Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Stevenson was looking for a new definition of ‘the spiritual’ as he began to detach himself from the established Church, and he became one of the first members of the Psychological Society of Edinburgh, precursor of the Spiritualist Society, made up mostly of medical men, artists and university students. Bob was also a member (later vice-president), Stevenson himself was secretary briefly, and in 1873 he planned an article on spiritualism, probably to read to the Spec.

(#litres_trial_promo) When he told his parents later that he had not come lightly to his views about religion, he hardly did justice to the rigour he had applied during these years to questions of belief and ethics. It turned out to be a lifetime’s preoccupation, and at no point did he warrant his father’s intemperate description of him as merely ‘a careless infidel’.

The atmosphere at Heriot Row struck some observers as rather lax: both Thomas Stevenson and his son were loud, domineering talkers, and Louis shocked one set of visitors by ‘contradicting his father flatly before every one at table’.

(#litres_trial_promo) At a dinner party in the early 1870s, Flora Masson, daughter of Jenkin’s friend Professor David Masson, remembered being placed between the father and son and being amazed (and perhaps a little wearied) at how they took exactly opposing views on every subject. Louis’s talk that evening was ‘almost incessant’ (it was clearly one of his hyperactive days): ‘I felt quite dazed at the amount of intellection he expended on each subject, however trivial in itself,’ she wrote. ‘The father’s face at certain times was a study; an indescribable mixture of vexation, fatherly pride and admiration, and sheer bewilderment at his son’s brilliant flippancies and the quick young thrusts of his wit and criticism.’

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Flora was a fellow member of the Jenkins’ theatrical group, but remembered meeting Louis first (in the early 1870s) on a skating expedition with the professor and his family to Duddingston Loch, just to the south of Arthur’s Seat. She noted how the Jenkins always stayed in a couple, while Louis skated alone, ‘a slender, dark figure with a muffler about his neck; [ … ] disappearing and reappearing like a melancholy minnow among the tall reeds that fringe the Loch’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps he was auditioning for Hamlet. At the Jenkins’ theatricals Stevenson never managed to bag a major role. One year he was the prompt, another a bit player in Taming of the Shrew, another time he played the part of the dandy Sir Charles Pomander in Charles Reade and Thomas Taylor’s sentimental comedy Masks and Faces with ‘a gay insolence which made his representation [ … ] most convincing’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The highlight of his acting career came in 1875 as Orsino in Twelfth Night, but though the Heriot Row servants were mightily impressed with his appearance, and Margaret Stevenson glowed with maternal pride, the actor himself knew that in the process of being allotted a role of substance ‘one more illusion’ had been lost.

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Even though he wasn’t able to command it through acting ability, Stevenson was always likely to make a bid to arrest attention at the Jenkin plays. One time when he was in charge of the curtain, he mischievously raised it while two members of the cast were larking around on stage just after finishing a particularly intense tragic scene. Though some of the audience laughed, Stevenson didn’t escape a sharp reprimand from Jenkin. Flora, an intelligent young woman who later wrote novels and became the friend of both Browning and Florence Nightingale, seems to have escaped Stevenson’s notice even though she was put in his way so regularly by their mutual friends. But she was watching him, and remarked how he liked to keep his costume on as long as possible after a performance (preferably right through supper). She also remembered once seeing him walk up and down the Jenkins’ drawing room, watching himself in a mirror ‘in a dreamy, detached way’, ‘as if he were acting to himself being an actor’.

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His parents’ watchfulness grew more intense as Louis grew up and their hold over him loosened. His health became the language in which the family communicated, and was fussed over continually; uncle George Balfour, Mrs Stevenson’s distinguished doctor-brother, was always being sought for out-of-hours opinions, and several times prescribed his nephew short breaks at the Bridge of Allan or Swanston. ‘Rest’ was the favoured cure, though from what malady is hard to tell, apart from the perennial threat of ‘weakness’. Louis was very susceptible to catching viruses, and was always appallingly thin; today his appearance would suggest an immune deficiency syndrome. But when he was well, he bubbled over with vitality; his bright-eyed look, ready wit and endless appetite for talk were all legend. The collapses, when they came, were as often to do with depressed spirits as anything else.

Nevertheless, levels of fearfulness ran high in the household, and on hearing that her son wished to spend the summer of 1872 in Germany improving his knowledge of the language, Margaret Stevenson went into hysterics, saying she might never see him again. The plan was duly modified, and when Louis set out for Frankfurt that July in the company of Walter Simpson, it was for a three-week holiday, made over into another invalid tour by a rendezvous with his parents afterwards at Baden-Baden. Margaret’s fears seem to have been much more to do with Louis becoming independent than becoming ill.

This tightening of parental concern may have been a response to the new friendships that Louis was enjoying, mostly with lively law students like Baxter, and people in the Jenkin circle, from which his parents were excluded. Added to this was the return to Edinburgh from Cambridge of Bob Stevenson in the summer of 1871. Bob’s aimless brilliance and energy were a tonic to his younger cousin, who immediately drew him into the group of friends – Louis, Baxter, Simpson and Ferrier – who together formed a society called ‘LJR’. The initials stood for ‘Liberty – Justice – Reverence’, fervent discussion of which – over many rounds of drinks in Advocates’ Close – was one of their raisons d’être. (A manuscript note by Stevenson links ‘LJR’ with ‘Whitman: humanity: [ … ] love of mankind: sense of inequality: justification of art: decline of religion’.) More often, though, the members of LJR were to be found planning elaborate practical jokes, and devised a term, ‘Jink’, to describe their activities: ‘as a rule of conduct, Jink consisted in doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their absurdity and the consequent laughter’.

(#litres_trial_promo) They invented a character called John Libbel in whose name they carried out fake correspondences with prominent Edinburgh citizens, and for whom they printed calling cards: ‘I have spent whole days going from lodging-house to lodging-house inquiring anxiously, “If Mr Libbel had come yet?”’, Stevenson related, ‘and when the servant or a landlady had told us “No”, assuring her that he would come soon, and leaving a mysterious message.’

(#litres_trial_promo) On another occasion, they started a rumour that Libbel had inherited a fortune and that they were agents of the estate. ‘Libbelism’ was really a form of subversive performance art, and ‘Jink’ a kind of Dadaism avant la lettre, set in 1870s Edinburgh. Stevenson’s own remarks corroborate this, with their echo of ‘art for art’s sake’: ‘we were disinterested, we required none of the encouragement of success, we pursued our joke, our mystification, our blague for its own sake’.

Once, to their amazement, Louis and Bob were caught out by a jeweller in whose shop they had been attempting to act out ‘some piece of vaulting absurdity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The shopman’s eyes lit up when he realised what was going on: ‘“I know who you are,” he cried; “you’re the two Stevensons.”’ The man said that his colleague would be vexed; he’d been dying to see them in action. Would the young men come back later for tea? And thus, bested by one of their own victims and astonished that their real names were known to anyone, the cousins beat a hasty retreat. Just as Libbelism anticipates some of the fantastic plots of Stevenson’s New ArabianNights, so this scene in the jeweller’s is like a comic version of his story ‘Markheim’. ‘Jink’ was an imaginative release in more ways than one.

At this date, Bob was living at home in the Portobello district of Edinburgh with his widowed mother and sisters and studying at the city’s School of Art. He was going to be an artist, and had been travelling in France for the past few summers with other painter-friends. He had always been a hero-figure to Louis, and now seemed more fortunate than ever: of the two youths, Bob was by far the more attractive, with his fine tall figure and well-grown moustaches (Louis’s weedy lip-hair was the butt of jokes for years). Women all fell for him at a glance, and men loved him for his exuberant erudition and excitable character. The word ‘genius’ was often applied, especially with regard to his talk, though Louis’s characterisation of it perhaps better suggests the description ‘manic’: ‘the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell [ … ] the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But this sort of wild verbal exhibitionism had another charm for Louis; as he said in the same essay, ‘there are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, impromptu, collaborative, and always To be continued.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had less reason to delight in their nephew’s return to Edinburgh. With his flagrant pursuit of something that hardly had a name yet – la vie bohème – his art studies, his affectations of dress and his insolent wordiness, Bob must have looked like the least appropriate companion possible for their son. The parents didn’t know, of course, about the long drinking sessions in Advocates’ Close, the excesses of Libbelism or the long walks on which Louis and Bob behaved like a couple of mad tramps, singing and dancing on the moonlit roads out of sheer high spirits. They also, presumably, hadn’t heard the story which went about a few years later, that Bob had divided his patrimony into ten equal parts and was going to allot himself one part a year for a decade, at the end of which he would commit suicide.

(#litres_trial_promo) But they knew enough to be worried, and when Thomas Stevenson, snooping among his son’s papers, came upon the comically-intended ‘constitution’ of the LJR – beginning ‘Ignore everything that our parents have taught us’ – he was thrown into a state of angry panic. This was presumably before the evening (31 January 1873) when Thomas decided to challenge his son with some straight questions about his beliefs.

The timing of the interview was unfortunate. Louis had been ill for weeks with diphtheria, and was freshly impressed with the fragility of life and a sense of carpe diem. In the spirit of honest dealing, he decided not. to temporise as usual but to answer his father’s questions as truthfully as he could, saying to Thomas’s face that he no longer believed in the established Church or the Christian religion. ‘If I had foreseen the real Hell of everything since,’ he wrote miserably to Baxter after this spontaneous outburst, ‘I think I should have lied as I have done so often before.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For what began as an attempt at family openness turned into as traumatic an act of ‘coming out’ as can be imagined: a thunderbolt to the bewildered parents, to whom confirmation of Louis’s atheism was of course much more than a devastating personal rebuke or act of filial aggression; to believers like them, it meant the eternal damnation of their only child’s soul, and the possible contamination of other souls. The chagrin they felt when he abandoned the family profession was nothing to him turning his back on salvation. ‘And now!’ Louis continued in his outpouring to Baxter,

they are both ill, both silent, both as down in the mouth as if – I can find no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it in my heart to retract; but it is too late; and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than Hell upon my father; but can I help it? They don’t see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold.

[ … ] Now, what is to take place? What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said, ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ As my mother said, ‘This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.’ And, O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.

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The household became eerily quiet, like ‘a house in which somebody is still waiting burial’. His parents went into a state of hushed emergency, Margaret pathetically suggesting that her son join the minister’s youth classes, Thomas locked in his study, reading up Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion in order to rejoin the fray. ‘What am I to do?’ Stevenson wrote despairingly to his friend. ‘If all that I hold true and most desire to spread, is to be such death and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and mother, what the devil am I to do?’

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The fallout from Louis’s confession continued for months, his father’s anger and his mother’s distress erupting uncontrollably all through the spring and summer of 1873. Margaret wept at church, Thomas was full of dark threats and despairing glances, and condemned his son’s attempts at cheerfulness as ‘heartless levity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Bob went off to Antwerp to study art in the spring, Louis felt his misery at home even more sharply, and by the summer was almost prostrated by illness. This was one area where the youth could still count on a sympathetic response from his parents. They agreed that he should have a holiday, somewhere quiet in the countryside, with friendly, trustworthy people. Their choice was Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of Margaret’s niece Maud and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington.

Frances Sitwell was lying on a sofa near a window at her friend Maud Babington’s home when she saw a young man approach up the drive. He was wearing a straw hat and velvet jacket, carried a knapsack and looked hot, having just walked from Bury St Edmunds, a good eight miles away. ‘Here is your cousin,’ she remarked to Maud, who went out through the french window to meet him. The young man – very boyish, and with a strong Scottish accent – seemed shy to begin with, and jumped at the chance to go and visit the moat in the company of Mrs Sitwell’s ten-year-old son, Bertie. But by the end of the day, when he and she began to talk seriously to each other, ‘an instantaneous understanding’ sprang up between them,

(#litres_trial_promo) and strong mutual attraction. ‘Laughter, and tears, too, followed hard upon each other till late into the night,’ Mrs Sitwell wrote, ‘and his talk was like nothing I had ever heard before, though I knew some of our best talkers and writers.’

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Frances Sitwell was thirty-four when she met Stevenson, and had been married since the age of twenty to the Reverend Albert Sitwell, sometime private secretary to the Bishop of London and vicar of Minster, in Kent, since 1869. They had met in Ireland, where both grew up, and spent the earliest part of their marriage in India; Frances had also lived in Australia. The marriage was not a success, at least not from Mrs Sitwell’s point of view. No one seems to have had a good word to say for her husband, ‘a man of unfortunate temperament and uncongenial habits’, according to E.V. Lucas.

(#litres_trial_promo) The euphemism hints at cruelty and vice (was Sitwell an adulterer? a drinker?), but all we can be sure of is that by the time the couple moved to Minster with their two little boys, Frederick and Bertie, Frances was finding it necessary to spend long periods of time away from home visiting friends, of whom Maud Babington was the closest. Like Louis, she was an exile at Cockfield from an intolerable home life.

When Stevenson met her in the summer of 1873, Mrs Sitwell was mourning the death of her elder son only three months before, aged twelve. The tragedy seems to have catalysed her thoughts about a permanent separation from her husband, though she knew it would be difficult to effect one without Sitwell’s agreement. She and her surviving son were tied to ‘the Vicar’ indefinitely unless she could become financially independent, which meant finding a job, a very daunting prospect for a woman of her social standing at the time.

One thing she didn’t consider, and which speaks volumes about her character, was to throw herself into the arms of one or other of her many admirers. They were, on the whole, adorers rather than suitors, in whom she inspired devotion that verged on idolisation. ‘Divining intuition like hers was genius. Vitality like hers was genius,’ one of them wrote; another, ‘she was the soul of honour, discretion and sympathy’, ‘waiting for her smile is the most delightful of anticipations, and when it comes it is always dearer than you remembered, and irradiates all who are in her company with happiness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Over the years she nurtured a string of needy young men, including Stevenson, Sidney Colvin, Cotter Morrison, Stephen Phillips and latterly Joseph Conrad, all of whom left ardent tributes to her virtues: a ‘good angel’, ‘a priceless counsellor’; a ‘deity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But above and beyond the superlatives, a genuinely extraordinary character emerges: not a wit, a beauty or a coquette, but a woman of quiet, tender and very ardent feelings, who retained a childlike capacity for simple pleasures and the subtlest appreciation of sophisticated ones. Colvin remembers her clapping her hands for joy and ‘leaping in her chair’ at the anticipation of a gift or treat, and described her sympathy thus: ‘She cools and soothes your secret smart before ever you can name it; she divines and shares your hidden joy, or shames your fretfulness with loving laughter; she unravels the perplexities of your conscience, and finds out something better in you than you knew of; she fills you not only with generous resolutions but with power to persist in what you have resolved.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was this paragon with whom Stevenson spent the month of August 1873. Sibylline, sensitive, brave, tender, distressed, bereaved, abused: he would have fallen in love with a tenth of her.

Mrs Sitwell, as we have seen, was delighted by the young Scot and within three days of his arrival at Cockfield had written to her friend Sidney Colvin to urge him to hurry if he wanted to meet ‘a brilliant and to my mind unmistakable young genius’

(#litres_trial_promo) who had ‘captivated the whole household’

(#litres_trial_promo) at Cockfield. Colvin had been a friend of hers (how good a friend I will discuss presently) since the late 1860s. They probably met through the Babingtons: Churchill Babington was made Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge during Colvin’s time there as an undergraduate. Mrs Sitwell intuited that Colvin and Stevenson would find each other interesting, but she also realised that Colvin, with his influential London literary connections, could be of use to her excitable new friend, who made no bones about the fact that the law was a bore and that he lived only for writing.

Sidney Colvin was only five years Stevenson’s senior, but had the air of a much older, more sedate person. Tall and thin, with papery dry skin, a rather ponderous manner and a speech impediment, he did not seem readily appealing. On graduating from Cambridge in 1867 he began a career as an art critic and literary commentator, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe and the Fortnightly Review, three of the most prestigious periodicals of the day. In 1871 he became the Portfolio’s main art critic and had already published a short book; he was a member of the Savile Club (as was Fleeming Jenkin) and a friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whose work he promoted avidly), and when Stevenson met him in 1873 he had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. A young man so well-placed in the world might well have adopted a superior air with Maud Babington’s scruffy student cousin, but Colvin’s manner was always respectful, courteous and hesitant – he was a very English Englishman, and though not charming himself, highly appreciative of charm. It is hard to say who was more pleased when the train pulled in at Cockfield on 6 August, the ‘young genius’ from Edinburgh, excited to be meeting the sage of the Fortnightly Review, or Colvin himself:

If you want to realise the kind of effect [Stevenson] made, at least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital presence, with something about it that at first sight struck you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, an Ariel. [ … ] he comprised within himself, and would flash on you in the course of a single afternoon, all the different ages and half the different characters of man, the unfaded freshness of a child, the ardent outlook and adventurous day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood, the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and already, as early as the midtwenties of his life, an almost uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age.

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The weeks at Cockfield passed in simple pleasure trips and long lounging days. Louis was already a favourite with Maud and Professor Babington (who called him ‘Stivvy’), and was a welcome companion to Bertie Sitwell, with whom he played at toy theatres and piggyback rides. The party visited Lavenham and Melford, and Louis was so ardent a helper at the school picnic that he blistered his hand slicing bread for the sandwiches. Colvin came and went, having discussed at length possible essay and book projects that Stevenson could put forward to the publisher Alexander Macmillan, and Stevenson was so excited at the prospect that he was already composing a piece on ‘Roads’ as he walked the lanes around Cockfield. ‘Roads’ seems a very apt subject for this pivotal moment in Stevenson’s career, when at last there appeared to be some alternative to the path he had been set on by his parents. Soothed by Mrs Sitwell and sponsored by Colvin, Stevenson was on the brink of enjoying the literary life he craved.

‘Roads’ wasn’t the only piece of writing Stevenson began at Cockfield; there was also an epistolary novel, or perhaps the resuscitation of an earlier attempt at a novel under the encouragement of Mrs Sitwell. Nothing remains of it now, but the heroine’s name was Claire and the project seems to have been closely tied to Louis’s burgeoning feelings for Mrs Sitwell herself, framed around an imagined or anticipated correspondence with her.