTORS
‘The ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly; I am bound in and in with my forbears. . . . We are all nobly born; fortunate those who know it; blessed those who remember.’ — R. L. S., Letters, ii. 230.
‘The sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny.’ — R. L. S., Dedication of Catriona.
‘It is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees,’ as Stevenson once wrote, ‘that we can follow back the careers of our component parts and be reminded of our ante-natal lives.’1 But the threads are many and tangled, and it is hard to distinguish for more than a generation or two the transmission of the characteristics that meet in any individual of our own day. The qualities that would be required by other ages and for other pursuits are often unperceived, and the same man might scarce be recognised could he renew his life in three several centuries, and be set to a different task in each. Moreover, when any one has been dead for a hundred years, it is seldom that anything is remembered of him but his name and his occupation; he has become no more than a link in a pedigree, and the personal disposition is forgotten which made him loved or feared, together with the powers that gained him success or the weaknesses that brought about his failure. Therefore it is no unusual