Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial. Alexander H. Japp
Stevenson.”
As indicating the estimate of many of the good Edinburgh people of Stevenson and the Stevensons that still held sway up to so late a date as 1893, I will here extract two characteristic passages from the letters of the friend and correspondent of these days just referred to, and to whom I had sent a copy of the Atalanta Magazine, with an article of mine on Stevenson.
“If you can excuse the garrulity of age, I can tell you one or two things about Louis Stevenson, his father and even his grandfather, which you may work up some other day, as you have so deftly embedded in the Atalanta article that small remark on his acting. Your paper is pleasant and modest: most of R. L. Stevenson’s admirers are inclined to lay it on far too thick. That he is a genius we all admit; but his genius, if fine, is limited. For example, he cannot paint (or at least he never has painted) a woman. No more could Fettes Douglas, skilful artist though he was in his own special line, and I shall tell you a remark of Russel’s thereon some day. [4] There are women in his books, but there is none of the beauty and subtlety of womanhood in them.
“R. L. Stevenson I knew well as a lad and often met him and talked with him. He acted in private theatricals got up by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin. But he had then, as always, a pretty guid conceit o’ himsel’—which his clique have done nothing to check. His father and his grandfather (I have danced with his mother before her marriage) I knew better; but ‘the family theologian,’ as some of R. L. Stevenson’s friends dabbed his father, was a very touchy theologian, and denounced any one who in the least differed from his extreme Calvinistic views. I came under his lash most unwittingly in this way myself. But for this twist, he was a good fellow—kind and hospitable—and a really able man in his profession. His father-in-law, R. L. Stevenson’s maternal grandfather, was the Rev. Dr. Balfour, minister of Colinton—one of the finest-looking old men I ever saw—tall, upright, and ruddy at eighty. But he was marvellously feeble as a preacher, and often said things that were deliciously, unconsciously, unintentionally laughable, if not witty. We were near Colinton for some years; and Mr. Russell (of the Scotsman), who once attended the Parish Church with us, was greatly tickled by Balfour discoursing on the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, remarking that Mrs. P---’s conduct was ‘highly improper’!”
The estimate of R. L. Stevenson was not and could not be final in this case, for Weir of Hermiston and Catriona were yet unwritten, not to speak of others, but the passages reflect a certain side of Edinburgh opinion, illustrating the old Scripture doctrine that a prophet has honour everywhere but in his own country. And the passages themselves bear evidence that I violate no confidence then, for they were given to me to be worked into any after-effort I might make on Stevenson. My friend was a good and an acute critic who had done some acceptable literary work in his day.
CHAPTER III—THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN
R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year of the death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so finely celebrated. As a mere child he gave token of his character. As soon as he could read, he was keen for books, and, before very long, had read all the story-books he could lay hands on; and, when the stock ran out, he would go and look in at all the shop windows within reach, and try to piece out the stories from the bits exposed in open pages and the woodcuts.
He had a nurse of very remarkable character—evidently a paragon—who deeply influenced him and did much to form his young mind—Alison Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo, became “Cumy,” and who not only was never forgotten, but to the end was treated as his “second mother.” In his dedication of his Child’s Garden of Verses to her, he says:
“My second mother, my first wife,
The angel of my infant life.”
Her copy of Kidnapped was inscribed to her by the hand of Stevenson, thus:
“To Cumy, from her boy, the author.
Skerryvore, 18th July 1888.”
Skerryvore was the name of Stevenson’s Bournemouth home, so named after one of the Stevenson lighthouses. His first volume, An Inland Voyage has this pretty dedication, inscribed in a neat, small hand:
“My dear Cumy—If you had not taken so much trouble with me all the years of my childhood, this little book would never have been written. Many a long night you sat up with me when I was ill. I wish I could hope, by way of return, to amuse a single evening for you with my little book. But whatever you think of it, I know you will think kindly of
The Author.”
“Cumy” was perhaps the most influential teacher Stevenson had. What she and his mother taught took effect and abode with him, which was hardly the case with any other of his teachers.
“In contrast to Goethe,” says Mr. Baildon, “Stevenson was but little affected by his relations to women, and, when this point is fully gone into, it will probably be found that his mother and nurse in childhood, and his wife and step-daughter in later life, are about the only women who seriously influenced either his character or his art.” (p. 32).
When Mr. Kelman is celebrating Stevenson for the consistency and continuity of his undogmatic religion, he is almost throughout celebrating “Cumy” and her influence, though unconsciously. Here, again, we have an apt and yet more striking illustration, after that of the good Lord Shaftesbury and many others, of the deep and lasting effect a good and earnest woman, of whom the world may never hear, may have had upon a youngster of whom all the world shall hear. When Mr. Kelman says that “the religious element in Stevenson was not a thing of late growth, but an integral part and vital interest of his life,” he but points us back to the earlier religious influences to which he had been effectually subject. “His faith was not for himself alone, and the phases of Christianity which it has asserted are peculiarly suited to the spiritual needs of many in the present time.”
We should not lay so much weight as Mr. Kelman does on the mere number of times “the Divine name” is found in Stevenson’s writings, but there is something in such confessions as the following to his father, when he was, amid hardship and illness, in Paris in 1878:
“Still I believe in myself and my fellow-men and the God who made us all. … I am lonely and sick and out of heart. Well, I still hope; I still believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling to it. It is not much, perhaps, but it is always something.”
Yes, “Cumy” was a very effective teacher, whose influence and teaching long remained. His other teachers, however famous and highly gifted, did not attain to such success with him. And because of this non-success they blamed him, as is usual. He was fond of playing truant—declared, indeed, that he was about as methodic a truant as ever could have existed. He much loved to go on long wanderings by himself on the Pentland Hills and read about the Covenanters, and while yet a youth of sixteen he wrote The Pentland Rising—a pamphlet in size and a piece of fine work—which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a high price. He had made himself thoroughly familiar with all the odd old corners of Edinburgh—John Knox’s haunts and so on, all which he has turned to account in essays, descriptions and in stories—especially in Catriona. When a mere youth at school, as he tells us himself, he had little or no desire to carry off prizes and do just as other boys did; he was always wishing to observe, and to see, and try things for himself—was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something of an idler, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply. He was applying them rightly, though not in their way. It is not only in his Apology for Idlers that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as in his essay on A College Magazine, where he says, “I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!”
When he went to College it was still the same—he tells us in the funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of Professor Blackie, though the Professor