Footsteps. Richard Holmes
far the most revealing document to me consisted of a linked series of four essays which he wrote for the Cornhill magazine and Henley’s London magazine between 1877 and 1879. He later collected them in 1881 under the general title of Virginibus Puerisque (“To Youths and Maidens”). The first two essays concern marriage and the marriage relationship; the third is headed “On Falling in Love”, with the Shakespearian epigraph—“What fools these mortals be!”; and the fourth is called, severely, “Truth of Intercourse”. But all four are evidently drawn from his passion for Fanny, and they represent an entirely new note in his work and outlook.
The tone Stevenson adopted was ironic, mildly facetious, even slightly misogynic. Considering the circumstances under which he was composing this surprised me very much. It runs right through all four essays, from the famous definition of marriage as “a sort of friendship recognised by the police” to the long peroration on the terrors of the righteous wife. “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave … To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.” What is one to make of all this?
Part of the answer seems to be that Stevenson, having really fallen in love with Fanny, was genuinely frightened—even terrified—by the implications. She was not the first woman he had flirted with, played bohemians with or slept with. But she was undoubtedly the first woman to become so important to him that she made his life incomplete, and challenged his identity. All the rapid shuttlings between England and France vividly suggest this, and everywhere the essays bear it out.
There is the frank avowal: “The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.” Or there is the mocking paradox: “Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.” There is even the rather knowing and hopeful: “It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much better educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.”
Above all, there is Stevenson’s hymn to the eternally boyish in man, the Peter Panish element (though that is an anachronism), which he felt intuitively it was dangerous, even a crime, to deny. The true threat of marriage, as he saw it, came down finally to this: that it would kill the boy in him. This passage is one of the best in the Virginibus Puerisque, and evidently links with Stevenson’s meditations on those threats to “the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth” during his night at La Trappe. He is considering the “unfading boyishness of hope”, what he defines as the piratical quality, the refusal to be quite tamed or rational or responsible, Tom Sawyer’s “Ah, if he could only die temporarily. Turning aside for a moment from the imminent threat of marriage, he suddenly stops to wonder if boyishness is not, after all, an irreducible quality even in the most sage and settled of his fellow-citizens. The thought develops in a now characteristic way, in which a journey through a harsh landscape is already foreseen, even predicted:
Here we recognise the thought of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
In a literary way, this idea is central not only to the kind of books Stevenson went on to write (with their mixture of boyish adventure and very adult nostalgia), but to a whole tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling are all foreseen. But I saw only the immediate and personal situation.
The spring of 1878 did not bring Stevenson anywhere nearer a practical decision about Fanny. Though he had published An Inland Voyage in May, and gone some way to establishing himself in his own eyes as a professional author, their shared future still seemed unassured. Stevenson returned to London to work as an assistant editor on Henley’s London magazine, and suddenly in July Fanny announced that she was returning to California. If it was an ultimatum Stevenson did not respond; but it is likely that Fanny—still married to Sam—was in just as much turmoil as he. Lloyd recalled with feeling: “I had not the slightest perception of the quandary my mother and RLS were in, nor what agonies of mind their approaching separation was bringing.”
The three Osbournes left on the boat-train from London in August, and Stevenson, pale and silent, came to see them off. He could not bear to wait till the train pulled out but, wrapping his long brown ulster coat round his thin shoulders, strode off down the platform without glancing back. In September he reached the Cévennes, and only then did he dare to look about him.
4
After La Trappe there seemed to be a new sense of determination about Stevenson’s route. He was rested, and certain issues must now have been clearly in the forefront of his mind. He and Modestine now embarked on the great upland peaks of the central Cévennes: the Montagne du Goulet at 4,700 feet; and, a day’s walk beyond it, the Pic de Finiels at 5,600 feet. It is a different landscape from the Gévaudan, bolder, wilder, more dramatically plotted. It is visionary highland country: steep woods of scented pine climb sharply upwards to windy expanse of bare moorland, heath, rolling grass or scree; then drop back down in precipitous alpine meadows, or rocky gorges, rushing streams and deep green-and-gold terraces of chestnut trees. You walk against the sky, with chain after chain of hills rolling southwards at your feet.
This is also the beginning of the “country of the Camisards”, the Protestant rebels of the regional insurrection of 1702-3, whose history had fascinated Stevenson from adolescence, when he sketched out The Pentland Rising about a similar upheaval in the eighteenth-century Scottish highlands.
The last eight chapters of the Travels are largely concerned with this Camisard history, together with Stevenson’s reflections on the nature of religious belief and bigotry. The effect of this in the published text is to give the last third of his journey a curiously impersonal feel, an essay in regional history, which is quite at odds with the almost confessional tone of the previous days. He retells the stories of the various Camisard commanders—“Spirit” Séguier, Roland and Joani—together with the atrocities performed by the Catholic generals like Maréchal Julien in suppressing the movement (despite promised English aid) on the orders of the French King. It is a saga not unlike that of twelfth-century Cathars, persecuted by the armed forces of the Inquisition, further south in the Basses-Pyrenees; and it shows the nascent historical novelist in Stevenson.
When he stands on the top of Mont Mars, after a long, lonely, exhausting climb, his reflections appear to be totally absorbed in the long-ago struggles of these French covenanters:
I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me, was the watershed of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you may see in clear weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons, and perhaps from here the soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view—Salomon and Joani to the north, Roland and Castanet to the south—and when Julien had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cévennes, which lasted all through November and October, 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages were utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence