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By Root 670 0

When possible, Bob escaped to Edinburgh to stay with Louis, or to make sandcastles down in North Berwick. They rode ponies. Bob had ‘Hell’, his sister Katherine had ‘Heaven’ and Louis rode ‘Purgatory’. Sometimes, David’s children would accompany them. His two sons, Charles and David (known as David A., or DAS), had been brought up in prim Edinburgh style, and lacked the wildness of their cousins. Louis, in fact, found the two disgracefully smug and always referred to them both as ‘the good little boys’ until his adult conscience caught up with him. Bob, on the other hand, was an all-rounder like his father, just as happy with mathematics as he was with art. He had, as Louis described it, ‘the most indefagitable, feverish mind I have ever known; he had acquired a smattering of almost every knowledge and art; he would surprise you by his playing, his painting, his writing, his knowledge of philosophy, and above all by a sort of vague, disconnected and totally inexplicable erudition.’ In later years, he went to Cambridge and then became a writer and critic on art, though no particular subject pinned him down for long. He, like Louis, revolted against his father’s beliefs. Whereas Alan had suppressed the best of himself to become an engineer, Bob challenged everything openly. As with Louis, the biggest breach erupted over religion. Bob found his father’s devotion impossible to understand, and in later life became a vehement dissenter.

Bob’s youth and rebellion coincided with Alan’s final decline. After his retirement, he and the family had moved first to Portobello and then to the Fifeshire village of St Cyrus, within sight of the Bell Rock. As the MS worsened, Alan had to make frequent trips to the English spa towns to help alleviate the pains, and his NLB pension was dwindling fast. There was no money to send Bob to the High School, no money for holidays or spoilings. The little Alan could do – scientific papers, snippets of poetry, memoirs of his father – did not pay well, and the increasing periods of illness meant that he was unable to take regular work teaching or translating. He did manage to contribute a large entry on lighthouses to Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, and, more for the sake of occupation than reward, began translating the ‘Ten Hymns of Synesius’ from the Greek. Synesius had been ambassador to the Emperor Arcadius Augustus, and had written a series of ‘sublime and grand’ verses as well as several essays including a ‘Treatise on Dreams’ and a tract ‘In Praise of Baldness’. Coleridge, whom Alan knew through Wordsworth, claimed that he had himself translated eight of the Hymns by the age of fifteen; Alan claimed modestly that without the poet’s lead, he would ‘not otherwise have ventured to try my feeble and unskillful hand on the work’. He wrote a brief introduction to the translations, mentioning that ‘it pleased God in 1852 to disable me, by a severe nervous affliction, for my duties, as engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses; and I took to beguiling my great suffering by trying to versify the whole Ten Hymns of Synesius. During many an hour, the employment helped to soothe my pains.’ With the translations were a number of his own poems, all heavily influenced by Wordsworth. Most of them contained a deep seam of religious anguish. One poem, entitled ‘On Memory as an Agent of Retributive Justice,’ emphasised his preoccupation with punishment and atonement.

In that dreadful day,

When the last trumpet’s wondrous note shall sound,

Rending the spheres, and piercing the dull tomb,

The wheel of each man’s destiny shall roll

Backwards, unfolding all his inner life;

From his last breath to childhood’s earliest sin,

Which led him first from God, all shall be told.

Finally, in 1865, Alan Stevenson, the quiet pioneer, died. The Commissioners recorded an unusually heartfelt tribute, noting ‘their deep and abiding regret for the loss of a man…whose genuine piety, kind heart and high intellect made him beloved.’ By any standards, he had been an extraordinary man, fluent in six languages, a classical scholar, the