A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close. Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no means disdained the pleasures of the table. Not, perhaps, in the role of a gourmet – but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of taste and smell. "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part in life that is played by eating and drinking. "There is a romance about the matter after all," he observed. "Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining than scenery." It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine. "Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April" – these, he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.

After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to sleep – at a moment's notice – and after a short, sound repose, was as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued until friends arrived.

At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief wishes. "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, O Du lieber Gott! friends." The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered. Never was a man more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and without effort. "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and in the second, for a man of genius." Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?" His expression, of mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic presence" – together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so unique as could command all love at will. And the friends were very many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore. First and foremost was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described him. "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife. These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son. He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.

But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:

 
"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, – "
 

And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."

Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave and humorous in rapid transition, the amazing scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were excelled by the scope and variety of his talk. "There was no part of the writer that was not visibly present in the man." (Graham Balfour.) He had laid down his opinion that "there can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome." But none save those who were privileged to hear him, as with quick, impetuous gestures, like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his phrases, could realise the power, the versatility, the inexpressible, irrepressible charm with which the author could fulfil his "fair ambition."

When the visitors had severally taken their departure, the strong resonant voice, with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still ringing in their ears, – Stevenson had suffered no abatement in the stream of his exuberant mental vitality. The excitement of conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and presently, for the writing of a few unavoidable letters, he betook himself to his study; "the study where a smiling God beholds each day my stage of labour trod," and sate himself down there with reluctance.

Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own whimsical lines. "I deny that letters should contain news – I mean mine – those of other people should," was his theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of correspondence." For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley had alluded.

For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to "combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and more mature, – a tendency almost towards the didactic. "'Tis a strange world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for Him." And now, "with the passing of years," he observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation." He was suffering, and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die": but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave example bore him constant company. "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.

As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his beloved piano, his father and mother came in. They were living in Bournemouth to be near their only son. The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably failing. The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a poignantly pathetic one. Their disagreements had been very many and deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature, – "no profession!" as his father contemptuously replied. They had differed on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion, – yet here, in the fulness of time, they were at peace together, – the austere old man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as though he were walking on eggs." Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love. And perhaps the nearing vision of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and laisser-faire, and the equalisation of things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.