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The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

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The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson SaS' no/ THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BY GRAHAM BALFOUR IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I LONDON METHUEN AND CO. 36 ESSEX STREET 1901 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty PREFACE This book is intended to supplement the volumes of Stevenson's Letters already published. Originally it was to have been written by Mr. Colvin, and to have appeared simultaneously with the two volumes of corre- so edited but health spondence, admirably by him ; when and opportunity unfortunately failed him, Mrs. Steven- son requested me to undertake the task. The reason for this selection was that during the last two years and a half of my cousin's life, I had on his invitation made Vailima my home and the point of departure for my from the of his own journeys ; and, apart members family, had been throughout that period the only one of his intimate friends in contact with every side of his life. In Stevenson's case, if anywhere, the rule holds, that all biography would be autobiography if it could, and I have availed myself as far as possible of the writings in which he has referred to himself and his past experi- ence. To bring together the passing allusions to himself scattered widely throughout his works was an obvious at the same time in duty ; my longer quotations, except two or three manifest and necessary instances, have been taken almost entirely from the material which was hitherto either unpublished or issued only in the limited Edinburgh Edition. Whenever I found any passage in his manuscripts or ephemeral work bearing upon his VOL. I. b vi PREFACE life or development, I employed it no less readily than I should have used a letter or a hasty note, and in exactly the same fashion, regarding it as a piece of direct evidence from the best possible source. Such use of documents, I need hardly point out, differs entirely from challenging admiration for the literary form of immature or unfinished compositions. Where so much taste and discretion have been shown in preparing the final edition of his works, I should be the last to trans- gress the bounds imposed upon publication. Since autobiography is wont to deal at some length with the first memories of its author, there seemed no occasion unduly to restrain this tendency in the case of the singer and interpreter of childhood, whose account of his early years is not only interesting in itself, but also of additional value for its illustration of his poems and essays. Again, in the representation of his adolescence, it must be remembered that he never wholly ceased to be a boy, that much that belonged to him in early youth remained with him in after-life, and that enthusiasms and generous impulses would sweep in and carry him away till the end. Much of course he did outgrow, and that almost entirely his worse part. I feel that I should have done him a very ill service if I had refrained from showing the faults of the immaturity from which the character and genius of his manhood emerged. He had many failings, but few or none that made his friends think worse of him or love him any the less. To be the writer that he was, amounted to a and service to great exploit humanity ; to become the man that in the end he became, seems to me an achievement equally great, an example no less eloquent. PREFACE vii Many persons, both friends and strangers to me, have rendered my task far easier than I could have hoped. There is hardly one of Stevenson's intimate friends but has helped me in a greater or less degree, and if I were here to repeat my thanks to all to whom I am indebted for information, I should have to record more than sixty names. Those to whom we owe most are often those the least and to Mrs. Steven- whom formally we thank ; son and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne I can never express my indebtedness for their suggestions and their knowledge, their confidence, their patience, and their encouragement. But, of course, for everything that is here printed I alone am responsible. The references to Stevenson's writings are necessarily to the pages of the Edinburgh Edition, as being the most complete collection of his works. CONTENTS PAGE Preface, . ... V I. His Ancestors, I II. His Parents, .... 16 III. Infancy and Childhood— 1850-59, . 29 IV. Boyhood— 1859-67, 52 V. Student Days— 1867-73, 69 VI. Life at Five-and-Twenty— 1873-76, no VII. Transition— 1876-79, . 144 VIII. California— 1879-80, . 164 IX. Davos and the Highlands— 1880-82, 179 X. The Riviera— 1882-84,. 203 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Portrait of R. L. Stevenson at the Age of 26. Redrawn by T. Blake Wirgman from a charcoal drawing by Mrs. Stevenson, . Frontispiece Portrait of Mrs. R. L. Stevenson at the Age of 30. From a photograph, . .176 THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON CHAPTER I HIS ANCESTORS ' is I I in U(^ The ascendant hand what feel most strongly ; am bound in with forbears. all and my We are nobly born ; fortunate it — those who know ; blessed those who remember.' R. L. S., Letters^ ii. 230. * The and of I see like sights thoughts my youth pursue me ; and a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny.'—R. L. S., Dedication of Catriona. ' It is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees/ as Stevenson once wrote, 'that we can follow back the careers of our component parts and be reminded of our ^ ante-natal lives.' But the threads are many and tangled, and it is hard to distinguish for more than a generation or two the transmission of the characteristics that meet in any individual of our own day. The qualities that would be required by other ages and for other pursuits are often unperceived, and the same man might scarce be recognised could he renew his life in three several centuries, and be set to a different task in each. More- over, when any one has been dead for a hundred years, it is seldom that anything is remembered of him but his and his he has name occupation ; become no more than a link in a pedigree, and the personal disposition is forgotten which made him loved or feared, together with the powers that gained him success or the weaknesses that brought about his failure. Therefore it is no unusual * Memories Portraits and ^ p. 162. VOL. I. A 2 LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON circumstance that, while we can trace the line of Steven- son's ancestors on either side for two and four hundred years respectively, our knowledge of them, in any real sense of the word, begins only at the end of the eigh- teenth century. After that date we have four portraits, drawn in part by his own hand, together with the for in these be dis- materials another sketch ; may cerned some of the traits and faculties which went to make up a personality so unusual, so fascinating, and so deeply loved. The record of his father's people opens in 1675 with the birth of a son, Robert, to James Stevenson, 'pre- sumably a tenant farmer' of Nether Carsewell in the parish of Neilston, some ten miles to the south-west of Glasgow. Robert's son, a maltster in Glasgow, had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born 1749, and Alan, born June 1752. 'With these two brothers my story begins,' their ' descendant wrote in A Family of Engineers} Their deaths were simultaneous their lives brief and ; unusually full. Tradition whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts ; and it is certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home,' almost before they had reached the years of manhood. In 1774 Alan was summoned to the West Indies by Hugh. * An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious scale and it used to be told in child- ; me my hood how the brothers pursued him from one island to another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the tropics, and simultaneously struck down. The dates and places of their deaths would seem to ^ Except where it is otherwise stated, the quotations in this chapter and most of the facts about his father's people are drawn from the unfinished fragment of A Family of Engineers, printed in the volume of Biography in the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's works. HIS ANCESTORS 3 indicate a more scattered and prolonged pursuit.' At all * events, in something like the course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five, the other twenty-two.' Alan left behind him a wife and one child, aged two, the future engineer of the Bell Rock, who was also destined to be the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. The widow was daughter of David Lillie, a Glasgow builder, several times Deacon of the Wrights, but had lost her father only a month before her husband's death, and for the time, at any rate, mother and son were almost ' destitute.
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