Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 Part 46

[VAILIMA, SEPTEMBER 1894.]

DEAR BOB, - You are in error about the Picts. They were a Gaelic race, spoke a Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they were blacker than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly Celts; their name shows it - the 'cold croft,' it means; so does their country. Where the BLACK Scotch come from n.o.body knows; but I recognise with you the fact that the whole of Britain is rapidly and progressively becoming more pigmented; already in one man's life I can decidedly trace a difference in the children about a school door. But colour is not an essential part of a man or a race. Take my Polynesians, an Asiatic people probably from the neighbourhood of the Persian gulf. They range through any amount of shades, from the burnt hue of the Low Archipelago islander, which seems half negro, to the 'bleached'

pretty women of the Marquesas (close by on the map), who come out for a festival no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to vary directly with the degree of exposure to the sun. And, as with negroes, the babes are born white; only it should seem a LITTLE SACK of pigment at the lower part of the spine, which presently spreads over the whole field. Very puzzling. But to return. The Picts furnish to-day perhaps a third of the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons, and the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was a Pictish place. But the fact is, we don't know their frontiers. Tell some of your journalist friends with a good style to popularise old Skene; or say your prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian, and I was his blessed clerk, and did not know it; and you will not be in a state of grace about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact is - it's not interesting to the public - but it's interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarra.s.sing - this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quant.i.ty of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly traceable.

When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen.

What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic - or maenadic - foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and 'I could wish my days to be bound each to each' by the same open-mouthed wonder. They ARE anyway, and whether I wish it or not.

I remember very well your att.i.tude to life, this conventional surface of it. You had none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial FICELLES of the business; it is simian, but that is how the wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn't imitate, hence you kept free - a wild dog, outside the kennel - and came dam' near starving for your pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in which we were brought up.

Civilisation has become reflex with us; you might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something quite different. I defend civilisation for the thing it is, for the thing it has COME to be, the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb mult.i.tudes BACK? They don't do anything BECAUSE; they do things, write able articles, st.i.tch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse. Go and reason with monkeys!

No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double great- grandmother, the daughter of David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the Wrights, married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26, 1774, 'at Santt Kittes of a fiver,' by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th June 1772; and, second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower, and already the father of our grandmother. This improbable double connection always tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith being doubly our great-grandfather.

I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration.

My mother collared one of the photos, of course; the other is stuck up on my wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Gaelic-Celtic sharps? you might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a M'STEIN and a MACSTEPHANE; and our own great- grandfather always called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at least three PLACES called Stevenson - STEVENSON in Cunningham, STEVENSON in Peebles, and STEVENSON in Haddington. And it was not the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find some one.

Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head; they superimposed their language, they scarce modified the race; only in Berwicks.h.i.+re and Roxburgh have they very largely affected the place names. The Scandinavians did much more to Scotland than the Angles. The Saxons didn't come.

Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is in the matter of the book, of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is superficially all mine, in the sense that the last copy is all in my hand. Lloyd did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest; I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man's words and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The great difficulty of collaboration is that you can't explain what you mean. I know what kind of effect I mean a character to give - what kind of TACHE he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was necessary to say, 'Make him So-and-so'; and this was all right for Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but for Bellairs, for instance - a man with whom I pa.s.sed ten minutes fifteen years ago - what was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, as a personal artist, can begin a character with only a haze in my head, but how if I have to translate the haze into words before I begin? In our manner of collaboration (which I think the only possible - I mean that of one person being responsible, and giving the COUP DE POUCE to every part of the work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying to explain to my collaborator what STYLE I wished a pa.s.sage to be treated in. These are the times that ill.u.s.trate to a man the inadequacy of spoken language. Now - to be just to written language - I can (or could) find a language for my every mood, but how could I TELL any one beforehand what this effect was to be, which it would take every art that I possessed, and hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection and rejection, to produce? These are the impossibilities of collaboration. Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on the stuff, and to produce in consequence an extraordinarily greater richness of purview, consideration, and invention. The hardest chapter of all was 'Cross Questions and Crooked Answers.' You would not believe what that cost us before it a.s.sumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd wrote it at least thrice, and I at least five times - this is from memory. And was that last chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that I should ask the question! Two cla.s.ses of men - the artist and the educationalist - are sworn, on soul and conscience, not to ask it.

You get an ordinary, grinning, red-headed boy, and you have to educate him. Faith supports you; you give your valuable hours, the boy does not seem to profit, but that way your duty lies, for which you are paid, and you must persevere. Education has always seemed to me one of the few possible and dignified ways of life. A sailor, a shepherd, a schoolmaster - to a less degree, a soldier - and (I don't know why, upon my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster's unofficial a.s.sistant, and a kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost exhaust the category.

If I had to begin again - I know not - SI JEUNESSE SAVAIT, SI VIEILLESSE POUVAIT . . . I know not at all - I believe I should try to honour s.e.x more religiously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does not recognise and hallow s.e.x. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder, oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic self-tortures. It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and hallow most. Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.

But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and const.i.tutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not const.i.tutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron 'gentleman' and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short.

. . . There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me hugely: anarchy, - I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity's sake) commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind 'em (did you see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the New Testament over again); people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this, then, a new DRIVE among the monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more, the gross, dull, not unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top just like the early Christians.

That is, of course, they will step into power as a PERSONNEL, but G.o.d knows what they may believe when they come to do so; it can't be stranger or more improbable than what Christianity had come to be by the same time.

Your letter was easily read, the pagination presented no difficulty, and I read it with much edification and gusto. To look back, and to stereotype one bygone humour - what a hopeless thing!

The mind runs ever in a thousand eddies like a river between cliffs. You (the ego) are always spinning round in it, east, west, north, and south. You are twenty years old, and forty, and five, and the next moment you are freezing at an imaginary eighty; you are never the plain forty-four that you should be by dates. (The most philosophical language is the Gaelic, which has NO PRESENT TENSE - and the most useless.) How, then, to choose some former age, and stick there?

R. L. S.

Letter: TO SIR HERBERT MAXWELL

VAILIMA, SAMOA, SEPTEMBER 10, 1894.

DEAR SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, - I am emboldened by reading your very interesting Rhind Lectures to put to you a question: What is my name, Stevenson?

I find it in the forms Stevinetoun, Stevensoune, Stevensonne, Stenesone, Stewinsoune, M'Stein, and MacStephane. My family, and (as far as I can gather) the majority of the inglorious clan, hailed from the borders of Cunningham and Renfrew, and the upper waters of the Clyde. In the Barony of Bothwell was the seat of the laird Stevenson of Stevenson; but, as of course you know, there is a parish in Cunningham and places in Peebles and Haddington bearing the same name.

If you can at all help me, you will render me a real service which I wish I could think of some manner to repay. - Believe me, yours truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. - I should have added that I have perfect evidence before me that (for some obscure reason) Stevenson was a favourite alias with the M'Gregors.

Letter: TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

[VAILIMA], OCTOBER 8TH 1894.

MY DEAR c.u.mMY, - So I hear you are ailing? Think shame to yourself! So you think there is nothing better to be done with time than that? and be sure we can all do much ourselves to decide whether we are to be ill or well! like a man on the gymnastic bars.

We are all pretty well. As for me, there is nothing the matter with me in the world, beyond the disgusting circ.u.mstance that I am not so young as once I was. Lloyd has a gymnastic machine, and practises upon it every morning for an hour: he is beginning to be a kind of young Samson. Austin grows fat and brown, and gets on not so ill with his lessons, and my mother is in great price. We are having knock-me-down weather for heat; I never remember it so hot before, and I fancy it means we are to have a hurricane again this year, I think; since we came here, we have not had a single gale of wind! The Pacific is but a child to the North Sea; but when she does get excited, and gets up and girds herself, she can do something good. We have had a very interesting business here.

I helped the chiefs who were in prison; and when they were set free, what should they do but offer to make a part of my road for me out of grat.i.tude? Well, I was ashamed to refuse, and the trumps dug my road for me, and put up this inscription on a board:-

'CONSIDERING THE GREAT LOVE OF HIS EXCELLENCY TUSITALA IN HIS LOVING CARE OF US IN OUR TRIBULATION IN THE PRISON WE HAVE MADE THIS GREAT GIFT; IT SHALL NEVER BE MUDDY, IT SHALL GO ON FOR EVER, THIS ROAD THAT WE HAVE DUG!' We had a great feast when it was done, and I read them a kind of lecture, which I dare say Auntie will have, and can let you see. Weel, guid bye to ye, and joy be wi' ye! I hae nae time to say mair. They say I'm gettin' FAT - a fact! - Your laddie, with all love,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter: TO JAMES PAYN

VAILIMA, SAMOA, NOV. 4, 1894.

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN, - I am asked to relate to you a little incident of domestic life at Vailima. I had read your GLEAMS OF MEMORY, No.

1; it then went to my wife, to Osbourne, to the cousin that is within my gates, and to my respected amanuensis, Mrs. Strong.

Sunday approached. In the course of the afternoon I was attracted to the great 'all - the winders is by Vanderputty, which upon entering I beheld a memorable scene. The floor was bestrewn with the forms of mids.h.i.+pmen from the CURACOA - 'boldly say a wilderness of gunroom' - and in the midst of this sat Mrs. Strong throned on the sofa and reading aloud GLEAMS OF MEMORY. They had just come the length of your immortal definition of boyhood in the concrete, and I had the pleasure to see the whole party dissolve under its influence with inextinguishable laughter. I thought this was not half bad for arthritic gout! Depend upon it, sir, when I go into the arthritic gout business, I shall be done with literature, or at least with the funny business. It is quite true I have my battlefields behind me. I have done perhaps as much work as anybody else under the most deplorable conditions. But two things fall to be noticed: In the first place, I never was in actual pain; and in the second, I was never funny. I'll tell you the worst day that I remember. I had a haemorrhage, and was not allowed to speak; then, induced by the devil, or an errant doctor, I was led to partake of that bowl which neither cheers nor inebriates - the castor-oil bowl. Now, when castor-oil goes right, it is one thing; but when it goes wrong, it is another. And it went WRONG with me that day. The waves of faintness and nausea succeeded each other for twelve hours, and I do feel a legitimate pride in thinking that I stuck to my work all through and wrote a good deal of Admiral Guinea (which I might just as well not have written for all the reward it ever brought me) in spite of the barbarous bad conditions. I think that is my great boast; and it seems a little thing alongside of your GLEAMS OF MEMORY ill.u.s.trated by spasms of arthritic gout. We really should have an order of merit in the trade of letters. For valour, Scott would have had it; Pope too; myself on the strength of that castor-oil; and James Payn would be a Knight Commander. The worst of it is, though Lang tells me you exhibit the courage of Huish, that not even an order can alleviate the wretched annoyance of the business. I have always said that there is nothing like pain; toothache, dumb-ague, arthritic gout, it does not matter what you call it, if the screw is put upon the nerves sufficiently strong, there is nothing left in heaven or in earth that can interest the sufferer. Still, even to this there is the consolation that it cannot last for ever.

Either you will be relieved and have a good hour again before the sun goes down, or else you will be liberated. It is something after all (although not much) to think that you are leaving a brave example; that other literary men love to remember, as I am sure they will love to remember, everything about you - your sweetness, your brightness, your helpfulness to all of us, and in particular those one or two really adequate and n.o.ble papers which you have been privileged to write during these last years. - With the heartiest and kindest good-will, I remain, yours ever,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO LIEUTENANT EELES

VAILIMA, SAMOA, NOVEMBER 24, 1894.

MY DEAR EELES, - The hand, as you will perceive (and also the spelling!), is Teuila's, but the scrannel voice is what remains of Tusitala's. First of all, for business. When you go to London you are to charter a hansom cab and proceed to the Museum. It is particular fun to do this on Sundays when the Monument is shut up.

Your cabman expostulates with you, you persist. The cabman drives up in front of the closed gates and says, 'I told you so, sir.'

You breathe in the porter's ears the mystic name of COLVIN, and he immediately unfolds the iron barrier. You drive in, and doesn't your cabman think you're a swell. A lord mayor is nothing to it.

Colvin's door is the only one in the eastern gable of the building.

Send in your card to him with 'From R. L. S.' in the corner, and the machinery will do the rest. Henry James's address is 34 De Vere Mansions West. I cannot remember where the place is; I cannot even remember on which side of the park. But it's one of those big Cromwell Road-looking deserted thoroughfares out west in Kensington or Bayswater, or between the two; and anyway, Colvin will be able to put you on the direct track for Henry James. I do not send formal introductions, as I have taken the liberty to prepare both of them for seeing you already.

Hoskyn is staying with us.

It is raining dismally. The Curacoa track is hardly pa.s.sable, but it must be trod to-morrow by the degenerate feet of their successor the Wallaroos. I think it a very good account of these last that we don't think them either deformed or habitual criminals - they seem to be a kindly lot.