Robert Louis Stevenson [32]
had intimacy with him. Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book):
"I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts - namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me - his elder by some fifteen months - as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' HE OF ALL MORTALS, WHO WAS, IN A SENSE, ALWAYS STILL A BOY!"
Mr Gosse tells us:
"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or he modelled little groups and figures in clay."
2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he wrote:
"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, AND SOMETHING OF THE SHORTER CATECHIST."
SOMETHING! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably awakens, was much with him - the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect - the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-devilries - Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been - the same, or different from what it was with those that were there? His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self- satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way - a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in OLD MORTALITY, "I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:
"It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels - packed no doubt with gems and jewellery - are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a week would enable such a man
"I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts - namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me - his elder by some fifteen months - as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' HE OF ALL MORTALS, WHO WAS, IN A SENSE, ALWAYS STILL A BOY!"
Mr Gosse tells us:
"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or he modelled little groups and figures in clay."
2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he wrote:
"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, AND SOMETHING OF THE SHORTER CATECHIST."
SOMETHING! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably awakens, was much with him - the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect - the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-devilries - Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been - the same, or different from what it was with those that were there? His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self- satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way - a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in OLD MORTALITY, "I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:
"It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels - packed no doubt with gems and jewellery - are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a week would enable such a man