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

MY DEAR FRIEND, – I have been so busy, away to Bridge of Allan with my father first, and then with Simpson and Baxter out here from Saturday till Monday. I had no time to write, and, as it is, am strangely incapable. Thanks for your letter. I have been reading such lots of law, and it seems to take away the power of writing from me. From morning to night, so often as I have a spare moment, I am in the embrace of a law book – barren embraces. I am in good spirits; and my heart smites me as usual, when I am in good spirits, about my parents. If I get a bit dull, I am away to London without a scruple; but so long as my heart keeps up, I am all for my parents.

What do you think of Henley’s hospital verses?[19 - Printed by Mr. Leslie Stephen in the Cornhill.] They were to have been dedicated to me, but Stephen wouldn’t allow it – said it would be pretentious.

Wednesday.– I meant to have made this quite a decent letter this morning, but listen. I had pain all last night, and did not sleep well, and now am cold and sickish, and strung up ever and again with another flash of pain. Will you remember me to everybody? My principal characteristics are cold, poverty, and Scots Law – three very bad things. Oo, how the rain falls! The mist is quite low on the hill. The birds are twittering to each other about the indifferent season. O, here’s a gem for you. An old godly woman predicted the end of the world, because the seasons were becoming indistinguishable; my cousin Dora objected that last winter had been pretty well marked. “Yes, my dear,” replied the soothsayeress; “but I think you’ll find the summer will be rather co-amplicated.” – Ever your faithful

    R. L. S.

To Mrs. Sitwell

The rehearsals were those of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for amateur theatricals at Professor Fleeming Jenkin’s, in which Stevenson played the part of Orsino.

    [Edinburgh, April 1875] Saturday.

I am getting on with my rehearsals, but I find the part very hard. I rehearsed yesterday from a quarter to seven, and to-day from four (with interval for dinner) to eleven. You see the sad strait I am in for ink. —À demain.

Sunday.– This is the third ink-bottle I have tried, and still it’s nothing to boast of. My journey went off all right, and I have kept ever in good spirits. Last night, indeed, I did think my little bit of gaiety was going away down the wind like a whiff of tobacco smoke, but to-day it has come back to me a little. The influence of this place is assuredly all that can be worst against one; mais il faut lutter. I was haunted last night when I was in bed by the most cold, desolate recollections of my past life here; I was glad to try and think of the forest, and warm my hands at the thought of it. O the quiet, grey thickets, and the yellow butterflies, and the woodpeckers, and the outlook over the plain as it were over a sea! O for the good, fleshly stupidity of the woods, the body conscious of itself all over and the mind forgotten, the clean air nestling next your skin as though your clothes were gossamer, the eye filled and content, the whole MAN HAPPY! Whereas here it takes a pull to hold yourself together; it needs both hands, and a book of stoical maxims, and a sort of bitterness at the heart by way of armour. – Ever your faithful

    R. L. S.

Wednesday.– I am so played out with a cold in my eye that I cannot see to write or read without difficulty. It is swollen horrible; so how I shall look as Orsino, God knows! I have my fine clothes tho’. Henley’s sonnets have been taken for the Cornhill. He is out of hospital now, and dressed, but still not too much to brag of in health, poor fellow, I am afraid.

Sunday.– So. I have still rather bad eyes, and a nasty sore throat. I play Orsino every day, in all the pomp of Solomon, splendid Francis the First clothes, heavy with gold and stage jewellery. I play it ill enough, I believe; but me and the clothes, and the wedding wherewith the clothes and me are reconciled, produce every night a thrill of admiration. Our cook told my mother (there is a servants’ night, you know) that she and the housemaid were “just prood to be able to say it was oor young gentleman.” To sup afterwards with these clothes on, and a wonderful lot of gaiety and Shakespearean jokes about the table, is something to live for. It is so nice to feel you have been dead three hundred years, and the sound of your laughter is faint and far off in the centuries. – Ever your faithful

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Mrs. Sitwell

    [Edinburgh, April 1875.]

Wednesday.– A moment at last. These last few days have been as jolly as days could be, and by good fortune I leave to-morrow for Swanston, so that I shall not feel the whole fall back to habitual self. The pride of life could scarce go further. To live in splendid clothes, velvet and gold and fur, upon principally champagne and lobster salad, with a company of people nearly all of whom are exceptionally good talkers; when your days began about eleven and ended about four – I have lost that sentence; I give it up; it is very admirable sport, any way. Then both my afternoons have been so pleasantly occupied – taking Henley drives. I had a business to carry him down the long stair, and more of a business to get him up again, but while he was in the carriage it was splendid. It is now just the top of spring with us. The whole country is mad with green. To see the cherry-blossom bitten out upon the black firs, and the black firs bitten out of the blue sky, was a sight to set before a king. You may imagine what it was to a man who has been eighteen months in an hospital ward. The look of his face was a wine to me. He plainly has been little in the country before. Imagine this: I always stopped him on the Bridges to let him enjoy the great cry of green that goes up to Heaven out of the river beds, and he asked (more than once) “What noise is that?” – “The water.” – “O!” almost incredulously; and then quite a long while after: “Do you know the noise of the water astonished me very much?” I was much struck by his putting the question twice; I have lost the sense of wonder of course; but there must be something to wonder at, for Henley has eyes and ears and an immortal soul of his own.

I shall send this off to-day to let you know of my new address – Swanston Cottage, Lothianburn, Edinburgh. Salute the faithful in my name. Salute Priscilla, salute Barnabas, salute Ebenezer – O no, he’s too much, I withdraw Ebenezer; enough of early Christians. – Ever your faithful

    Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Sidney Colvin

    [Edinburgh, May or June 1875.]

I say, we have a splendid picture here in Edinburgh. A Ruysdael of which one can never tire: I think it is one of the best landscapes in the world: a grey still day, a grey still river, a rough oak wood on one shore, on the other chalky banks with very complicated footpaths, oak woods, a field where a man stands reaping, church towers relieved against the sky and a beautiful distance, neither blue nor green. It is so still, the light is so cool and temperate, the river woos you to bathe in it. O I like it!

I say, I wonder if our Scottish Academy’s exhibition is going to be done at all for Appleton or whether he does not care for it. It might amuse me, although I am not fit for it. Why and O why doesn’t Grove publish me? – Ever yours,

    R. L. Stevenson.

To Sidney Colvin

I was at this time, if I remember rightly, preparing some lectures on Hogarth for a course at Cambridge.

    [Swanston, June 1875.]

MY DEAR COLVIN, – I am a devil certainly; but write I cannot. Look here, you had better get hold of G. C. Lichtenberg’s Ausfürliche Erklarung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche: Göttingen, 1794 to 1816 (it was published in numbers seemingly). Douglas the publisher lent it to me: and tho’ I hate the damned tongue too cordially to do more than dip into it, I have seen some shrewd things. If you cannot get it for yourself, (it seems scarce), I dare say I could negotiate with Douglas for a loan. This adorable spring has made me quite drunken, drunken with green colour and golden sound. We have the best blackbird here that we have had for years; we have two; but the other is but an average performer. Anything so rich and clear as the pipe of our first fiddle, it never entered into the heart of man to fancy. How the years slip away, Colvin; and we walk little cycles, and turn in little abortive spirals, and come out again, hot and weary, to find the same view before us, the same hill barring the road. Only, bless God for it, we have still the same eye to see with, and if the scene be not altogether unsightly, we can enjoy it whether or no. I feel quite happy, but curiously inert and passive, something for the winds to blow over, and the sun to glimpse on and go off again, as it might be a tree or a gravestone. All this willing and wishing and striving leads a man nowhere after all. Here I am back again in my old humour of a sunny equanimity; to see the world fleet about me; and the days chase each other like sun patches, and the nights like cloud-shadows, on a windy day; content to see them go and no wise reluctant for the cool evening, with its dew and stars and fading strain of tragic red. And I ask myself why I ever leave this humour? What I have gained? And the winds blow in the trees with a sustained “Pish“! and the birds answer me in a long derisive whistle.

So that for health, happiness, and indifferent literature, apply to – Ever yours,

    R. L. S.

To Mrs. Sitwell

“Burns” means the article on Burns which R. L. S. had been commissioned to write for the Encyclopædia Britannica. The “awfully nice man” was the Hon. J. Seed, formerly Secretary to the Customs and Marine Department of New Zealand; and it was from his conversation that the notion of the Samoan Islands as a place of refuge for the sick and world-worn first entered Stevenson’s mind, to lie dormant (I never heard him speak of it) and be revived thirteen years later.

    [Edinburgh, June 1875.]

Simply a scratch. All right, jolly, well, and through with the difficulty. My father pleased about the Burns. Never travel in the same carriage with three able-bodied seamen and a fruiterer from Kent; the A. – B.’s speak all night as though they were hailing vessels at sea; and the fruiterer as if he were crying fruit in a noisy market-place – such, at least, is my funeste experience. I wonder if a fruiterer from some place else – say Worcestershire – would offer the same phenomena? insoluble doubt.

    R. L. S.

Later.– Forgive me, couldn’t get it off. Awfully nice man here to-night. Public servant – New Zealand. Telling us all about the South Sea Islands till I was sick with desire to go there: beautiful places, green for ever; perfect climate; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do but to study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they fall. Navigator’s Island is the place; absolute balm for the weary. – Ever your faithful friend,

    R. L. S.

To Mrs. Sitwell

The examination for the Bar at Edinburgh was approaching. Fontainebleau is the paper called Forest Notes, afterwards printed in the Cornhill Magazine. The church is Glencorse Church in the Pentlands, to the thoughts of which Stevenson reverted in his last days with so much emotion (see Weir of Hermiston, chap. v.).

    [Swanston. End of June 1875.]

Thursday.– This day fortnight I shall fall or conquer. Outside the rain still soaks; but now and again the hilltop looks through the mist vaguely. I am very comfortable, very sleepy, and very much satisfied with the arrangements of Providence.

Saturday – no, Sunday, 12.45. – Just been – not grinding, alas! – I couldn’t – but doing a bit of Fontainebleau. I don’t think I’ll be plucked. I am not sure though – I am so busy, what with this d – d law, and this Fontainebleau always at my elbow, and three plays (three, think of that!) and a story, all crying out to me, “Finish, finish, make an entire end, make us strong, shapely, viable creatures!” It’s enough to put a man crazy. Moreover, I have my thesis given out now, which is a fifth (is it fifth? I can’t count) incumbrance.

Sunday.– I’ve been to church, and am not depressed – a great step. I was at that beautiful church my petit poëme en prose was about. It is a little cruciform place, with heavy cornices and string course to match, and a steep slate roof. The small kirkyard is full of old gravestones. One of a Frenchman from Dunkerque – I suppose he died prisoner in the military prison hard by – and one, the most pathetic memorial I ever saw, a poor school-slate, in a wooden frame, with the inscription cut into it evidently by the father’s own hand. In church, old Mr. Torrence preached – over eighty, and a relic of times forgotten, with his black thread gloves and mild old foolish face. One of the nicest parts of it was to see John Inglis, the greatest man in Scotland, our Justice-General, and the only born lawyer I ever heard, listening to the piping old body, as though it had all been a revelation, grave and respectful. – Ever your faithful

    R. L. S.

To Mrs. Sitwell

    [Edinburgh, July 15, 1875.]

Passed.

Ever your

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