Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1095 page)

—   (here he made a gesture with his hand as if he were trying to shape something and give it outline and form)

—   “you may take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express and realise it. I ‘11 give you an example — The Merry Men. There I began with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and 1 gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with which that coast affected me.”

It was on this last scheme that Sophia Scarlet had been conceived, the atmosphere being that of a large plantation in Tahiti, such as Mr. Stewart’s had been at Atimono twenty years before.1 It may be that the method did not lend itself readily to an effective sketch of the plot; the draft of the beginning of the story seems to me better than I thought the outline at the time. But in any case there could be no hesitation in the choice. Weir of Hermiston was begun, and for three or four days Stevenson was in such a seventh heaven as he has described:2 he worked all day and all evening, writing or talking, debating points, devising characters and incidents, ablaze with enthusiasm, and abounding with energy. No finished story was, or ever will be, so good as Weir of Hermiston shone to us in those days by the light of its author’s first ardour of creation.

Then he settled down, and a few days later read aloud to the family, as was his custom, the first draft of the opening chapters. After that but little progress was made, and in January, 1893, St. Ives was begun as a short story, the visit of the ladies to the prisoners in 1 South Sea Bubbles, 24th August, 1870. 2 See vol. ii. p. 38. Edinburgh being introduced at first as a mere episode without result. Stevenson was then attacked by hemorrhage: silence was imposed, and for several days he continued his work only by dictating to his stepdaughter on his fingers in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. In this fashion he achieved from five to seven pages of manuscript a day. Before long, however, he left home with his wife and Mrs. Strong upon his last visit to Sydney, all work was stopped, and on his return in six weeks’ time he began a short story for the Illustrated London News. He had lately been reading again Barbey d’Aure- villy, and his mind had turned to Brittany. The new tale dealt with the Chouans in 1793, and was to be called The Owl. But it did not prosper; the writer was not well, and he was anxious about his wife’s health, and when one chapter had been written, he gave up the attempt and took up a half-finished piece of work, which afterward became The Ebb Tide.

This was a story begun with Mr. Osbourne in Honolulu just after their return from Tahiti, and known at that time as The Pearl Fisher and later as The Schooner Farallone. Mr. Osbourne had drafted the opening chapters, and no work of his had ever earned more praise from his stepfather. But at that moment an area of several acres behind the house was being cleared of forest and planted with pineapples for exportation — a scheme which it was hoped would make the plantation pay, and for the time being this engaged all Mr. Osbourne’s energies. Stevenson, talking to me one day, produced the unfinished draft of the story, which at this time included only the first ten or eleven chapters, and debated what course he should pursue. The fragment was originally intended as a prologue; Attwater was to be blinded with vitriol and then return to England. The remainder of the action of the book was to take place in England, and chiefly in Blooms- bury, where the Herricks lived. Stevenson now reconsidered the whole question, accepted a shorter ending, and grew more and more interested in the character of Attwater, as he worked it out. It is perhaps worth remarking that the picture of the arrival of the schooner at the new island gives better than anything else some of the charm of such cruises as those which delighted its author, who found no experience more exhilarating than “when you sight an island and drop anchor in a new world.”1

The fables begun before he had left England and promised to Messrs. Longmans, he attacked again, and from time to time added to their number. The reference to Odin perhaps is due to his reading of the Sagas, which led him to attempt a tale in the same style, called “The Waif Woman.” But I find no clue to any fresh study of Celtic legends that could have suggested the last and most beautiful fable of all, called “The Song of the Morrow,” which dealt with the king’s daughter of Duntrine, who “had no care for the morrow and no power upon the hour,” and is like nothing else Stevenson ever wrote.

Besides all these and the letters to the Times, as well as his private correspondence, there were endless other schemes, for the most part projected and perhaps not even begun, never certainly brought near to completion. He wrote to Mr. Charles Baxter: “My schemes 1 Letters, ii. 120. are all in the air, and vanish and reappear again like shapes in the clouds.” So likewise to Miss Boodle: “ I have a projected, entirely planned love-story — everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I ‘m afraid — called Cannonmills. And I ‘ve a vague, rosy haze before me — a love-story too, but not improper — called The Rising Sun. It ‘s the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it’s a kind of a pun: it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him and had befriended him. I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions: it should be pretty and true if I could do it.”

Neither of these was ever written. There was also a play for home representation, showing the adventures of an English tourist in Samoa; and I can remember two more serious schemes which were likewise without result. In the August before he died, he drew up with Mr. Osbourne the outline of a history, or of a series of the most striking episodes, of the Indian Mutiny, to be written for boys, and sent home for the books necessary for its execution. Another day he sketched the plan of an English grammar, to be illustrated by examples from the English classics. These are but a few, the many are unremembered; but all alike belong, not to the fleet of masterpieces unlaunched, but the larger and more inglorious squadron whose keels were never even laid down.

CHAPTER XVI

THE END — 1894

“Brief day and bright day And sunset red, Early in the evening, The stars are overhead.”

R. L. S.

“Wanted Volunteers To do tbeir best for twoscore years! A ready soldier, here 1 stand, Primed for Thy command, With burnished sword. If this be faith, O Lord, Help Thou mine unbelief And be my battle brief.”

Envoy to No. XXV. of Songs of Travel.

The climate of Samoa had apparently answered the main purpose of preserving Stevenson from any disabling attacks of illness, and allowing him to lead a life of strenuous activity. “I do not ask for health,” he had said to his stepson at Bournemouth, “ but I will go anywhere and live in any place where I can enjoy the ordinary existence of a human being.” And this had now been granted to him beyond his utmost hope.

In all the time he was in Samoa he had but two or three slight hemorrhages, that were cured within a very few days. The consumption in his lungs was definitely arrested, but it seems certain that a structural weakening of the arteries was slowly and inevitably going on, al- though his general health was apparently not affected. He had influenza at least once; occasionally he was ailing, generally with some indefinite lassitude which was attributed to malaria or some other unverifiable cause. In the summer of 1892 he was threatened with writers’ cramp, which had attacked him as long ago as 1884. From this time forth, however, his stepdaughter wrote to his dictation nearly all his literary work and correspondence, and, thanks to her quickness and unwearying devotion, he suffered the least possible inconvenience from this restriction of his powers. He had one or two threatenings of tropical diseases, which were promptly averted; and for several periods, to his own intense disgust, he gave up even the very moderate quantity of red wine which seemed to be a necessity of life to him, and — worst deprivation of all — he abandoned at these times the cigarettes which usually he smoked all day long.1

But in spite of these occasional lapses, he was able to lead an active life, full of varied interests, and the amount of work which he did during this period would have been satisfactory to less careful writers, even if they had done nothing else but follow their own profession without any interruption or diversion whatever.

In this respect Samoa was an infinite gain. If the tropical climate in any degree weakened the bodily fabric that might longer have borne the strain of his im- • petuous life in some more bracing air, no one can for a moment doubt what choice he himself would have made had he been offered five years of activity, of 1 Letters, ii. 297. cruising and riding and adventure, against five-and- twenty or fifty of existence in the sick-room and the sanatorium.

It was his friends and his country that he missed. From the day that Mr. Colvin went down the ship’s side in the Thames, or the day that Mr. Low parted from him in New York, Stevenson never again saw any one of his old and intimate companions. Fortune was against him in the matter. They were all busy people, with many engagements and many ties, and when at last Mr. Charles Baxter was able to start for Samoa, he had not yet reached Egypt before the blow fell. Nor was this perversity of fortune confined to his old friends alone; it also affected the younger writers with whom, in spite of distance, he had formed ties more numerous, and, in proportion to their number, more intimate than have ever before been established and maintained at any such distance by correspondence alone. And it was the more tantalising because the paths of several seemed likely to lead them past the very island where he lived. So he had to content himself as best he might with his mail-bag, which, especially in the answers to the Vailima Letters, did much to remove for him the drawbacks of his isolation and of absence from the centres of literature to which he always looked for praise and blame.

But besides the loss of intercourse, he more than most men suffered from another pang. The love of country which is in all Scots, and beyond all others lies deepest in the Celtic heart, flowed back upon him again and again with a wave of uncontrollable emotion. When the “smell of the good wet earth” came to him, it came “with a kind of Highland touch.” A tropic shower discovered in him “a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander.” When he turned to his grandfather’s life, he was filled with this yearning, and the beautiful sentences in which he has described1 the old man’s farewell to “ Sumburgh and the wild crags of Skye “ were his own valediction to those shores. No more was he to “see the topaz and the ruby interchange on the summit of the Bell Rook,” no more to see the castle on its hill, or “the venerable city which he must always think of as his home.” As he wrote of himself, “ Like Leyden I have gone into far lands to die, not stayed like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil.”

It is not to be wondered that his letters show moods of depression which his indomitable spirit prevented him from manifesting at the time to those around him, and which perhaps beset him most when he turned to his correspondence. As has been well said:2 “He was an exile, and though his exile lay in pleasant places, he had an exile’s thoughts, and these were bound to be uppermost when he wrote to his old intimates.”

There were times when he was tempted to risk everything, and to go back to the old life and the old friends, were it only for a few weeks, or even a few days. But he resisted the temptation, and fought on manfully to the end.

For the rest the advantages and drawbacks of his position were very evenly balanced: if absence threw him out of touch with what went on at home, it also 1 Vol. i. p. 9.         2 Quarterly Review, No. 381, p. 196. kept him clear of literary cliques and coteries, and saved him from many interruptions and calls upon his time; if it hindered his personal influence, it gave, as Mr. Quiller Couch has pointed out, a greater scope and leisure for his correspondence. His earlier Scotch novels were, as we have seen, not written in Scotland, and residence in that country could hardly have bettered his latest stories. On the other hand, among the work to which Polynesia diverted his attention there is nothing, as a whole, ranking as quite first-rate except The Beach of Falesd.

One drawback to Samoa there certainly was, redeemed by no corresponding advantage, and that was the inevitable delay in obtaining material or information. If a book were wanted, it was usually of such a date and character that it was mere waste of time to attempt to procure it nearer than London or Edinburgh, and this meant, under the most favourable circumstances, an interval of nearly three months, even if the right book existed or could be obtained at all.

This to a man of Stevenson’s temperament and fertility was most unsettling; and it involved besides great waste of labour, and the abandonment of much work that had been well begun.

The difficulty of the life in Samoa was its great expense. In 1887 Stevenson had written: “Wealth is only useful for two things — a yacht and a string quartette. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.” But though he had neither the music nor the vessel, and was now making an income of six or seven times the amount mentioned, it was no more than enough to meet the cost of his living and the needs of his generosity, while he was occasionally haunted by a fear lest his power of earning should come to an end.1

During the period of his residence at Vailima he returned but twice to the world of populous cities. In the early part of 1893 he paid a visit of several weeks to Sydney, and though as usual there he was much confined to his room, he derived from the trip a good deal of enjoyment. For the first time he realised that his fame had reached the Colonies, and though no man was ever under fewer illusions upon the point, he enjoyed the opportunities it gave him of meeting all sorts of people. Artists and Presbyterian ministers alike vied in entertaining him; at Government House he was just in time to see the last of Lord and Lady Jersey; and by this time there were at Sydney a number of friends in whose company he delighted, especially Dr. Fairfax Ross and the Hon. B. R. Wise. But the event which pleased and cheered him most was his meeting at Auckland with Sir George Grey, with whom he had more than one prolonged and most inspiring discussion upon the affairs of Samoa.