Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

I am to-day, thanks to a pure heaven and a beneficent, loud-talking, antiseptic mistral, on the high places as to health and spirits. Money holds out wonderfully. Fanny has gone for a drive to certain meadows which are now one sheet of jonquils: sea-bound meadows, the thought of which may freshen you in Bloomsbury. "Ye have been fresh and fair, Ye have been filled with flowers"--I fear I misquote. Why do people babble? Surely Herrick, in his true vein, is superior to Martial himself, though Martial is a very pretty poet.

Did you ever read St. Augustine? The first chapters of the _Confessions_ are marked by a commanding genius: Shakespearian in depth. I was struck dumb, but, alas! when you begin to wander into controversy, the poet drops out. His description of infancy is most seizing. And how is this: "Sed majorum nugae negotia vocantur; puerorum autem talia cum sint puniuntur a majoribus." Which is quite after the heart of R. L. S. See also his splendid passage about the "luminosus limes amicitiae" and the "nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis"; going on "_Utrumque_ in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat imbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum." That "Utrumque" is a real contribution to life's science. Lust _alone_ is but a pigmy; but it never, or rarely, attacks us single-handed.

Do you ever read (to go miles off, indeed) the incredible Barbey d'Aurevilly? A psychological Poe--to be for a moment Henley. I own with pleasure I prefer him with all his folly, rot, sentiment, and mixed metaphors, to the whole modern school in France. It makes me laugh when it's nonsense; and when he gets an effect (though it's still nonsense and mere Poery, not poesy) it wakens me. _Ce qui ne meurt pas_ nearly killed me with laughing, and left me--well, it left me very nearly admiring the old ass. At least, it's the kind of thing one feels one couldn't do. The dreadful moonlight, when they all three sit silent in the room--by George, sir, it's imagined--and the brief scene between the husband and wife is all there. _Quant au fond_, the whole thing, of course, is a fever dream, and worthy of eternal laughter. Had the young man broken stones, and the two women been hard-working honest prostitutes, there had been an end of the whole immoral and baseless business: you could at least have respected them in that case.

I also read _Petronius Arbiter_, which is a rum work, not so immoral as most modern works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more classical than the classics, with astounding results of barrenness and tedium. Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing at Rome was too much.

R. L. S.

TO MR. DICK

This correspondent was for many years head clerk and confidential
assistant in the family firm at Edinburgh.

_La Solitude, Hyeres, 12th March 1884._

MY DEAR MR. DICK,--I have been a great while owing you a letter; but I am not without excuses, as you have heard. I overworked to get a piece of work finished before I had my holiday, thinking to enjoy it more; and instead of that, the machinery near hand came sundry in my hands! like Murdie's uniform. However, I am now, I think, in a fair way of recovery; I think I was made, what there is of me, of whipcord and thorn-switches; surely I am tough! But I fancy I shall not overdrive again, or not so long. It is my theory that work is highly beneficial, but that it should, if possible, and certainly for such partially broken-down instruments as the thing I call my body, be taken in batches, with a clear break and breathing space between. I always do vary my work, laying one thing aside to take up another, not merely because I believe it rests the brain, but because I have found it most beneficial to the result. Reading, Bacon says, makes a full man, but what makes me full on any subject is to banish it for a time from all my thoughts. However, what I now propose is, out of every quarter to work two months, and rest the third. I believe I shall get more done, as I generally manage, on my present scheme, to have four months' impotent illness and two of imperfect health--one before, one after, I break down. This, at least, is not an economical division of the year.

I re-read the other day that heartbreaking book, the _Life of Scott_. One should read such works now and then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place; the Waverley Novels are better to re-read than the over-true _Life_, fine as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of consolation, opens with the best and shortest and completest sermon ever written--upon Man's chief end.--Believe me, my dear Mr. Dick, very sincerely yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_P.S._--You see I have changed my hand. I was threatened apparently with scrivener's cramp, and at any rate had got to write so small, that the revisal of my MS. tried my eyes, hence my signature alone remains upon the old model; for it appears that if I changed that, I should be cut off from my "vivers."

R. L. S.

TO COSMO MONKHOUSE

This amiable and excellent public servant, art-critic, and versifier
was a friend of old Savile Club days; the drift of his letter can
easily be guessed from this reply. The reference to Lamb is to the
essay on the Restoration dramatists.

_La Solitude, Hyeres, March 16, 1884._

MY DEAR MONKHOUSE,--You see with what promptitude I plunge into correspondence; but the truth is, I am condemned to a complete inaction, stagnate dismally, and love a letter. Yours, which would have been welcome at any time, was thus doubly precious.

Dover sounds somewhat shiveringly in my ears. You should see the weather _I_ have--cloudless, clear as crystal, with just a punkah-draft of the most aromatic air, all pine and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry. To be idle at Dover is a strange pretension; pray, how do you warm yourself? If I were there I should grind knives or write blank verse, or---- But at least you do not bathe? It is idle to deny it: I have--I may say I nourish--a growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all which I once was, and I am ashamed to say liked it. How ignorant is youth! grossly rolling among unselected pleasures; and how nobler, purer, sweeter, and lighter, to sip the choice tonic, to recline in the luxurious invalid chair, and to tread, well-shawled, the little round of the constitutional. Seriously, do you like to repose? Ye gods, I hate it. I never rest with any acceptation; I do not know what people mean who say they like sleep and that damned bedtime which, since long ere I was breeched, has rung a knell to all my day's doings and beings. And when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has "fallen in love with stagnation," I can only say to him, "You will never be a Pirate!" This may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse; but in your own soul it will clang hollow--think of it! Never! After all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immoral day-dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die. Can it be? Is there not some escape, some furlough from the Moral Law, some holiday jaunt contrivable into a Better Land? Shall we never shed blood? This prospect is too grey.

Here lies a man who never did
Anything but what he was bid;
Who lived his life in paltry ease,
And died of commonplace disease.

To confess plainly, I had intended to spend my life (or any leisure I might have from Piracy upon the high seas) as the leader of a great horde of irregular cavalry, devastating whole valleys. I can still, looking back, see myself in many favourite attitudes; signalling for a boat from my pirate ship with a pocket-handkerchief, I at the jetty end, and one or two of my bold blades keeping the crowd at bay; or else turning in the saddle to look back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at the hand-gallop up the road out of the burning valley: this last by moonlight.

_Et point du tout._ I am a poor scribe, and have scarce broken a commandment to mention, and have recently dined upon cold veal! As for you (who probably had some ambitions), I hear of you living at Dover, in lodgings, like the beasts of the field. But in heaven, when we get there, we shall have a good time, and see some real carnage. For heaven is--must be--that great Kingdom of Antinomia, which Lamb saw dimly adumbrated in the _Country Wife_, where the worm which never dies (the conscience) peacefully expires, and the sinner lies down beside the Ten Commandments. Till then, here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling, with neither health nor vice for anything more spirited than procrastination, which I may well call the Consolation Stakes of Wickedness; and by whose diligent practice, without the least amusement to ourselves, we can rob the orphan and bring down grey hairs with sorrow to the dust.

This astonishing gush of nonsense I now hasten to close, envelope, and expedite to Shakespeare's Cliff. Remember me to Shakespeare, and believe me, yours very sincerely,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

Mr. Gosse had written describing the office which he then occupied, a
picturesque old-fashioned chamber in the upper stories of the Board
of Trade.

_La Solitude, Hyeres, March 17, 1884._

MY DEAR GOSSE,--Your office--office is profanely said--your bower upon the leads is divine. Have you, like Pepys, "the right to fiddle" there? I see you mount the companion, barbiton in hand, and, fluttered about by city sparrows, pour forth your spirit in a voluntary. Now when the spring begins, you must lay in your flowers: how do you say about a potted hawthorn? Would it bloom? Wallflower is a choice pot-herb; lily-of-the-valley, too, and carnation, and Indian cress trailed about the window, is not only beautiful by colour, but the leaves are good to eat. I recommend thyme and rosemary for the aroma, which should not be left upon one side; they are good quiet growths.

On one of your tables keep a great map spread out; a chart is still better--it takes one further--the havens with their little anchors, the rocks, banks, and soundings, are adorably marine; and such furniture will suit your ship-shape habitation. I wish I could see those cabins; they smile upon me with the most intimate charm. From your leads, do you behold St. Paul's? I always like to see the Foolscap; it is London _per se_ and no spot from which it is visible is without romance. Then it is good company for the man of letters, whose veritable nursing Pater-Noster is so near at hand.

I am all at a standstill; as idle as a painted ship, but not so pretty. My romance, which has so nearly butchered me in the writing, not even finished; though so near, thank God, that a few days of tolerable strength will see the roof upon that structure. I have worked very hard at it, and so do not expect any great public favour. _In moments of effort, one learns to do the easy things that people like._ There is the golden maxim; thus one should strain and then play, strain again and play again. The strain is for us, it educates; the play is for the reader, and pleases. Do you not feel so? We are ever threatened by two contrary faults: both deadly. To sink into what my forefathers would have called "rank conformity," and to pour forth cheap replicas, upon the one hand; upon the other, and still more insidiously present, to forget that art is a diversion and a decoration, that no triumph or effort is of value, nor anything worth reaching except charm.--Yours affectionately,

R. L. S.

TO MISS FERRIER

Soon after the date of the following letter Miss Ferrier went out to
her friends and stayed with them through the trying weeks which
followed.

_La Solitude, Hyeres_ [_March_ 22, 1884].

MY DEAR MISS FERRIER,--Are you really going to fail us? This seems a dreadful thing. My poor wife, who is not well off for friends on this bare coast, has been promising herself, and I have been promising her, a rare acquisition. And now Miss Burn has failed, and you utter a very doubtful note. You do not know how delightful this place is, nor how anxious we are for a visit. Look at the names: "The Solitude"--is that romantic? The palm-trees?--how is that for the gorgeous East? "Var"? the name of a river--"the quiet waters by"! 'Tis true, they are in another department, and consist of stones and a biennial spate; but what a music, what a plash of brooks, for the imagination! We have hills; we have skies; the roses are putting forth, as yet sparsely; the meadows by the sea are one sheet of jonquils; the birds sing as in an English May--for, considering we are in France and serve up our song-birds, I am ashamed to say, on a little field of toast and with a sprig of thyme (my own receipt) in their most innocent and now unvocal bellies--considering all this, we have a wonderfully fair wood-music round this Solitude of ours. What can I say more?--All this awaits you. _Kennst du das Land_, in short.--Your sincere friend,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO W. H. LOW

The verses enclosed were the set entitled "The Canoe Speaks,"
afterwards printed in _Underwoods_. Stevenson was suffering at this
time from a temporary weakness of the eyesight.

_La Solitude, Hyeres [April 1884]._

MY DEAR LOW,--The blind man in these sprawled lines sends greeting. I have been ill, as perhaps the papers told you. The news--"great news--glorious news--sec-ond ed-ition!"--went the round in England.

Anyway, I now thank you for your pictures, which, particularly the Arcadian one, we all (Bob included, he was here sick-nursing me) much liked.

Herewith are a set of verses which I thought pretty enough to send to press. Then I thought of the Manhattan, towards whom I have guilty and compunctious feelings. Last, I had the best thought of all--to send them to you in case you might think them suitable for illustration. It seemed to me quite in your vein. If so, good; if not, hand them on to Manhattan, Century, or Lippincott, at your pleasure, as all three desire my work or pretend to. But I trust the lines will not go unattended. Some riverside will haunt you; and O! be tender to my bathing girls. The lines are copied in my wife's hand, as I cannot see to write otherwise than with the pen of Cormoran, Gargantua, or Nimrod. Love to your wife.--Yours ever,

R. L. S.

Copied it myself.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

_La Solitude, Hyeres, April 19, 1884._

MY DEAR FATHER,--Yesterday I very powerfully stated the _Haeresis Stevensoniana_, or the complete body of divinity of the family theologian, to Miss Ferrier. She was much impressed; so was I. You are a great heresiarch; and I know no better. Whaur the devil did ye get thon about the soap? Is it altogether your own? I never heard it elsewhere; and yet I suspect it must have been held at some time or other, and if you were to look up you would probably find yourself condemned by some Council.

I am glad to hear you are so well. The hear is excellent. The Cornhills came; I made Miss Ferrier read us _Thrawn Janet_, and was quite bowled over by my own works. _The Merry Men_ I mean to make much longer, with a whole new denouement, not yet quite clear to me. _The Story of a Lie_ I must rewrite entirely also, as it is too weak and ragged, yet is worth saving for the Admiral. Did I ever tell you that the Admiral was recognised in America?

When they are all on their legs this will make an excellent collection.

Has Davie never read _Guy Mannering_, _Rob Roy_, or _The Antiquary_? All of which are worth three _Waverleys_. I think _Kenilworth_ better than _Waverley_; _Nigel_, too; and _Quentin Durward_ about as good. But it shows a true piece of insight to prefer _Waverley_, for it _is_ different; and though not quite coherent, better worked in parts than almost any other: surely more carefully. It is undeniable that the love of the slap-dash and the shoddy grew upon Scott with success. Perhaps it does on many of us, which may be the granite on which D.'s opinion stands. However, I hold it, in Patrick Walker's phrase, for an "old, condemned, damnable error." Dr. Simson was condemned by P. W. as being "a bagful of" such. One of Patrick's amenities!

Another ground there may be to D.'s opinion; those who avoid (or seek to avoid) Scott's facility are apt to be continually straining and torturing their style to get in more of life. And to many the extra significance does not redeem the strain.

DOCTOR STEVENSON.

TO W. E. HENLEY

_La Solitude, Hyeres, April 20th, 1884._

I have been really ill for two days, hemorrhage, weakness, extreme nervousness that will not let me lie a moment, and damned sciatica o' nights; but to-day I am on the recovery. Time; for I was miserable. It is not often that I suffer, with all my turns and tumbles, from the sense of serious illness; and I hate it, as I believe everybody does. And then the combination of not being able to read, not being allowed to speak, being too weak to write, and not wishing to eat, leaves a man with some empty seconds. But I bless God, it's over now; to-day I am much mended.

Insatiable gulf, greedier than hell, and more silent than the woods of Styx, have you or have you not lost the dedication to the _Child's Garden_? Answer that plain question as otherwise I must try to tackle to it once again.

Sciatica is a word employed much by Shakespeare in a certain connection. 'Tis true, he was no physician, but as I read, he had smarted in his day. I, too, do smart. And yet this keen soprano agony, these veins of fire and bombshell explosions in the knee, are as nothing to a certain dull, drowsy pain I had when my kidneys were congested at Nice; there was death in that; the creak of Charon's rowlocks, and the miasmas of the Styx. I may say plainly, much as I have lost the power of bearing pain, I had still rather suffer much than die. Not only the love of life grows on me, but the fear of certain odd end-seconds grows as well. 'Tis a suffocating business, take it how you will; and Tyrrel and Forest only bunglers.

Well, this is an essay on death, or worse, on dying: to return to daylight and the winds, I perceive I have grown to live too much in my work and too little in life. 'Tis the dollars do it: the world is too much. Whenever I think I would like to live a little, I hear the butcher's cart resounding through the neighbourhood; and so to plunge again. The fault is a good fault for me; to be able to do so, is to succeed in life; and my life has been a huge success. I can live with joy and without disgust in the art by which I try to support myself; I have the best wife in the world; I have rather more praise and nearly as much coin as I deserve; my friends are many and true-hearted. Sir, it is a big thing in successes. And if mine anchorage lies something open to the wind, Sciatica, if the crew are blind, and the captain spits blood, one cannot have all, and I may be patched up again, who knows? "His timbers yet are (indifferently) sound, and he may float again."

Thanks for the word on _Silverado_.--Yours ever,

THE SCIATICATED BARD.

TO TREVOR HADDON

The allusions to Skelt, the last of the designers and etchers of
cheap sheets illustrating the popular dramas and melodramas of the
day, will need no explanation to readers familiar with the essay _A
Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_.

_La Solitude, Hyeres, April 23rd, 1884._

DEAR MR. HADDON,--I am pleased to see your hand again, and, waiting my wife's return, to guess at some of the contents. For various things have befallen me of late. First, as you see, I had to change my hand; lastly I have fallen into a kind of blindness, and cannot read. This more inclines me for something to do, to answer your letter before I have read it, a safe plan familiar to diplomatists.

I gather from half shut eyes that you were a Skeltist; now seriously that is a good beginning; there is a deal of romance (cheap) in Skelt. Look at it well, and you will see much of Dickens. And even Skelt is better than conscientious, grey back-gardens, and conscientious, dull still lives. The great lack of art just now is a spice of life and interest; and I prefer galvanism to acquiescence in the grave. All do not; 'tis an affair of tastes; and mine are young. Those who like death have their innings to-day with art that is like mahogany and horse-hair furniture, solid, true, serious and as dead as Caesar. I wish I could read _Treasure Island_; I believe I should like it. But work done, for the artist, is the Golden Goose killed; you sell its feathers and lament the eggs. To-morrow the fresh woods!

I have been seriously ill, and do not pick up with that finality that I should like to see. I linger over and digest my convalescence like a favourite wine; and what with blindness, green spectacles, and seclusion, cut but a poor figure in the world.

I made out at the end that you were asking some advice--but what, my failing eyes refuse to inform me. I must keep a sheet for the answer; and Mrs. Stevenson still delays, and still I have no resource against tedium but the waggling of this pen.

You seem to me to be a pretty lucky young man; keep your eyes open to your mercies. That part of piety is eternal; and the man who forgets to be grateful has fallen asleep in life. Please to recognise that you are unworthy of all that befalls you--unworthy, too, I hear you wail, of this terrible sermon; but indeed we are not worthy of our fortunes; love takes us in a counterfeit, success comes to us at play, health stays with us while we abuse her; and even when we gird at our fellow-men, we should remember that it is of their good will alone, that we still live and still have claims to honour. The sins of the most innocent, if they were exactly visited, would ruin them to the doer. And if you know any man who believes himself to be worthy of a wife's love, a friend's affection, a mistress's caress, even if venal, you may rest assured he is worthy of nothing but a kicking. I fear men who have no open faults; what do they conceal? We are not meant to be good in this world, but to try to be, and fail, and keep on trying; and when we get a cake to say, "Thank God!" and when we get a buffet, to say, "Just so: well hit!"

I have been getting some of the buffets of late; but have amply earned them--you need not pity me. Pity sick children and the individual poor man; not the mass. Don't pity anybody else, and never pity fools. The optimistic Stevenson; but there is a sense in these wanderings.

Now I have heard your letter, and my sermon was not mal-a-propos. For you seem to be complaining. Everybody's home is depressing, I believe; it is their difficult business to make it less so. There is an unpleasant saying, which would have pricked me sharply at your age.--Yours truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO COSMO MONKHOUSE

_La Solitude, Hyeres [April 24, 1884]._

DEAR MONKHOUSE,--If you are in love with repose, here is your occasion: change with me. I am too blind to read, hence no reading; I am too weak to walk, hence no walking; I am not allowed to speak, hence no talking; but the great simplification has yet to be named; for, if this goes on, I shall soon have nothing to eat--and hence, O Hallelujah! hence no eating. The offer is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil, for I could never find him. I am married, but so are you. I sometimes write verses, but so do you. Come! _Hic quies!_ As for the commandments, I have broken them so small that they are the dust of my chambers; you walk upon them, triturate and toothless; and with the Golosh of Philosophy, they shall not bite your heel. True, the tenement is falling. Ay, friend, but yours also. Take a larger view; what is a year or two? dust in the balance! 'Tis done, behold you Cosmo Stevenson, and me R. L. Monkhouse; you at Hyeres, I in London; you rejoicing in the clammiest repose, me proceeding to tear your tabernacle into rags, as I have already so admirably torn my own.

My place to which I now introduce you--it is yours--is like a London house, high and very narrow; upon the lungs I will not linger; the heart is large enough for a ballroom; the belly greedy and inefficient; the brain stocked with the most damnable explosives, like a dynamiter's den. The whole place is well furnished, though not in a very pure taste; Corinthian much of it; showy and not strong.

About your place I shall try to find my way above, an interesting exploration. Imagine me, as I go to bed, falling over a blood-stained remorse; opening that cupboard in the cerebellum and being welcomed by the spirit of your murdered uncle. I should probably not like your remorses; I wonder if you will like mine; I have a spirited assortment; they whistle in my ear o' nights like a north-easter. I trust yours don't dine with the family; mine are better mannered; you will hear nought of them till 2 A.M., except one, to be sure, that I have made a pet of, but he is small; I keep him in buttons, so as to avoid commentaries; you will like him much--if you like what is genuine.

Must we likewise change religions? Mine is a good article, with a trick of stopping; cathedral bell note; ornamental dial; supported by Venus and the Graces; quite a summer-parlour piety. Of yours, since your last, I fear there is little to be said.

There is one article I wish to take away with me: my spirits. They suit me. I don't want yours; I like my own; I have had them a long while in bottle. It is my only reservation.--Yours (as you decide),

R. L. MONKHOUSE.

TO W. E. HENLEY

_La Solitude, Hyeres [May 1884]._

DEAR BOY,--_Old Mortality_[9] is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes it. We like her immensely.

I keep better, but no great shakes yet; cannot work--cannot: that is flat, not even verses: as for prose, that more active place is shut on me long since.

My view of life is essentially the comic; and the romantically comic. _As You Like It_ is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters; _Tempest_ and _Twelfth Night_ follow. These are what I mean by poetry and nature. I make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Moliere, except upon the stage, where his inimitable _jeux de scene_ beggar belief; but you will observe they are stage-plays--things _ad hoc_; not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy; hence more perfect, and not so great. Then I come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to Fantasio; to one part of La Derniere Aldini (which, by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion, Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany. And to me these things are the good; beauty, touched with sex and laughter; beauty with God's earth for the background. Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it does, it does so by the heroic illusion; the anti-masque has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our steps in life, and sits by the deathbed, and certainly redacts the epitaph, laughter has been lost from these great-hearted lies. But the comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation; embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character; and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth.

R. L. S.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

Early in May Stevenson again fell very dangerously ill with
hemorrhage of the lungs, and lay for several weeks between life and
death, until towards the end of June he was brought sufficiently
round to venture by slow stages on the journey to England, staying
for two or three weeks at Royat on the way. His correspondent had
lately been appointed Clark Reader in English Literature at Trinity
College, Cambridge.

_[La Solitude, Hyeres] From my bed, May 29, 1884._

DEAR GOSSE,--The news of the Professorate found me in the article of--well, of heads or tails; I am still in bed, and a very poor person. You must thus excuse my damned delay; but, I assure you, I was delighted. You will believe me the more, if I confess to you that my first sentiment was envy; yes, sir, on my blood-boltered couch I envied the professor. However, it was not of long duration; the double thought that you deserved and that you would thoroughly enjoy your success fell like balsam on my wounds. How came it that you never communicated my rejection of Gilder's offer for the Rhone? But it matters not. Such earthly vanities are over for the present. This has been a fine well-conducted illness. A month in bed; a month of silence; a fortnight of not stirring my right hand; a month of not moving without being lifted. Come! _Ca y est_: devilish like being dead.--Yours, dear Professor, academically,

R. L. S.

I am soon to be moved to Royat; an invalid valet goes with me! I got him cheap--second-hand.

In turning over my late friend Ferrier's commonplace book, I find three poems from _Viol and Flute_ copied out in his hand: "When Flower-time," "Love in Winter," and "Mistrust." They are capital too. But I thought the fact would interest you. He was no poetist either; so it means the more. "Love in W.!" I like the best.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

Enclosing some supplementary verses for the _Child's Garden_.

_Marseilles, June 1884._

DEAR S. C.,--Are these four in time? No odds about order. I am at Marseille and stood the journey wonderfully. Better address Hotel Chabassiere, Royat, Puy de Dome. You see how this d--d poeshie flows from me in sickness: Are they good or bad? Wha kens? But I like the _Little Land_, I think, as well as any. As time goes on I get more fancy in. We have no money, but a valet and a maid. The valet is no end; how long can you live on a valet? Vive le valet! I am tempted to call myself a valetudinarian. I love my love with a V because he is a Valetudinarian; I took him to Valetta or Valais, gave him his Vails and tenderly addressed him with one word,

Vale.

_P.S._--It does not matter of course about order. As soon as I have all the slips I shall organise the book for the publisher. A set of 8 will be put together under the title _An Only Child_; another cycle of 10 will be called _In the Garden_, and other six called _Bedtime_ to end all up. It will now make quite a little volume of a good way upwards of 100 pp. Will you instruct Bain to send me a Bible; of a type that I can read without blindness; the better if with notes; there is a Clarendon Press Bible, pray see it yourself. I also want Ewald's History in a translation.

R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The play of _Deacon Brodie_, the joint work of R. L. S. and W. E. H.,
was to be performed in London early in July.

[_Hotel Chabassiere, Royat, July 1884._]

DEAR S. C.,--Books received with great thanks. Very nice books, though I see you underrate my cecity: I could no more read their beautiful Bible than I could sail in heaven. However I have sent for another and can read the rest for patience.

I quite understand your feelings about the _Deacon_, which is a far way behind; but I get miserable when I think of Henley cutting this splash and standing, I fear, to lose a great deal of money. It is about Henley, not Brodie, that I care. I fear my affections are not strong to my past works; they are blotted out by others; and anyhow the _Deacon_ is damn bad.

I am half asleep and can no more discourse. Say to your friends, "Look here, some friends of mine are bringing out a play; it has some stuff; suppose you go and see it." But I know I am a cold, unbelieving fellow, incapable of those hot claps that honour you and Henley and therefore--I am asleep. _Child's Garden_ (first instalment) come. Fanny ill; self asleep.

R. L. S.

TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

_Hotel Chabassiere, Royat [July 1884]._

MY DEAR PEOPLE,--The weather has been demoniac; I have had a skiff of cold, and was finally obliged to take to bed entirely; to-day, however, it has cleared, the sun shines, and I begin to

* * * * *

_Several days after._--I have been out once, but now am back in bed. I am better, and keep better, but the weather is a mere injustice. The imitation of Edinburgh is, at times, deceptive; there is a note among the chimney pots that suggests Howe Street; though I think the shrillest spot in Christendom was not upon the Howe Street side, but in front, just under the Miss Graemes' big chimney stack. It had a fine alto character--a sort of bleat that used to divide the marrow in my joints--say in the wee, slack hours. That music is now lost to us by rebuilding; another air that I remember, not regret, was the solo of the gas-burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering, and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare rain-drops, and, looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen's and Frederick's Street dotting it with yellow, and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances--I, who have now positively forgotten the colour of unhappiness; who am full like a fed ox, and dull like a fresh turf, and have no more spiritual life, for good or evil, than a French bagman.

We are at Chabassiere's, for of course it was nonsense to go up the hill when we could not walk.

The child's poems in a far extended form are likely soon to be heard of--which Cummy I dare say will be glad to know. They will make a book of about one hundred pages.--Ever your affectionate,

R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

I had reported to Stevenson a remark made by one of his greatest
admirers, Sir E. Burne-Jones, on some particular analogy, I forget
what, between a passage of Defoe and one in _Treasure Island_.

[_Hotel Chabassiere, Royat, July 1884._]

... Here is a quaint thing, I have read _Robinson_, _Colonel Jack_, _Moll Flanders_, _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, _History of the Plague_, _History of the Great Storm_, _Scotch Church and Union_. And there my knowledge of Defoe ends--except a book, the name of which I forget, about Peterborough in Spain, which Defoe obviously did not write, and could not have written if he wanted. To which of these does B. J. refer? I guess it must be the history of the Scottish Church. I jest; for, of course, I _know_ it must be a book I have never read, and which this makes me keen to read--I mean _Captain Singleton_. Can it be got and sent to me? If _Treasure Island_ is at all like it, it will be delightful. I was just the other day wondering at my folly in not remembering it, when I was writing _T. I._, as a mine for pirate tips. _T. I._ came out of Kingsley's _At Last_, where I got the Dead Man's Chest--and that was the seed--and out of the great Captain Johnson's _History of Notorious Pirates_. The scenery is Californian in part, and in part _chic_.

I was downstairs to-day! So now I am a made man--till the next time.

R. L. STEVENSON.

If it was _Captain Singleton_, send it to me, won't you?

_Later._--My life dwindles into a kind of valley of the shadow picnic. I cannot read; so much of the time (as to-day) I must not speak above my breath, that to play patience, or to see my wife play it, is become the be-all and the end-all of my dim career. To add to my gaiety, I may write letters, but there are few to answer. Patience and Poesy are thus my rod and staff; with these I not unpleasantly support my days.

I am very dim, dumb, dowie, and damnable. I hate to be silenced; and if to talk by signs is my forte (as I contend), to understand them cannot be my wife's. Do not think me unhappy; I have not been so for years; but I am blurred, inhabit the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim designs upon activity. All is at a standstill; books closed, paper put aside, the voice, the eternal voice of R. L. S., well silenced. Hence this plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very great purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy, dull, somnolent, superannuated son of a bedpost.

TO W. E. HENLEY

I suppose, but cannot remember, that I had in the meantime sent him
_Captain Singleton_.

[_Hotel Chabassiere, Royat, July 1884._]

DEAR BOY,--I am glad that ---- ---- has disappointed you. Depend upon it, nobody is so bad as to be worth scalping, except your dearest friends and parents; and scalping them may sometimes be avoided by scalping yourself. I grow daily more lymphatic and benign; bring me a dynamiter, that I may embrace and bless him!--So, if I continue to evade the friendly hemorrhage, I shall be spared in anger to pour forth senile and insignificant volumes, and the clever lads in the journals, not doubting of the eye of Nemesis, shall mock and gird at me.

All this seems excellent news of the _Deacon_. But O! that the last tableau, on from Leslie's entrance, were re-written! We had a great opening there and missed it. I read for the first time _Captain Singleton_; it has points; and then I re-read _Colonel Jack_ with ecstasy; the first part is as much superior to _Robinson Crusoe_ as _Robinson_ is to--_The Inland Voyage_. It is pretty, good, philosophical, dramatic, and as picturesque as a promontory goat in a gale of wind. Get it and fill your belly with honey.

Fanny hopes to be in time for the _Deacon_. I was out yesterday, and none the worse. We leave Monday.

R. L. S.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For many years fellow of and historical lecturer at Trinity
College, Cambridge.

[2] _Paillon._

[3] The name of the Delectable Land in one of Heine's _Lieder_.

[4] _Silverado Squatters_.

[5] The allusion is to a specimen I had been used to hear quoted of
the Duke of Wellington's table-talk in his latter years. He had said
that musk-rats were sometimes kept alive in bottles in India. Curate,
or other meek dependent: "I presume, your Grace, they are small rats
and large bottles." His Grace: "No, large rats, small bottles; large
rats, small bottles; large rats, small bottles."

[6] _Croutes_: crude studies from nature.

[7] Mr. J. Comyns Carr, at this time editing the English Illustrated
Magazine.

[8] A favourite Skye terrier. Mr. Stevenson was a great lover of dogs.

[9] The essay so called, suggested by the death of J. W. Ferrier. See
_Memories and Portraits_.

VIII

LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH

SEPTEMBER 1884--AUGUST 1887

Arriving in England at the end of July 1884, Stevenson took up his quarters first for a few weeks at Richmond. He was compelled to abandon the hope of making his permanent home at Hyeres, partly by the renewed failure there of his own health, partly by a bad outbreak of cholera which occurred in the old Provencal town about the time he left it. After consultation with several doctors, all of whom held out hopes of ultimate recovery despite the gravity of his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth. Here he found in the heaths and pinewoods some distant semblance of the landscape of his native Scotland, and in the sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean. At all events, he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it for a home; and such it became for all but three years, from September 1884 to August 1887. These, although in the matter of health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter of work some of the most active and successful. For the first two or three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; for the next five, from mid-November 1884 to mid-April 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers, pleasantly situated amid the pinewoods of Branksome Park, and by its name recalling familiar Midlothian associations. Lastly, about Easter 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of their own, given by the elder Mr. Stevenson as a special gift to his daughter-in-law, and renamed by its new occupants Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast.

During all the time of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth he was compelled to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with invincible spirit and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost constant prisoner to the house. A great part of his time had perforce to be spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was produced. Often for days, and sometimes for whole weeks together, he was forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and paper. The few excursions to a distance which he attempted--most commonly to my house at the British Museum, once to Cambridge, once to Matlock, once to Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris--these excursions generally ended in a breakdown and a hurried retreat to home and bed. Nevertheless, he was able in intervals of comparative ease to receive and enjoy the visits of friends from a distance both old and new--among the most welcome of the latter being Mr. Henry James, Mr. William Archer, and Mr. John S. Sargent; while among Bournemouth residents who attached themselves to him on terms of special intimacy and affection were Sir Percy and Lady Shelley and Sir Henry and Lady Taylor and their daughters.

At the same time, seizing and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising, under the circumstances, alike by quantity and quality. During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays _Admiral Guinea_ and _Beau Austin_ were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley, and many other dramatic schemes were broached which health and leisure failed him to carry out. In the course of the next few months he finished _Prince Otto_, _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and _More New Arabian Nights_, all three of which had been begun, and the two first almost completed, before he left Hyeres. He at the same time attacked two new tasks--a highway novel called _The Great North Road_, and a _Life of Wellington_ for a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, both of which he had in the sequel to abandon; and a third, the boys' story of _Kidnapped_, which in its turn had to be suspended, but on its publication next year turned out one of the most brilliant of his successes.

About midsummer of this year, 1885, he was distressed by the sudden death of his old and kind friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin, and after a while undertook the task of writing a memoir of him to be prefixed to his collected papers. Towards the close of the same year he was busy with what proved to be the most popular of all his writings, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and with the Christmas story of _Olalla_. _Jekyll and Hyde_ was published in January 1886, and after threatening for the first week or two to fall flat, in no long time caught the attention of all classes of readers, was quoted from a hundred pulpits, and made the writer's name familiar to multitudes both in England and America whom it had never reached before. A success scarcely inferior, though of another kind, was made a few months afterwards by _Kidnapped_, which Stevenson had taken up again in the early spring, and which was published about midsummer. After completing this task in March, he was able to do little work during the remainder of the year, except in preparing materials for the _Life of Fleeming Jenkin_, and in writing occasional verses which helped to make up the collection published in the following year under the title _Underwoods_. In the early autumn of the same year, 1886, he took a longer and more successful excursion from home than usual, staying without breakdown for two or three weeks at the Monument, as he always called my house at the British Museum, and seeing something of kindred spirits among his elders, such as Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, the painters Burne-Jones and W. B. Richmond, and others who had hitherto delighted in his work and now learned to delight no less in his society.

Thence he went with Mr. Henley for a short trip to Paris, chiefly in order to see the sculptor Rodin and his old friends Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Low. From this trip he returned none the worse, but during all the later autumn and winter at Bournemouth was again hampered in his work by renewed and prolonged attacks of illness. A further cause of trouble was the distressing failure of his father's health and spirits, attended by symptoms which plainly indicated the beginning of the end.

For some weeks of April, 1887, he was much taken up with a scheme which had nothing to do with literature, and which the few friends to whom he confided it regarded as wildly Quixotic and unwise. In these years he had, as we have seen, taken deeply to heart both what he thought the guilty remissness of Government action in the matter of the Soudan garrisons and of Gordon, and the tameness of acquiescence with which the national conscience appeared to take the result. He had been not less disturbed at the failure, hitherto, of successive administrations to assert the reign of law in Ireland. He was no blind partisan of the English cause in that country, and had even written of the hereditary hatred of Irish for English as a sentiment justified by the facts of history. But he held strongly that private warfare, the use of dynamite and the knife, with the whole system of agrarian vengeances and the persecution of the weak, were means which no end could justify; and that redress of grievances, whatever form it might ultimately take, must be preceded by the re-establishment of law. In _More New Arabian Nights_, published the year before, he had endeavoured "to make dynamite ridiculous if he could not make it horrible," and to the old elements of fantastic invention, and humorously solemn realism in the unreal, had added the new element of a witty and scornful criminal psychology. A case that now appealed to him with especial force was that of the cruel persecution kept up against the widow and daughters of the murdered man Curtin. He determined that if no one else would take up the duty of resisting such persecution without regard to consequences, he would take it up himself, in the hope of more effectually rousing the public conscience to the evils of the time. His plan was to go with his family, occupy and live upon the derelict farm, and let happen what would. This, as the letters referring to the matter plainly show, was no irresponsible dream or whim, but a purpose conceived in absolute and sober earnest. His wife and household were prepared to follow, though under protest, had he persisted; as it seemed for some weeks that he certainly would, until at last the arguments of his friends, and still more the unmistakable evidence that his father's end was near, persuaded him to give up his purpose. But to the last, I think he was never well satisfied that in giving way he had not been a coward, preferring fireside ease and comfort to the call of a public duty.

After spending a part of the winter at Bournemouth and a part at Torquay, both Stevenson's parents returned to Edinburgh in April 1887; and within a few weeks after their arrival he was summoned north to his father's death-bed. He stayed at Edinburgh the short time necessary for the dispatch of business, and returned to his own sick-room life at Skerryvore.

During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth, preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no apparent progress towards recovery. Every period of respite had been quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion, which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew in the long run merely irksome; and even his persistent high courage and gaiety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his wife and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him. Accordingly, when in May 1887 the death of his father severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life. His wife's connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure of lung patients. Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly took passage on board the S.S. _Ludgate Hill_, sailing for New York from London on August 21st, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine Roch. The concluding letters of the present section tell of the preparations for this departure.

TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

_Wensleydale, Bournemouth, Sunday, 28th September 1884._

MY DEAR PEOPLE,--I keep better, and am to-day downstairs for the first time. I find the lockers entirely empty; not a cent to the front. Will you pray send us some? It blows an equinoctial gale, and has blown for nearly a week. Nimbus Britannicus; piping wind, lashing rain; the sea is a fine colour, and wind-bound ships lie at anchor under the Old Harry rocks, to make one glad to be ashore.