Chapter II: Part 2

Next day I went to see _Mr. Doxey_ himself, who is a Stevenson enthusiast, and has one window (the window of the crowd) devoted entirely to Stevenson. All his works, all his editions--including the Edinburgh Edition--are there; and he, with the greatest kindness, showed me the treasures he had collected. In the first place, the number of portraits was astonishing. Years and conditions and circumstances, all various and changing; but the face--the face always the same. The eyes, wonderful in their keenness, their interrogative, questioning, eager gaze; the looking out, always looking out, always asking, looking ahead, far away into some distant land not given to _les autres_ to perceive. That wonderful looking out was the first thing that impressed me when I met Mr. Stevenson in Sydney in '93. Unfortunately for us, he only stayed there a short time, would not visit, was very difficult of access, not at all well, and when he went seemed to disappear, not go. Mr. Doxey had pictures of him in every possible phase--in turn-down collar, in no collar at all; his hair long, short, and middling; in oils, in water-colour, in photos, in a smoking-cap and Imperial; with a moustache, without a moustache; young, youthful, dashing, Byronic; not so youthful, middle-aged; looking in _this_ like a modern Manfred; in _that_ like an epitome of the fashions, wearing a debonair demeanour and a _degage_ tie; as a boy, as a barrister; on horseback, in a boat. There was a portrait taken by Mrs. Stevenson in 1885, and one lent by Virgil Williams; another, a water-colour, lent by Miss O'Hara; and a wonderful study of his wonderful hands. Then he was photographed in his home at Samoa, surrounded by his friends and his faithful, devoted band of young men, his Samoan followers; in the royal boat-house at Honolulu, seated side by side with his Majesty King Kalakaua; on board the _Casco_. Here, evidently anxious for a really good picture, he has taken off his hat, standing in the sun bareheaded. At a native banquet, surrounded by all the delicacies of the season, bowls of _kava_, _poi_, _palo-sami_, and much good company. Then the later ones at Vailima; in the clearing close to his house, in the verandah. Later still, writing in his bed. Coming to the "inn" he talks about in 1873--coming so close, close, unexpectedly, but not unprepared--Robert Louis Stevenson has passed the veil. Not dead, but gone before, he lives in the hearts of all people. But not so palpably, so outwardly, so proudly, as in the hearts of these people of the Sunny Land, who, standing on the extreme verge of the Western world, shading their eyes from the shining glory, watch the sunshine go out through the Golden Gate, out on its way across the pearly Pacific to the lonely Mountain of Samoa where lies the body of the man "Tusitala," whose songs and lessons and stories fill the earth, and the souls of the people thereof.

On the fly-leaf of the copy of "The Silverado Squatters," sent to "Virgil Williams and Dora Norton Williams," to whom it was dedicated, is the following poem in the handwriting of the author, written at Hyeres, where, as he says in his diary, he spent the happiest days of his life--

Here, from the forelands of the tideless sea,
Behold and take my offering unadorned.
In the Pacific air it sprang; it grew
Among the silence of the Alpine air;
In Scottish heather blossomed; and at last,
By that unshapen sapphire, in whose face
Spain, Italy, France, Algiers, and Tunis view
Their introverted mountains, came to fruit.
Back now, my booklet, on the diving ship,
And posting on the rails to home, return
Home, and the friends whose honouring name you bear.
--_The Sketch, Feb. 26, 1896_

STEVENSON AND HAZLITT

Of the many books which Robert Louis Stevenson planned and discussed with his friends in his correspondence there is none, perhaps, which would have been more valued than the biography of William Hazlitt. Whenever Stevenson refers to Hazlitt, whether in his essay on "Walking Tours" or in his letters, he makes one wish he would say more. This is what he writes to Mr. Hammerton:

_"I am in treaty with Bentley for a Life of Hazlitt; I hope it will
not fall through as I love the subject, and appear to have found a
publisher who loves it also. That, I think, makes things more
pleasant. You know I am a fervent Hazlittite; I mean regarding him as
the English writer who has had the scantiest justice. Besides which,
I am anxious to write biography; really, if I understand myself in
quest of profit, I think it must be good to live with another man
from birth to death. You have tried it, and know."_

If the qualification of a biographer is to understand his subject, Stevenson may be said to have been well qualified to write on Hazlitt. Mr. Leslie Stephen has given us a fine critical estimate of Hazlitt the writer, and the late Mr. Ireland's prefatory memoir to his admirable selection from the Essays, with its enforced limitations, is an excellent piece of biographical condensation, but the life of the essayist has yet to be written. The subject has been tried by many others, but no one has quite captured the spirit of Hazlitt. Had the details of Hazlitt's life, with his passionate hates and loves, been told by himself in the manner of his beloved Rousseau, he might have produced a book which for interest would have rivalled the _Confessions_, but failing such a work one must deplore that Stevenson was not encouraged to write on the subject.

_I. R., in London Academy._

ON BERANGER

_From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica._

....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of what he finished. "I am a good little bit of a poet," he says himself, "clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a modest choice of subjects (_le coin ou je me suis confine_), have brought some success." Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary history. When he first began to cultivate the _chanson_, this minor form lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiseled toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more sentiment. From a date comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his influential friends, and came back gladly to the garret and the street corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the masses as interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he sought more and more after what is deep, serious, and constant in the thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling in _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ or _Le Vieux Vagabond_. And this innovation involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic movement. For the _chanson_, as he says himself, opened up to him a path in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry. If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the new movement on two grounds:--first, because the romantic school misused somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the motto of "Art for art," and set no object of public usefulness before them as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far higher place in his estimation than any private passion or favour. He had little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words, "forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord."...

STEVENSON OF THE LETTERS.

Long, hatchet face, black hair, and haunting gaze,
That follows, as you move about the room,
Ah, this is he who trod the darkening ways,
And plucked the flowers upon the edge of doom.

The bright, sweet-scented flowers that star the road
To death's dim dwelling, others heed them not,
With sad eyes fixed upon that drear abode,
Weeping, and wailing their unhappy lot.

But he went laughing down the shadowed way,
The boy's heart leaping still within his breast,
Weaving his garlands when his mood was gay,
Mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest.

The high Gods gave him wine to drink; a cup
Of strong desire, of knowledge, and of pain,
He set it to his lips and drank it up,
Then smiling, turned unto his flowers again.

These are the flowers of that immortal strain,
Which, when the hand that plucked them drops and dies,
Still keep their radiant beauty free from stain,
And breathe their fragrance through the centuries.
B. PAUL NEWMAN.

APROPOS VAILIMA LETTERS.

The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man's letters, when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says that her late husband's friends--if such she still holds them to be--have hastened to make money out of the scraps and scrawls he sent them. The charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment's reflection supplies its modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead friend's letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends--friends such as those he made in Bournemouth, Lady Shelley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the most attached a man ever had--not one has brought out of his or her treasury the delightful letters of "R. L. S." We have the Vailima Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse sent to the _Times_. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not "sold"? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of a dedication of Mr. Gosse's poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his craft so well, and could hardly elude it in his least-considered letters, introduced his own figure as a sort of foil--he was childless. That word, uttered with regret, has, perhaps, a pang which the heart of a widow might imagine she should be spared. Again, in one of the Vailima Letters, Stevenson refers to his having been happy only once in his life, and that, too, on the chance of its misinterpretation, may be ashes in Mrs. Stevenson's mouth. Yet who does not know "R. L. S." as a man of moods? He is that, and nothing else, in some of his letters. And no chance phrase of his will ever be read to the discredit of Mrs. Stevenson--she may take the English reader's oath on that.

In one of his Vailima Letters Stevenson speaks of the "incredible" pains he has given to the first chapter of "Weir of Hermiston." Yet, after that even he remodelled it. It was worth the trouble, and the other seven and a bit are worthy of it. The very title was a serious trouble to him. "Braxfield" he would have liked it to be, but the judge of that name was not treated with enough historical care to warrant the adoption of it. Another name, "The Hanging Judge," he abandoned; also "The Lord Justice Clerk," also "The Two Kirsties of Cauldstaneship," and "The Four Black Brothers." No doubt in choosing "Weir of Hermiston"--with some of the sound-romance of Dobell's "Keiths of Revelston" about it--he chose finally for the best.--_The Sketch._

NOTICE
OF A
NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT
FOR LIGHTHOUSES.

BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

_From the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts,
Vol. VIII._, 1870-1871

EDINBURGH
PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY
1871]

A VISIT TO STEVENSON'S PACIFIC ISLE

It is a curious fact that Stevenson, whom we all regarded at home as being the personification of Samoa--indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the average Englishman's idea of Samoa was "some island or other in the Pacific where Stevenson lives,"--has left very little behind him in the way of tradition or story in the island he loved so well. He lived in the midst of a society which, outside his immediate family surroundings, must have been eminently uncongenial to a man of his refined nature, yet he damaged his fame here, at least, by meddling in the petty squabbles which agitate the beach at Apia, and his "Footnote to History" has made him a host of enemies, notably among the German colony, who, by the mouth of one of their many prophets, condemned him to me as a writer of "stupid stinks!" And therefore he may have made a mistake in imagining himself a factor in the insoluble equation of Samoan affairs. It is to the natives that he was more attached than to the vague ideals which form their so-called political future. To them he was a great chief, "Tusitala Talmita" by name, and many a native I have spoken to mentioned him with real affection as a good friend and a man with a golden heart. Perhaps this is the praise he himself would have chosen rather than that of the white colony.

It is not my purpose, however, to dilate on his life in Samoa, nor indeed would it be possible to gather, from the mass of conflicting evidence, any rational account of his doings in his island home. It is of a pilgrimage which I made to visit his library that I would give some short account. The room was walled from floor to ceiling with books, and I began to inspect them. To the left of the door were some "yellow backs," but few, nor did I see in his library much trash of any description. Next came books of travel in almost every country in the world, the bulk of them, however, dealing with the Pacific. From Capt. Cook down, it would be hard to name a Pacific travel book that has not found itself on the shelves at Vailima. Next, I am bound to say, came my first disappointment. I had always thought that Stevenson must have been a good classical scholar, and had an idea formed, I know not how or whence, that a great style--and surely his may be justly called so--necessitated a close and intimate acquaintance with those classical authors who--

"Upon the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever."

Yet I found classics, indeed, but, alas! in Mr. Bohn's edition, while on the shelf beneath lay the originals uncut. It came to me as a positive blow to find the pages of the "Odyssey" uncared for and unread, save in some translation. Of Horace he had many and good editions, and they seemed read and used; but of the Greek tragedians I found only "Sophocles" in Prof. Campbell's translation, and no edition of his plays save a small "OEdipus the King." This was a great shock to me, for even supposing that Stevenson was only "a maker of phrases" (as many people will tell you, above all here, "for a prophet is not without honor," etc.), still phrases must have some basis in education, and a man who is evidently careless of his masters of ancient language is not likely to prove a brilliant coiner of words.

Turning with regret from this shelf, I came next upon a fine collection of French works, beginning with a complete edition of Balzac, which had evidently been read with care. Much French fiction was here--Daudet's "Tartarin," "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," "Les Rois en Exil," Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and a complete Victor Hugo, besides a swarm of the more ephemeral novels. Here, too, was a fine and complete edition of "Wellington's Dispatches" and several military treatises. Next to these came a good collection (be it always remembered that I speak of Samoa in Samoa, and 14,000 miles from the home of English and French publishing and printing) of historical works; Gibbon, of course, Milman, Von Ranke and many of the old French chroniclers--Philippe de Comines especially--read and marked, no doubt, when Stevenson was writing "The Black Arrow." One passage so marked struck me as curious. Surely Stevenson was a man whom, from his writings, one would imagine to be practically without enemies; yet, in the light of events at Apia, and from what I have heard here, the quotation seems apposite; "Je scay bien que ma lange m'a porte grande hommage, aussi m'a-t-elle fait quelques fois de plaisir beaucoup, toutesfois c'est raison que je repare l'amende." Now these are almost the exact words which conclude the preface to the only deplorable book Stevenson ever wrote--his "Footnote to History," which has made him many enemies, and, I think, no friends--in fact, nothing but the vigorous description of the hurricane saves it from worthlessness. As history it is not trustworthy, and as a footnote it was ridiculous. However, to return to the books. There was a very complete collection of modern poets, hardly any of note being omitted. I even saw a copy of "J. K. S.'s" "Lapsus Calami," which surprised me, for Stevenson was neither a Cambridge nor a public school man.

Such, then, in brief, is a rough summary of the library of this remarkable man; many of the editions de luxe were packed away, but I believe what I saw was his working stock. We now opened a little glass door leading from the room into Stevenson's sanctum, where he dictated almost all his work. It was quite a small room, lighted by two windows; and in one corner lay a bed with a mat "Samoan fashion" spread thereon, while beside it was a table with a bunch of withered flowers (the last he ever looked on), and which Mr. Chatfield has very properly never permitted to be removed. Here, in one corner, stood a small bookcase with editions of his own works; the walls were hung with engravings of ancestors--the only sign of his Scotch origin I noted in the house--while above the chimney-piece (the only chimney-pieces and fire-places in Samoa are at Vailima), were a lovely series of drawings of Gordon Browne, to illustrate one of his later books, "The Island Nights' Adventures." These pictures, though only in black and white, breathe the spirit of the islands in a marvellous manner, especially remarkable being the illustration, "The Beach of Falesa." In a small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, "A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals." I heard that Stevenson was fond of "supping full of horrors," and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me that on some days he was the most charming of companions--brilliant, witty and fascinating; on others, dull and morose beyond description, hardly uttering a word, and giving no sign of the wealth of tenderness and genial kindness that lurked within. As a host, it is agreed on all hands he was incomparable. His entertainment catered for the tastes of all, and in the sunshine of his delightful company all sorts and conditions of men were happy.

We left this room with a feeling of depression, and passing through the other to the door, my eye fell on what I had not before noticed, the original of the delightful map which is the frontispiece to Treasure Island--a most beautiful piece of drawing, reminding me, in its quaint accompaniments of spouting dolphins and horn-blowing Tritons, as much as in its pretended accuracy, of those strange maps in the earlier editions of Gulliver, where Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., are all laid out with geographical detail of latitude and longitude. The curious, sprawling writing of Flint and Billy Bones were in contrast to the fine workmanship of the rest of the map, which, save for some slight coarseness in the shading of the steeper side of "Spyglass Hill," might have been engraved. The last thing I saw in the library was perhaps the most curious of all. It was a navigating chart constructed by the natives of the Wallis Islands for their own use and guidance. I have since learned that such charts are used by the traders also who navigate these latitudes. The form of the charts is a parallelogram constructed on a framework of cane or other light wood. Across this parallelogram run vertically convex pieces of wood bent to show the general run or set of the wind and waves; cross currents are marked with cross pieces of wood showing their direction, and their force and variation are indicated on the slips of wood themselves (which are not half an inch wide) by means of signs and curious marks. Islands are denoted on this wonderful piece of native work by cowrie shells fastened to the framework. I suppose Stevenson must have picked this up on his travels among the islands, and I believe that although these charts are universally used in the Wallis group and are found perfectly correct, very few specimens of the kind have emerged as yet from those islands. I puzzled a long time to guess what it was, Mrs. Chatfield enjoying my mystification, which she herself had experienced when she first saw this remarkable map. One more fact I must mention about the library. In a corner I found a number of quarto volumes, well bound, containing apparently a continuous day-book of some of Stevenson's many voyages. It is to be hoped that these journals may some day be given to the world. Many and curious were the scenes he witnessed; various and entertaining the personages he must have met on his travels. He seems to have visited most of the many groups of islets with which the Pacific is so plentifully sprinkled.

I did not care to visit the rest of the house, though my hostess most kindly offered to show me anything she could, but I stood outside and looked at the lofty hill over the house where he sleeps his last sleep in the land and among the people he loved so well. Samoans show much poetic feeling in selecting beautiful sites for the graves of their chiefs. In my journeys round the island, in the most remote districts, I was frequently delighted by coming suddenly upon the usual inclosure of rough stones which mark the resting-place of a chief, always in a beautiful spot and invariably commanding a wide and splendid view. This may also have been Stevenson's object in selecting the summit of the hill for his grave. The labor required to carry him to his last resting-place was immense, as many as sixty Samoans being employed, while only nineteen Europeans braved the difficulties of the ascent to be present at the sad offices. But his last home is beautiful; by day the trees innumerable round his lonely grave are musical with the fanfare of the glorious tradewinds, while at times the sound of

"The league-long roller thundering on the reef"

is borne across the waving forest. The view by day is superb; mountain, valley, reef and palm, with the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf around the distant reef, while overhead the solitary tropic bird wings its silent flight through the dazzling azure of the skies. No more beautiful spot for a grave can be imagined; the majestic voice of those southern seas he loved so well makes melody in the very air around his grave. No spot more typical of the Pacific could have been found; and I turned away with a feeling of relief that one whose nature was so allied to that he wrote of should in his death not have been divided from the scenes he made familiar to so many thousands of admirers.

A PEN PORTRAIT

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, really does look like the watermelon portrait of him in one of the magazines. He sat in a Long Branch car on Tuesday on his way from Manasquan to New York.

He has a long, narrow face, and wears his long brown hair parted in the middle and combed back. It is just such straight, coarse hair as General Roger A. Pryor's, but much lighter in color. Stevenson sat in a forward corner of the car, with his hat off, and the cape of his coat up behind his head like a monk's cowl. His black velvet coat and vest showed plainly, and over his legs he wore a black and white checked shawl. His Byronic collar was soft and untidy, and his shirt was unlaundered, but his clothes were scrupulously clean. On the long, thin, white fingers of his left hand he wore two rings, and he kept these fingers busy constantly pulling his drooping moustache. His face is slightly freckled and a little hollow at the cheek, but it has a good bit of Scotch color in it.

Mr. Stevenson presented such an odd figure that all in the car stared at him, particularly when a rumor of who he was ran among the people. But he seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused. He was reading a book, and every now and then he would fix a sentence in his mind, close the book on one finger, look at the ceiling and muse. When a sentence pleased him, he smiled at it, and then read it again. At the Jersey City depot he threw off his shawl and stood up, and then the figure he cut was extraordinary, for his coat proved to be merely a large cape, with a small one above it, and under both came his extra long legs, or, rather, his long lavender trousers, for they appeared to have no legs within them.

Mrs. Stevenson was with him, but sat apart studying the scenery. Her husband looked at her frequently with a whimsical smile, and found great fun in laughing at her behind his book when a dude of tremendous style took the seat beside her.--_The Sun, 1887._

APPRECIATION AND HOMAGE.

"The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,' and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its forerunner, 'Tom Sawyer.'"

...."He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to 'Silverado Squatters'.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic ... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs."

_Brander Matthews._

"No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is most unceasingly inspired by '_an unextinguishable zest in technical successes_' and has also most constantly remembered that '_The end of all art is to please_.'"

_M. G. Van Rensselaer._

"In the years I knew him, if Stevenson expressed much interest in children, it was mainly for the sake of their fathers and mothers: but that after a while he began to take a very great delight in summoning back to his clear recollection the panic fears and adventurous pleasure of his own early youth, thus becoming, in his portraiture of himself, the consummate painter of one species of child. But his relation to other children was shy and gently defiant; it would have exhausted him to play with them; but he looked forward to a time when they should be old enough to talk to him."

_Edmund Gosse._

R. L. S. AND MUSIC.

Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don't want it--the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang contends; you need not even read poetry, if you "hate poetry and painting," like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza. Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand "Will ye no come back again?" and "Bonnie Dundee," Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music "the least disagreeable of noises," even he was at the worst only insensible to the charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet--that he never made out a tune is no matter--and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months before his death he asked to be taught "at least the alphabet of your language." Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music of his country, and, like Congreve's Jeremy, had a "reasonable ear" for a jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent Novello's house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ and listen to his daughter's singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin went into mild raptures over Halle's playing of Thalberg's "Home, sweet home." Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him; and if Shakespeare wasn't musical he ought to have been considering the way in which he has spoken of the man who "hath no music in his soul." In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people--some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.

To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays. In "The Wrong Box," for example, we have the humorous situation where the young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a veritable "locus classicus" on the art of playing the penny whistle, and the difference between the amateur and the professional performer. Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that instrument. "The young of the penny whistler," as he puts it, "like those of the salmon, are occult from observation." He endows David, his forbear at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour "in the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a deep philosopher, but much of a musician."

It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had not much of a musical ear, and had only a "rudimentary acquaintance" with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green." It is clear that he improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the visitors round the cathedral.

"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 (the verger), 'You're very fond of music.' I said I
was. 'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my
father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger
so distressed and shaken in the foundation 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."

The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him; but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is "useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly excited" over Halevy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to "slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside, so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.

That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural, but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far. When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that "I write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano until I go to bed." At this time the whistle was Osborne's instrument. "You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!" Stevenson exclaimed to his father, "Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes." By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is arranging certain numbers of the "Magic Flute" for "two melodious forefingers." Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley's powers as a virtuoso that Stevenson should have "counterfeited his playing on the piano."

But Stevenson's particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised instrument. "Played on my pipe," "took to tootling on the flageolet," are entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that "pipe" is synonymous with flageolet. "If I take to my pipe," he writes on one occasion, "I know myself all is over for the morning." Writing to Mr. Colvin in June, 1891, he says:--"Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing 'Le Chant d'Amour' lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence." Generally speaking, Stevenson "tootled" by himself; but now and again he took part in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music "furiously" with these two. A day or two later he writes:--"Woke at the usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice, Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the pipe."

But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in 1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or "a sheaf of 'em."

But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully's. About the harmony, which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. "Where I have put an A," he says, "is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity) I have always to babble questions; all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever." A few months later and he had composed his Opus 1. He called it a Threnody, and he sent it for criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in the art. Some plain talk on the part of the cousin apparently followed, for we find the composer urging certain points in self-justification. "There may be hidden fifths in it," he says, "and if there are it shows how damn spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ." There was the true composer, putting down his inspiration as it came to him, and allowing it to stand as it was in defiance of all rule! Nothing daunted, he made another attempt. "Herewith another shy," he said, "more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the damn bareness of the base, it looks like a real piece of music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time. The base was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, and may God have mercy on their souls." That is too characteristically charming to be spoiled by comment.

J. C. H.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

The following misprints have been corrected:
"authoratitive" corrected to "authoritative" (page 1)
"leggea" corrected to "legged" (page 16)
"aud" corrected to "and" (page 24)
"delighful" corrected to "delightful" (page 40)