Read Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Online
Authors: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1100 page)
At the same time it must be laid to the credit of his reason and the firm balance of his judgment that although vivisection was a subject he could not endure even to hear mentioned, yet, with all his imagination and sensibility, he never ranged himself among the opponents of this method of inquiry, provided, of course, it was limited, as in England, with the utmost rigour possible.
It is curious now to remember that an early critic of the Travels with a Donkey censured him severely for the treatment of Modestine as described by Stevenson himself. Yet woe betide either friend or stranger who appeared at Vailima on a horse with the sore back too common in the tropics: it was well for him if he did not have to return home on foot.
Irksome as ill-health was to Stevenson, it was yet the possible effect on his own character that he most dreaded, for he suspected that “ being an invalid was a fatal objection to a human being,” and his horror of valetudinarianism was due to its being “the worst training upon earth.” He felt it hard that he should be judged by the same standard as men to whom the world was still “ full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues.” Moreover, although he always reckoned his life “ as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded,” he could not be altogether unconscious of the insecurity of his tenure. On one of those fragments of paper preserved by chance, on which he used to write down his remarks during the many periods when he was forbidden to speak, these words occur: “You know the remarks of no doctor mean anything in my case. My case is a sport. I may die to-night or live till sixty.” I can remember his saying to me in Samoa, “ I have n’t had a fair chance, 1 ‘ve had to spend nearly all my life in expectation of death.” The chief result with him perhaps was that he sat looser to life, and had grown altogether familiar with the idea of leaving it; i for in the words of Sir Thomas Browne: “He that so often surviveth his expectation lives many lives, and will hardly complain of the shortness of his days.”
The question of Stevenson’s ill-health brings one to the consideration which troubled him now and again in his later days: whether he had not after all made a mistake in adopting literature as his profession. With him, as with Scott, “ to have done things worthy to be written was a dignity to which no man made any approach who had only written things worthy to be read.” At times he thought with a passing regret of the life of action he had forsaken, and was struck by the irony that his father, who had opposed his choice of the profession of literature, had come to approve of it before he died, while he, whom nothing but that change of life would satisfy, had himself lived to doubt its wisdom.2 But in these comparisons it was an ideal life that he contemplated, where he should be always well and always strong, doing his work in the open air. With such health and such conditions, his character and his powers might have attained to other heights; we should then have known a different man, less human and less endeared to us by the frailties of 1 Letters, ii. 353. 2 Ibid., 321. our common nature. But the field on which he fought with sickness and depression was one in which most of us are at times engaged, and where many sufferers carry on a lifelong struggle. Anywhere his example would have been splendid; it could hardly have been more widely seen, or have better helped his fellow- men.
There v/as this about him, that he was the only man I have ever known who possessed charm in a high degree, whose character did not suffer from the possession. The gift comes naturally to women, and they are at their best in its exercise. But a man requires to be of a very sound fibre before he can be entirely himself and keep his heart single, if he carries about with him a talisman to obtain from all men and all women the object of his heart’s desire. Both gifts Stevenson possessed, not only the magic but also the strength of character to which it was safely intrusted.
But who shall bring back that charm? Who shall unfold its secret? He was all that I have said: he was inexhaustible, he was brilliant, he was romantic, he was fiery, he was tender, he was brave, he was kind. With all this there went something more. He always liked the people he was with, and found the best and brightest that was in them; he entered into all the thoughts and moods of his companions, and led them along pleasant ways, or raised them to a courage and a gaiety like his own. If criticism or reminiscence has yielded any further elucidation of his spell, I do not know: it defies my analysis, nor have I ever heard it explained.
There linger on the lips of men a few names that bring to us, as it were, a breeze blowing off the shores of youth. Most of those who have borne them were taken from the world before early promise could be fulfilled, and so they rank in our regard by virtue of their possibilities alone. Stevenson is among the fewer still who bear the award both of promise and of achievement, and is happier yet in this: besides admiration and hope, he has raised within the hearts of his readers a personal feeling towards himself which is nothing less deep than love.
THE END
THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON FOR BOYS AND GIRLS By Jacqueline M. Overton
CONTENTS
THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
“Write me as one who loves his fellowmen.” — HUNT.
CHAPTER I
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS
“. . . For the sake
Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen,
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled
To plant a star for seamen.”
The pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend tells, while cruising off the coast of Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank the warning bell on one of the great rocks, to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who had put it there. The following year the Rover returned and perished himself on the same rock.
In the life of one of Scotland’s great men, Robert Louis Stevenson, we find proud record of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, having built Bell Rock Lighthouse on this same spot years afterward.
No story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life would be complete that failed to mention the work done for Scotland and the world at large by the two men he held most dear, the engineers, his father and grandfather.
When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, received his appointment on the Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had just begun. Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger, and few mariners cared to venture around them. At that time the coast “was lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an open chaufer. The whole archipelago thus nightly plunged in darkness was shunned by seagoing vessels.”
The board at first proposed building four new lights, but afterward built many more, so that to-day Scotland stands foremost among the nations for the number and splendor of her coast lights.
Their construction in those early days meant working against tremendous obstacles and dangers, and the life of the engineer was a hazardous one.
“The seas into which his labors carried him were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure much on horseback by dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouses in the very camp of wreckers.
“The aid of steam was not yet. At first in random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers and sometimes late into the stormy autumn.”
All of which failed to daunt Robert Stevenson who loved action and adventure and the scent of things romantic.
“Not only had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted, the supply of oil must be maintained and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole service with its routine ... had to be called out of nothing; and a new trade (that of light-keeper) to be taught, recruited and organized.”
Bell Rock was only one of twenty lighthouses Robert Stevenson helped to build, but it was by far the most difficult one ... and even to-day, after it has been lighted for more than a hundred years, it still remains unique — a monument to his skill.
Bell Rock was practically a reef completely submerged at full tide and only a few feet of its crest visible at low water. To raise a tower on it meant placing a foundation under water, a new and perilous experiment.
“Work upon the rock in the earliest stages was confined to the calmest days of the summer season, when the tides were lowest, the water smoothest, and the wind in its calmest mood. Under such conditions the men were able to stay on the site for about five hours....
“One distinct drawback was the necessity to establish a depot some distance from the erecting site. Those were the days before steam navigation, and the capricious sailing craft offered the only means of maintaining communication between rock and shore, and for the conveyance of men and materials to and fro....
“A temporary beacon was placed on the reef, while adjacent to the site selected for the tower a smith’s forge was made fast, so as to withstand the dragging motion of the waves when the rock was submerged. The men were housed on the
Smeaton
, which, during the spells of work on the rock, rode at anchor a short distance away in deep water.”
Once the engineers were all but lost when the
Smeaton
slipped her moorings and left them stranded on the rock.
In spite of all the obstacles, the work was completed at the end of two years and the light was shown for the first time February 1, 1811.
“I found Robert Stevenson an appreciative and intelligent companion,” writes Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of a cruise he made among the islands of Scotland with a party of engineers. The notes made by him on this trip were used afterward in his two stories, “The Pirate” and “Lord of the Isles.”
“My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips,” wrote Louis Stevenson. “All should go his way, from the principal light-keeper’s coat to the assistant’s fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on the storeroom floor. It might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awaken men’s resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent. His thought for the keepers was continual.... When a keeper was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the ship.... They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
“No servant of the Northern Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers.”
As he grew old his “medicine and delight” was his annual trip among his lighthouses, but at length there came a time when this joy was taken away from him and there came “the end of all his cruising; the knowledge that he had looked the last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the Sound of Mull; that he was never again to hear the surf break in Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse (all younger than himself, and the more, part of his own device) open in the hour of dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell Rock.”
Throughout the rank and file of his men he was adored. “I have spoken with many who knew him; I was his grandson, and their words may very well have been words of flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and that was the look that came over their faces at the name of Robert Stevenson.”
Of his family of thirteen children, three of his sons became engineers. Thomas Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis, like the others of his family, contributed largely to lighthouse building and harbor improvement, serving under his older brother, Allen, in building the Skerryvore, one of the most famous deep-sea lights erected on a treacherous reef off the west coast where, for more than forty years, one wreck after another had occurred.