Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1054 page)

1     Cf. Underwoods, No. xxvi., ‘The Sick Child.’

place, as indeed she had no need to do. Her true reward has been a monument of gratitude for which a parallel is hard to find. At twenty (an age when young men are not generally very tender to such memories) Louis wrote the paper on Nurses printed in Juvenilia. Fifteen years later the dedication of the Child’s Garden was ‘ To Alison Cunningham, From Her Boy/ and this was but the preface to one of the happiest sets of verses in one of the happiest of books. Alison Hastie, the lass at Limekilns, who put David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Forth, was, he told her, an ancestress of hers, just as David was a kinsman of his own. Of all his works he sent her copies; throughout his life he wrote letters to her; when he had a house, he had her to stay with him, and even proposed to bring her out on a visit to Samoa. In another fragment of autobiography he has again described her services: 4 My recollection of the long nights when I was kept awake by coughing are only relieved by the thought of the tenderness of my nurse and second mother (for my first will not be jealous), Alison Cunningham. She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help and console me . . . till the whole sorrow of the night was at an end with the arrival of the first of that long string of country carts, that in the dark hours of the morning, with the neighing of horses, the cracking of the whips, the shouts of drivers, and a hundred other wholesome noises, creaked, rolled, and pounded past my window.’

Thus she tended his bodily life, watchfully and un- weariedly: to his spiritual welfare, as she conceived it, she gave, if possible, even greater care. His father and mother were both genuinely religious people: the former clung, with a desperate intensity, to the rigid tenets of his faith; the latter was a true ‘ child of the manse,’ and visited and befriended churches and missions wherever she went. But if Louis spent, as he tells us,’ a Covenanting childhood,’ it was to Cummie that this was due.

Besides the Bible and the Shorter Catechism, which he had also from his mother, Cummie filled him with a love of her own favourite authors, M’Cheyne and others, Presbyterians of the straitest doctrine. It was she, in all probability, who first introduced him to 4 The Cameronian Dream.’1 That poem, he afterwards told Mr. Gosse, made the most indelible impression on his fancy, and was the earliest piece of literature which awakened in him the sentiment of romantic Scottish history.

From her, too, he first heard some of the writings of the Covenanters, Wodrow, Peden, and others, who directly influenced his choice of subjects, and according to his own testimony (Letters, ii. 312) had a great share in the formation of his style. A special favourite also was an old copy of A Cloud of Witnesses, which had belonged to his nurse’s grandmother.

In matters of conduct Cummie was for no half-measures. Cards were the Devil’s books. Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson played whist, decorous family whist — the mother had the keenest zest for all games — and Louis could remember praying fervently with his nurse that it might not be visited on them to their perdition. The novel and the playhouse were alike anathema to her; and this would seem no very likely opening for the career of one who was to be a novelist and write plays as well. For her pupil entered fully into the spirit of her ordinances, and insisted on a most rigorous observance of her code.

‘ I was brought up on Casselfs Family Paper,’ he wrote, ‘but the lady who was kind enough to read the tales aloud to me was subject to sharp attacks of conscience. She took the Family Paper on confidence; the tales it contained being Family Tales, not novels. But every now and then, something would occur to alarm her finer sense; she would express a well-grounded fear that the 1 This poem of fourteen stanzas was written by James Hyslop (1798-1827), originally a herdboy in the Cameronian country, and may be found in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (3rd edition, vol. ii. p. 216).

current fiction was | going to turn out a regular novel,” and the Family Paper> with my pious approval, would be dropped. Yet neither she nor I were wholly stoical; and when Saturday came round, we would study the windows of the stationer, and try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our favourites/1

In spite of her restrictions, Cummie was full of life and merriment. She danced and sang to her boy, and read to him most dramatically. She herself tells how, the last time she ever saw him, he said to her 4 before a room full of people, “ It’s you that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie.” “ Me, Master Lou,” I said; “ I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.” “ Ay, woman,” said he; “but it was the grand dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.”‘

When he was just three, his mother’s diary contains this entry: —

4 Mr. Swan at dinner. Smout recited the first four lines of “On Linden” in great style, waving his hand and making a splendid bow at the end. This is Cummie’s teaching.’ And no doubt the trick of gesture, partly inherited from his father, which accompanied his conversation through life, received some of its emphasis from his nurse.

The diary just quoted records somewhat irregularly the development of the boy’s powers and tastes and the working of his mind in childhood, but the nature and interest of the entries are fairly represented by the following extracts: —

k 26th July 1853. — Smout’s favourite occupation is making a church; he makes a pulpit with a chair and a stool; reads sitting, and then stands up and sings by turns.

st October 1853. — He is a great chatterbox, and speaks very distinctly; he knows many stories out of 1 Scribner’s Magazine, July 1888.

the Bible, and about half of the letters of the alphabet, but he is not so fond of hymns as he used to be.

‘6th November 1853. — I read the story of Samson once or twice out of the Bible to Smout, and was much surprised by his repeating it almost word for word.

48th December 1854. — Lou said, “You can never be good unless you pray.” When asked how he knew, he said with great emphasis, “ Because I’ve tried it.”

122nd December 1854. — Lou prays every night of his own accord that God would bless “ the poor soldiers that are fighting at Sebastopol.”

‘25th December 1854. — Smout gets a sword for his Christmas present. When his father was disparaging it, he said, “ I can tell you, papa, it’s a silver sword and a gold sheath, and the boy’s very well off and quite contented.”

‘9th January 1855. — When made to wear a shawl above his sword, he was in distress for fear it would not look like a soldier, and then said, “ Do you think it will look like a night-march, mama?”

l6th February 1855. — Lou dreamed that he heard “the noise of pens writing.”

‘I*]th February 1855, Sunday. — When I asked Lou what he had been doing, he said, “ I’ve been playing all day,” and then when I looked at him, he added, “at least, I’ve been making myself cheerful.”

‘1 Sth April 1856. — Smout can’t understand the days getting longer, and says he “ would rather go to bed at the seven o’clock that used to be.”

i lyth July 1856. — I heard to-day that what had made Smout so ill on the 5th was that he and Billy had been eating buttercups, which are poisonous; both were ill, so we may be thankful that they were not worse. Billy confessed, and Smout acknowledged whenever he was asked.’ (Mrs. Stevenson, however, omits the true explanation — that the boys were shipwrecked sailors, and could get no other food to support life.)

It was in the end of 1856 that Louis was for the first time experiencing ‘ the toils and vigils and distresses’ of composition. His uncle, David Stevenson, offered to his children and nephews a prize for the best history of Moses. Louis was allowed to try for it by dictating his version to his mother, and to this he devoted five successive Sunday evenings. A Bible picture-book was given to him as an extra prize, and, adds his mother,’ from that time forward it was the desire of his heart to be an author.’

For this he had already a qualification, which children either seldom possess, or of which at any rate they but seldom remember the possession. In a late reminiscence1 he greatly applauds his nurse’s ear and speaks of her reading to him ‘the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on the assonances and alliterations.’ So he tells us of the delight he already took in words for their own sake, and of the thrill which the mere sound of ‘ Jehovah Tsidkenu’ produced in him without reference to any possible meaning. To the same source I must refer for his account of the imagery called up in his mind from local surroundings by the metrical version of the twenty- third Psalm; the ‘ pastures green’ being stubble-fields by the Water of Leith, and ‘death’s dark vale’ a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery.

But in these suburbs only a part of his childhood was spent. Of other and happier playing-places he has left two records; the one a brief reference, with which the first description of his Edinburgh life, already quoted, terminates; the other, much more detailed, was written probably about 1872, and was manifestly the quarry from which was drawn most of the material for ‘The Manse’ in Memories and Portraits.

From these two essays it may be seen that Stevenson, alike at two-and-twenty and at five-and-thirty, remembered his childhood as it is given to few grown men 1 ‘ Rosa quo Locorum5: Juvenilia, pp. 303, 308.

and women to remember, and both papers contain the raw material or perhaps rather the prose version of many passages in the Child’s Garden of Verses.

‘One consequence of my ill-health was my frequent residence at Colinton Manse. Out of my reminiscences of life in that dear place, all the morbid and painful elements have disappeared. I remember no more nights of storm; no more terror or sickness. Beyond a thunderstorm when I was frightened, after a half make-believe fashion, and huddled with my cousins underneath the dining-room table; and a great flood of the river, to see which my father carried me wrapped in a blanket through the rain; I can recall nothing but sunshiny weather. That was my golden age: et ego in Arcadia vixi. There is something so fresh and wholesome about all that went on at Colinton, compared with what I recollect of the town, that I can hardly, even in my own mind, knit the two chains of reminiscences together; they look like stories of two different people, ages apart in time and quite dissimilar in character.’1

In the ‘Reminiscences of Colinton Manse,’2 ‘I take pleasure,’ he says, ‘in writing down these recollections, not because I fear to forget them, but because I wish to renew and to taste more fully the satisfaction that they have afforded me already.

‘The Water of Leith, after passing under Colinton Bridge, makes a curve, following the line of the high, steep, wooded bank on the convex, but on the concave enclosing a round flat promontory, which was once, I suppose, a marsh, and then a riverside meadow. . . . Immediately after crossing the bridge the roadway forks into two; one branch whereof tends upward to the entrance of the churchyard; while the other, green with grass, slopes downward, between two blank walls and past the cottage of the snuff-mill, to the gate of the manse.

1     Dated Swanston, Sunday, 18th May 1873.

2     Unpublished ms., written probably about 1872-3.

‘ There were two ways of entering the manse garden: one the two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton, and the other a door for pedestrians on the side next the kirk. . . . On the left hand were the stable, coach-house, and washing-houses, clustered round a small paven court. For the interior of these buildings, as abutting on the place of sepulture, I had always considerable terror; but the court has one pleasant memento of its own. When the grass was cut and stacked against the wall in the small paven court at the back of the house, do you not remember, my friends, making round holes in the cool, green herb and calling ourselves birds? It did not take a great height, in those days, to lift our feet off the ground; so when we shut our eyes, we were free to imagine ourselves in the fork of an elm bough, or half-way down a cliff among a colony of gulls and gannets. . . .

‘ Once past the stable you were now fairly within the garden. On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally steeped in sunshine; and all the day long, from the impending wood, there came the sweetest and fullest chorus of merles and thrushes and all manner of birds, that it ever was my lot to hear. The lawn was just the centre of all this — a perfect goblet for sunshine, and the Dionysius’ ear for a whole forest of bird-songs. This lawn was a favourite playground; a lilac that hung its scented blossom out of the glossy semicirque of laurels was identified by my playmates and myself as that tree whose very shadow was death. In the great laurel at the corner I have often lain perdu, with a toy-gun in my hand, waiting for a herd of antelopes to defile past me down the carriage drive, and waiting (need I add?) in vain.1 Down at the corner of the lawn next the snuff-mill wall 1 Another version runs: 4 Once as I lay, playing hunter, hid in a thick laurel, and with a toy-gun upon my arm, I worked myself so hotly into the spirit of my play, that I think I can still see the herd of antelope come sweeping down the lawn and round the deodar; it was almost a vision.’

In 1857, at Bridge of Allan, he was one day asked, ‘ What are you doing?’ ‘ Ah’m just hunting blaauwboks!’

there was a practicable passage through the evergreens and a door in the wall, which let you out on a small patch of sand, left in the corner by the river. Just across, the woods rose like a wall into the sky; and their lowest branches trailed in the black waters. Naturally, it was very sunless. . . . There was nothing around and above you but the shadowy foliage of trees. It seemed a marvel how they clung to the steep slope on the other side; and, indeed, they were forced to grow far apart, and showed the ground between them hid by an undergrowth of butter-bur, hemlock, and nettle. ... I wish I could give you an idea of this place, of the gloom, of the black slow water, of the strange wet smell, of the draggled vegetation on the far side whither the current took everything, and of the incomparably fine, rich yellow sand, without a grit in the whole of it, and moving below your feet with scarcely more resistance than a liquid. ... I remember climbing down one day to a place where we discovered an island of this treacherous material. O the great discovery! On we leapt in a moment; but on feeling the wet, sluicy island flatten out into a level with the river, and the brown water gathering about our feet, we were off it again as quickly. It was a “ quicksand,” we said; and thenceforward the island was held in much the same regard as the lilac-tree on the lawn.