Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1062 page)

Late on a winter afternoon in 1868 she paid her first visit to 17 Heriot Row, and there found Mrs. Stevenson sitting by the firelight, apparently alone. They began to talk, when ‘ suddenly, from out of a dark corner beyond the fireplace, came a voice, peculiar, vibrating; a boy’s voice, I thought at first. “Oh!” said Mrs. Stevenson, “ I forgot that my son was in the room. Let me introduce him to you.” The voice went on: I listened in perplexity and amazement. Who was this son who talked as Charles Lamb wrote? this young Heine with the Scottish accent? I stayed long, and when I came away the unseen converser came down with me to the front-door to let me out. As he opened it,* the light of the gas-lamp outside (“ For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,” he sings) fell on him, and I saw a slender, brown, long-haired lad, with great dark eyes, a brilliant smile, and a gentle, deprecating bend of the head. “ A boy of sixteen,” I said to myself. But he was eighteen, looking then, as he always did, younger than his age. I asked him to come and see us. He said, “Shall I come to-morrow?” I said “ Yes,” and ran home. As I sat down to dinner I announced, “I have made the acquaintance of a poet!” He came on the morrow, and from that day forward we saw him constantly. From that day forward too, our affection and our admiration for him, and our delight in his company, grew.’

1 Letters, ii. 13.

Thus much of his friends and their influence. There was also the other continual and stimulating influence of books, and though Stevenson was never a scholar in the strict and more arid sense, few men ever brought so great an enthusiasm to the studies of their choice. His ardour was now at its height. Twenty years later he wrote: 41 have really enjoyed this book as I — almost as I — used to enjoy books when I was going twenty — twenty-three; and these are the years for reading.’1

‘Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.’2

Besides his books at home, he had always access to the Advocates’ Library, the great public library of Edinburgh, which is entitled to receive a copy of everything published in the kingdom. But for the present the question is of those works with which a man lives, which for the time become an intimate part of himself, and closer than any friend. Such were to Stevenson the three already mentioned, the New Testament, Walt Whitman,3 and Herbert Spencer. Of the first he says but little, and of that I have already spoken: to Whitman he has done a measure of justice in one of the Familiar Studies, and also in a paper on ‘Books which have influenced me.’4 In the latter, too, Mr. Herbert Spencer also 1 Letters, ii. 246.    2 Memories and Portraits, p. 112.

3     ‘ His book . . . should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Greensickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the world upon his shoulders’ (ibid. p. 108).

4     Republished in his Later Essays, in the Edinburgh edition.

* I come next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and having thus shaken my VOL. I.          G

receives his meed of gratitude, and to him succeed Shakespeare, Dumas, Bunyan, Montaigne, and many others in rapid sequence, until the writer was manifestly overwhelmed in returning thanks to the whole world of books which brought him so much wisdom and happiness.1

But learning to write — there was the business of life. Although the description of the method by which he taught himself this most difficult of arts has been quoted again and again, and has long ago become classical, I have no alternative and no desire but to give it in this place. The process described had long begun, when this period opened, as it continued after its close; but to these years it chiefly refers — a space of protracted and laborious application without encouragement or immediate reward.2

tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.

. . Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive Rabbi exists, and few better. . . . His words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.’ — ’Books which have influenced me,’ Later Essays, 1 In a notebook of 1871-72 I find this Catalogus Librorum Carissimorum: —

Scott, strange to say, does not appear, but though Stevenson now and again said hard things of Sir Walter, they were all upon the technical side, and his incomparable merits perhaps no one ever better understood. Not all books, however, were of service: elsewhere he bewails the inhumanity of Obermann (Memories and Portraits, p. 112) and counts Moll Flanders and The Country Wife more wholesome reading.

Compare also the beginning of A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas1s and The Ideal House (Miscellanea, p. 47).

2 Memories and Portraits (A College Magazine), p. 122.

p. 279.

Montaigne’s Essays. Horace, his Odes.

Pepys, his Diary, esp. the Trip to Hazlitt’s Table-Talk.

Burns’ works.

Tristram Shandy.

Heine.

Keats.

Fielding.

Bristol, Bath, etc. Shakespeare, his works, Lear, Hamlet, Falstaff,; Twelfth Night.

‘ All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words.

‘ And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It 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. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.

4 This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And as regarded training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.

‘ I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey-tricks, which was called “ The Vanity of Morals “; it was to have had a second part “ The Vanity of Knowledge “; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works: Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a. tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty- footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no less a man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein — for it was not Congreve’s verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. ... So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semiramis, a tragedy,1 I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

‘ That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s. . . .

‘ It is the great point of these imitations that there still shines, beyond the student’s reach, his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is an old and a very true saying that failure is the only high-road to success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own per* formances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. “ Padding,” said one. Another wrote: “ I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly.” No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned, and I was not surprised or even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked at — well then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living.’

Thus the secret of learning was — for the right man — only the secret of taking pains: and yet in the history of 1 The tragedy was in blank verse, Academy, 19th May 1900.

his endeavours we find, where we should least expect it, a hereditary trait. It seems as absurd to couple with indolence the name of the indefatigable writer, as it was for him to bring his grandfather into a similar connection i1 but it is from himself that we hear of this failing, although we know not to which year it must be referred.

‘ I remember a time when I was very idle, and lived and profited by that humour. I have no idea why I ceased to be so, yet I scarce believe I have the power to return to it; it is a change of age. I made consciously a thousand little efforts, but the determination from which these arose came to me while I slept and in the way of growth. I have had a thousand skirmishes to keep myself at work upon particular mornings, and sometimes the affair was hot; but of that great change of campaign, which decided all this part of my life and turned me from one whose business was to shirk into one whose business was to strive and persevere, it seems to me as though all that had been done by some one else. The life of Goethe affected me; so did that of Balzac; and some very noble remarks by the latter in a pretty bad book, the Cousine Bette. I dare say I could trace some other influences in the change. All I mean is, I was never conscious of a struggle, nor registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personally to do with the matter. I came about like a well-handled ship. There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we call God.’2

This may be assigned to the time immediately before his retirement from engineering; but it might relate equally to several periods when he was unable to settle down to work: they were seldom of long duration, and, except before his own conscience, there was hardly any time when the author of the Apology for Idlers ever really neglected the tasks of his true vocation.

As to the products of his labours, editors, as he has told us, would have nothing to say to them. So he 1 Page 4.            2 Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, p. 40.

became an editor himself. Magazines had risen and fallen wherever the boy had gone; but none of his serials had yet attained the distinction of type. The idea of the Edinburgh University Magazine was started in the rooms of the 1 Spec.’ by four of the members of that society, of which Stevenson was the youngest and least esteemed; the history of its rise and fall (for print did not save it from the fate of its manuscript predecessors) may be read in Memories and Portraits, while some of Stevenson’s contributions are to be found in the volume of his Juvenilia. Interesting as they are, they constitute no great achievement, and the picture of ‘ An Old Scots Gardener,’ retouched in after days, is the only piece which has found a place with the works of his later years.