The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 23

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Mrs. Sitwell

The strain of anxiety recorded in the two last letters had given a shake to Stevenson’s own health, and it was agreed that he should go for a yachting tour with Sir Walter Simpson in the Inner Hebrides.

    [Edinburgh, June 1874], Thursday.

I have been made so miserable by Chopin’s Marche funèbre. Try two of Schubert’s songs, “Ich unglückselige Atlas” and “Du schönes Fischermädchen“ – they are very jolly. I have read aloud my death-cycle from Walt Whitman this evening. I was very much affected myself, never so much before, and it fetched the auditory considerable. Reading these things that I like aloud when I am painfully excited is the keenest artistic pleasure I know. It does seem strange that these dependent arts – singing, acting, and in its small way reading aloud seem the best rewarded of all arts. I am sure it is more exciting for me to read than it was for W. W. to write; and how much more must this be so with singing.

Friday.– I am going in the yacht on Wednesday. I am not right yet, and I hope the yacht will set me up. I am too tired to-night to make more of it. Good-bye. – Ever your faithful friend,

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Sidney Colvin

    [Edinburgh, June 1874], Friday.

MY DEAR COLVIN, – I am seedy – very seedy, I may say. I am quite unfit for any work or any pleasure; and generally very sick. I am going away next week on Wednesday for my cruise which I hope will set me up again. I should like a proof here up to Wednesday morning, or at Greenock, Tontine Hotel, up to Friday morning, as I don’t quite know my future address. I hope you are better, and that it was not that spell of work you had that did the harm. It is to my spurt of work that I am redevable for my harm. Walt Whitman is at the bottom of it all, ’cré nom! What a pen I have! – a new pen, God be praised, how smoothly it functions! Would that I could work as well. Chorus – Would that both of us could work as well – would that all of us could work as well! – Ever yours,

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.– Bob is better; but he might be better yet. All goes smoothly except my murrained health.

To Mrs. Sitwell

    Swanston [Summer 1874].

MY DEAR FRIEND, – I am back again here, as brown as a berry with sun, and in good form. I have been and gone and lost my portmanteau, with Walt Whitman in it and a lot of notes. This is a nuisance. However, I am pretty happy, only wearying for news of you and for your address.

Friday.—À la bonne heure! I hear where you are and that you are apparently fairish well. That is good at least. I am full of Reformation work; up to the eyes in it; and begin to feel learned. A beautiful day outside, though something cold.

    R. L. S.

To Sidney Colvin

Of the projects here mentioned, that of the little book of essays on the enjoyment of the world never took shape, nor were those contributions towards it which he printed in the Portfolio ever re-published until after the writer’s death. The Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland was printed in 1874, published as a pamphlet in February 1875, and attracted, I believe, no attention whatever. The “fables” must have been some of the earliest numbers of the series continued at odd times till near the date of his death and published posthumously: I do not know which, but should guess The House of Eld, Yellow Paint, and perhaps those in the vein of Celtic mystery, The Touchstone, The Poor Thing, The Song of To-morrow.

    [Swanston, Summer 1874], Tuesday.

MY DEAR COLVIN, – What is new with you? There is nothing new with me: Knox and his females begin to get out of restraint altogether; the subject expands so damnably, I know not where to cut it off. I have another paper for the PTFL[15 - Portfolio.] on the stocks: a sequel to the two others; also, that is to say, a word in season as to contentment and a hint to the careless to look around them for disregarded pleasures. Seeley wrote to me asking me “to propose” something: I suppose he means – well, I suppose I don’t know what he means. But I shall write to him (if you think it wise) when I send him this paper, saying that my writing is more a matter of God’s disposition than of man’s proposal; that I had from Roads upward ever intended to make a little budget of little papers all with this intention before them, call it ethical or æsthetic as you will; and thus I shall leave it to him (if he likes) to regard this little budget, as slowly they come forth, as a unity in its own small way. Twelve or twenty such essays, some of them mainly ethical and expository, put together in a little book with narrow print in each page, antique, vine leaves about, and the following title.

XII (OR XX) ESSAYS ON THE ENJOYMENT OF THE WORLD:

By Robert Louis Stevenson

(A motto in italics)

Publisher

Place and date

You know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice! I am going to launch on Scotch ecclesiastical affairs, in a tract addressed to the Clergy; in which doctrinal matters being laid aside, I contend simply that they should be just and dignified men at a certain crisis: this for the honour of humanity. Its authorship must, of course, be secret or the publication would be useless. You shall have a copy of course, and may God help you to understand it.

I have done no more to my fables. I find I must let things take their time. I am constant to my schemes; but I must work at them fitfully as the humour moves.

– To return, I wonder, if I have to make a budget of such essays as I dream, whether Seeley would publish them: I should give them unity, you know, by the doctrinal essays; nor do I think these would be the least agreeable. You must give me your advice and tell me whether I should throw out this delicate feeler to R. S.[16 - Richmond Seeley.]; or if not, what I am to say to this “proposal” business.

I shall go to England or Wales, with parents, shortly: after which, dash to Poland before setting in for the dismal session at Edinburgh.

Spirits good, with a general sense of hollowness underneath: wanity of wanities etc. – Ever yours,

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.– Parents capital; thanks principally to them; yours truly still rather bitter, but less so.

To Sidney Colvin

The last paragraph of the following means that Dr. Appleton, the amiable and indefatigable editor of the Academy, then recently founded, had been a little disturbed in mind by some of the contributions of his brilliant young friend, but allowed his academic conscience to be salved by the fact of their signature.

    [Swanston, Summer 1874.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, – Am I mad? Have I lived thus long and have you known me thus long, to no purpose? Do you imagine I could ever write an essay a month, or promise an essay even every three months? I declare I would rather die than enter into any such arrangement. The Essays must fall from me, Essay by Essay, as they ripen; and all that my communication with Seeley would effect would be to make him see more in them than mere occasional essays; or at least look far more faithfully, in which spirit men rarely look in vain. You know both Roads and my little girls[17 - The essay Notes on the Movements of Young Children.] are a part of the scheme which dates from early at Mentone. My word to Seeley, therefore, would be to inform him of what I hope will lie ultimately behind them, of how I regard them as contributions towards a friendlier and more thoughtful way of looking about one, etc. One other purpose of telling him would be that I should feel myself more at liberty to write as I please, and not bound to drag in a tag about Art every time to make it more suitable. Tying myself down to time is an impossibility. You know my own description of myself as a person with a poetic character and no poetic talent: just as my prose muse has all the ways of a poetic one, and I must take my Essays as they come to me. If I got 12 of ’em done in two years, I should be pleased. Never, please, let yourself imagine that I am fertile; I am constipated in the brains.

Look here, Appleton dined here last night and was delightful after the manner of our Appleton: I was none the less pleased, because I was somewhat amused, to hear of your kind letter to him in defence of my productions. I was amused at the tranquil dishonesty with which he told me that I must put my name to all I write and then all will be well. – Yours ever,

    R. L. S.

To Mrs. Sitwell

Written on an expedition to Wales with his parents.

    Train between Edinburgh and Chester, August 8, 1874.

My father and mother reading. I think I shall talk to you for a moment or two. This morning at Swanston, the birds, poor creatures, had the most troubled hour or two; evidently there was a hawk in the neighbourhood; not one sang; and the whole garden thrilled with little notes of warning and terror. I did not know before that the voice of birds could be so tragically expressive. I had always heard them before express their trivial satisfaction with the blue sky and the return of daylight. Really, they almost frightened me; I could hear mothers and wives in terror for those who were dear to them; it was easy to translate, I wish it were as easy to write; but it is very hard in this flying train, or I would write you more.

Chester.– I like this place much; but somehow I feel glad when I get among the quiet eighteenth century buildings, in cosy places with some elbow room about them, after the older architecture. This other is bedevilled and furtive; it seems to stoop; I am afraid of trap-doors, and could not go pleasantly into such houses. I don’t know how much of this is legitimately the effect of the architecture; little enough possibly; possibly far the most part of it comes from bad historical novels and the disquieting statuary that garnishes some façades.

On the way, to-day, I passed through my dear Cumberland country. Nowhere to as great a degree can one find the combination of lowland and highland beauties; the outline of the blue hills is broken by the outline of many tumultuous tree-clumps; and the broad spaces of moorland are balanced by a network of deep hedgerows that might rival Suffolk, in the foreground. – How a railway journey shakes and discomposes one, mind and body! I grow blacker and blacker in humour as the day goes on; and when at last I am let out, and have the fresh air about me, it is as though I were born again, and the sick fancies flee away from my mind like swans in spring.

I want to come back on what I have said about eighteenth century and middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to you the sort of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one to my mind; the spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bag-wigs, the clink of glasses at night in fire-lit parlours, something certain and civic and domestic, is all about these quiet, staid, shapely houses, with no character but their exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they make of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. O God be praised that we live in this good daylight and this good peace.

Barmouth, August 9th.– To-day we saw the cathedral at Chester; and, far more delightful, saw and heard a certain inimitable verger who took us round. He was full of a certain recondite, far-away humour that did not quite make you laugh at the time, but was somehow laughable to recollect. Moreover, he had so far a just imagination, and could put one in the right humour for seeing an old place, very much as, according to my favourite text, Scott’s novels and poems do for one. His account of the monks in the Scriptorium, with their cowls over their heads, in a certain sheltered angle of the cloister where the big cathedral building kept the sun off the parchments, was all that could be wished; and so too was what he added of the others pacing solemnly behind them and dropping, ever and again, on their knees before a little shrine there is in the wall, “to keep ’em in the frame of mind.” You will begin to think me unduly biassed in this verger’s favour if I go on to tell you his opinion of me. We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them, with, I dare say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me. “Ah,” says he, “you’re very fond of music.” I said I was. “Yes, I could tell that by your head,” he answered. “There’s a deal in that head.” And he shook his own solemnly. I said it might be so, but I found it hard, at least, to get it out. Then my father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the foundations of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know what it was, if not music. He was relieved when he heard that I occupied myself with literature (which word, note here, I do now spell correctly). Good-night, and here’s the verger’s health!

Friday.– Yesterday received the letter you know of. I have finished my Portfolio paper, not very good but with things in it: I don’t know if they will take it; and I have got a good start made with my John Knox articles. The weather here is rainy and miserable and windy: it is warm and not over boisterous for a certain sort of pleasure. This place, as I have made my first real inquisition into it to-night is curious enough; all the days I have been here, I have been at work, and so I was quite new to it.

Saturday.– A most beautiful day. We took a most beautiful drive, also up the banks of the river. The heather and furze are in flower at once and make up a splendid richness of colour on the hills; the trees were beautiful; there was a bit of winding road with larches on one hand and oaks on the other; the oaks were in shadow and printed themselves off at every corner on the sunlit background of the larches. We passed a little family of children by the roadside. The youngest of all sat a good way apart from the others on the summit of a knoll; it was ensconced in an old tea-box, out of which issued its head and shoulders in a blue cloak and scarlet hat. O if you could have seen its dignity! It was deliciously humorous: and this little piece of comic self-satisfaction was framed in wonderfully by the hills and the sunlit estuary. We saw another child in a cottage garden. She had been sick, it seemed, and was taking the air quietly for health’s sake. Over her pale face, she had decorated herself with all available flowers and weeds; and she was driving one chair as a horse, sitting in another by way of carriage. We cheered her as we passed, and she acknowledged the compliment like a queen. I like children better every day, I think, and most other things less. John Knox goes on, and a horrible story of a nurse which I think almost too cruel to go on with: I wonder why my stories are always so nasty.[18 - I remember nothing of either the title or the tenor of this story.] I am still well, and in good spirits. I say, by the way, have you any means of finding Madame Garschine’s address. If you have, communicate with me. I fear my last letter has been too late to catch her at Franzensbad; and so I shall have to go without my visit altogether, which would vex me.

    Robert Louis Stevenson.