Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1051 page)

Sir Walter Scott accompanied the Commissioners and their officer on one of the annual voyages of the Pharos round the coasts of Scotland; his Journal, published by Lockhart, shows that he found Robert Stevenson an appreciative and intelligent companion. The Pirate and The Lord of the Isles were a direct result of this cruise; and it is a curious link in the history of our literature that Scott then visited Skerryvore, the future site of the lighthouse which, as one of the greatest achievements of the Stevenson family, gave its name long afterwards to the only home that their representative in letters ever found in this country.

1 Cf. ‘ Roads,’ fuvenilia, p. 119.

While the great engineer was the man of action that his grandson longed to be, he also essayed authorship to some purpose. He wrote and published an Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse, which ‘is of its sort a masterpiece, and has been so recognised by judges; “ the romance of stone and lime,” it has been called, and “the Robinson Crusoe of engineering,” both happy and descriptive phrases. Even in his letters, though he cannot always be trusted for the construction of his sentences, the same literary virtues are apparent — a strong sense of romance and reality, and an almost infallible instinct for the right detail.’1

Traits are obliterated and the characteristics of a family may change, but the old man’s detestation of everything slovenly or dishonest,’ his interest in the whole page of experience, and his perpetual quest and fine scent for all that seems romantic to a boy,’ were handed down, if ever taste was transmitted, to his grandson. Of the one as of the other it might well have been said that ‘ Perfection was his design.’ But when we come to Thomas Stevenson, we shall find in him even more of the habits of mind and temper which distinguished his more celebrated son.

Stevenson’s mother was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Lewis Balfour, D.D., minister of Colinton, a parish on the stream known as the Water of Leith, four miles to the south-west of Edinburgh. The earliest known member of this family was one Alexander Balfour, placed in charge of the King’s Cellar by James IV. in 1499, and of the Queen’s Cellar in 1507; he held the lands of Inchrye in Fife, and was in all probability one of the Balfours of Mountquhannie, a numerous family, high in the favour of King James. The descendants of Alexander2 were chiefly ministers, advocates, or merchants.

1 Scribner’s Magazine, xiv. p. 490.

3 His eldest son was David, a name otherwise unknown in the family; this fact was only re-discovered several years after the publication of Kidnapped. So does reality supplement fiction.

John Balfour of Kinloch, the Covenanter whom Scott in Old Mortality designates Balfour of Burley, may possibly have belonged to this family, but of this there is absolutely no evidence. In the direct line of descent, James Balfour, minister of St. Giles’, Edinburgh, from 1589 to 1613, married a niece of Andrew Melville the Reformer, and was, as a brass in his church now records, ‘ one of those who, summoned by James VI. to Hampton Court in 1606, refused to surrender their principles to his desires for the establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland.’ James, born 1680, whose father was one of the Governors of the Darien Company, bought the estate of Pilrig, lying between Edinburgh and Leith, with which the family has ever since been connected, and to which David Balfour is brought in Catriona. The laird whom David met was James, born 1705, who, having studied at Leyden, became Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, and then exchanged this Chair for that of the Laws of Nature and Nations. His wife was a daughter of Sir John Elphinstone of Logie and granddaughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, known as Lord Minto, a judge of the Court of Session. It was through this connection that Stevenson was able to say, ‘ I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots’.’ The Professor’s son, John Balfour, father of the minister of Colinton, married his cousin Jean Whyte; and so by this marriage Stevenson’s mother was a second cousin of the novelist, Major George Whyte- Melville.

Lewis Balfour was born at Pilrig in 1777; about the age of twenty he showed symptoms of a weak chest, and was sent for a winter to the Isle of Wight with the most entire success. On returning, he took orders, went to his first Ayrshire parish, and there fell in love with and married a daughter of Dr. Smith of Galston, the Dr. Smith who in Burns’s Holy Fair ‘ opens out his cauld harangues on practice and on morals.’ In 1823 he came to the parish of Colinton, and there remained until his death thirty-seven years later. In 1844 he lost his wife, a woman of great personal beauty and sweetness of character, and the care of the household fell into the hands of his eldest unmarried daughter. His is the manse of Memories and Portraits, the favourite home of his grandson’s childhood. The essay in question describes him ‘as a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him — partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned for beauty, and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. . . . He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young. . . . When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or letters to his scattered family in a ,dark and cold room with a library of bloodless books — and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture.

“Thy foot He’ll not let slide, nor will He slumber that thee keeps,”

it ran — a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that really merited reward.

‘And I must suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and parson.’ The picture was not given (how should it have been?) but on that, and more than one other occasion, the minister showed himself in a very kind and sympathetic mood to his little kinsman. ‘ Try as I please,’ wrote the grandson in later days,’ I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.’ Yet even if no individual traits or physical resemblances can be traced to the old minister, much of the general Scottish cast of character in Stevenson — the ‘strong Scots accent of the mind’ — was confirmed by this strain; and it is evident that his intensity, his ethical preoccupations, and, as he himself says, his ‘love of preaching’ were due, at all events in part, to the fact that he was a ‘ grandson of the manse.’

Such, at any rate, was the history of his maternal ancestors, the Balfours, a family who possessed in a high degree the domestic virtues of the Lowland Scot. The laird of Pilrig in Catriona,, who was drawn (as far as possible) from existing records, was no unfair representative of them all: when good or evil, honour or dishonour, were presented to them as alternatives, there would be no hesitation in their choice, but they were rarely surprised in so distressing a dilemma. Till after the date I have reached, few of the cadets ever sought their fortunes abroad, though the next generation was more enterprising, and four out of Mrs. Stevenson’s five brothers spent much of their lives in India or New Zealand. But for the most part the family were stay-at-home folk, and adventures, which are to the adventurous, came not near their peaceful dwellings.

From Stevensons, Balfours, and the two families of Smiths, their descendant turned to see if he could find no trace of any origin more stimulating or more romantic. The name of Stevenson seemed to him Norse; or again, he clung to a very vague tradition that his father’s family was ‘somehow descended from a French barber surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one of the Cardinal Beatons.’

Even more fascinating was the theory based on nothing more than the fact that Stevenson was used permanently as a surname by some of the proscribed Macgregors. To have proved himself a disguised clansman of Rob Roy, and to have had James Mohr for the black sheep of the family, was a dream which it was worth a world of pains to verify; and the possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow ‘may have had a Highland alias upon his conscience and a claymore in his back parlour’ was too delightful to be let go without a struggle. But death interrupted these inquiries, and for these shadowy speculations there seems to be no ground in history. Mr. J. H. Stevenson of Edinburgh, a namesake, and a specialist in these matters, has investigated the question dispassionately and thoroughly, and his conclusion1 is that all theories of a possible Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain; that this family can be traced only to the stock of Westland Whigs settled in the end of the seventeenth century in the parish of Neilston; and that it is impossible to say anything about the date or origin of their first settlement in the locality. The most striking fact about them as a whole is, after all, the contrast between ‘ this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity’ that began with Robert Stevenson.

1 Family of Engineers% p. 201, note.

If it be difficult to follow his ancestors, it is manifestly impossible to find any safe ground for speculating on the race to which Stevenson belonged. None of his forbears for many centuries, so far as we can tell, were newcomers to Scotland; and it is probable that in him, as in almost any other native of the same region, several strains of the long-established races were combined. The word ‘ Balfour,’ as Cluny reminds us in Kidnapped, is ‘good Gaelic,’ its meaning being ‘ cold croft or farm.’ The place of that name is in Fife. The estate was held by the Bethunes for five hundred years, until recently it passed again into the hands of a Balfour ‘of that ilk.’ But the appellation of a family need signify no more than the former possession of some holding to which the Celts had already given a name, and the Balfours of Pilrig belonged apparently to an East Lowland type. Renfrew, on the other hand, was part of the Celtic kingdom of the Britons of Alclyde, and it was in that territory that the name of Stevenson has been chiefly found, and that this particular family was settled. Neither name nor locality, however, is any sure guide to an origin so remote; and we can be certain of no more than this, that Louis Stevenson and his father and grandfather exhibited many moods and tendencies of mind attributed to the Celtic race.

CHAPTER II

HIS PARENTS

‘We are the pledge of their dear and joyful union, we have been the solicitude of their days and the anxiety of their nights, we have made them, though by no will of ours, to carry the burden of our sins, sorrows, and physical infirmities. ... A good son, who can fulfil what is expected of him, has done his work in life. He has to redeem the sins of many, and restore the world’s confidence in children.’ — R. L. S., ‘Reflections and Remarks on Human Life,’ Miscellanea, p. 27.

‘ Peace and her huge invasion to these shores Puts daily home; innumerable sails Dawn on the far horizon and draw near; Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach:

Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there, And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef, The long, resounding foreland, Pharos stands.

These are thy works,

O father, these thy crown.’

R. L. S., Underwoods, xxviii.

Without a knowledge of his parents it would be hard to understand the man whose life and character are set forth in these pages. Yet of Thomas Stevenson, at any rate, I should despair of presenting any adequate image, were it not for the sketch in Memories and Portraits, and an account of his boyhood, written by his son in 1887, and as yet unpublished, which would have formed a later chapter of A Family of Engineers.

He was born in 1818, the youngest son of Robert Stevenson, and one of a family of thirteen children.

‘ He had his education at a private school, kept by a capable but very cruel man called Brown, in Nelson Street, and then at the High School of Edinburgh. His first year was in the old building down Infirmary Street, and I have often heard him tell how he took part in the procession to the new and beautiful place upon the Calton Hill. Piper was his master, a fellow much given to thrashing. He never seems to have worked for any class that he attended; and in Piper’s took a place about half-way between the first and last of a hundred and eighty boys. Yet his friends were among the duxes. He tells most admirably how he once on a chance question got to the top of the class among all his friends; and how they kept him there for several days by liberal prompting and other obvious devices, until at last he himself wearied of the fierce light that beat upon the upper benches. “ It won’t do,” he said. “ Good-bye.” And being left to his own resources, he rapidly declined, and before that day was over was half-way back again to his appropriate level. It is an odd illustration of how carelessly a class was then taught in spite of the many stripes. I remember how my own Academy master, the delightful D’Arcy Thompson, not forty years later, smelling a capable boy among the boobies, persecuted the bottom of the class for four days, with the tawse going at a great rate; until the event amply justified his suspicion, and an inveterate booby, M by name, shot up some forty places, and was ever afterwards a decent, if not a distinguished pupil.