INTRODUCTION.
The following section consists chiefly of extracts from the correspondence and journals addressed by Louis Stevenson, as a lad of eighteen to twenty-two, to his father and mother during summer excursions to the Scottish coast or to the continent. There exist enough of them to fill a volume; but it is not in letters of this kind to his family that a young man unbosoms himself most freely, and these are perhaps not quite devoid of the qualities of the guide-book and the descriptive exercise. Nevertheless, they seem to me to contain enough signs of the future master-writer, enough of character, observation, and skill in expression, to make a few worth giving by way of an opening chapter to the present book. Among them are interspersed one or two of a different character addressed to other correspondents.
But, first, it is desirable that readers not acquainted with the circumstances and conditions of Stevenson’s parentage and early life should be here, as briefly as possible, informed of them. On both sides of the house he came of capable and cultivated stock. His grandfather was Robert Stevenson, civil engineer, highly distinguished as the builder of the Bell Rock lighthouse. By this Robert Stevenson, his three sons, and two of his grandsons now living, the business of civil engineers in general, and of official engineers to the Commissioners of Northern Lights in particular, has been carried on at Edinburgh with high credit and public utility for almost a century. Thomas Stevenson, the youngest of the three sons of the original Robert, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s father. He was a man not only of mark, zeal, and inventiveness in his profession, but of a singularly interesting personality; a staunch friend and sagacious adviser, trenchant in judgment and demonstrative in emotion, outspoken, dogmatic,—despotic, even, in little things, but withal essentially chivalrous and soft-hearted; apt to pass with the swiftest transition from moods of gloom or sternness to those of tender or freakish gaiety, and commanding a gift of humorous and figurative speech second only to that of his more famous son.
Thomas Stevenson was married to Margaret Isabella, youngest daughter of the Rev. Lewis Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of Colinton in Midlothian. This Mr. Balfour (described by his grandson in the essay called ‘The Manse’) was of the stock of the Balfours of Pilrig, and grandson to that James Balfour, professor first of moral philosophy, and afterwards of the law of nature and of nations, who was held in particular esteem as a philosophical controversialist by David Hume. His wife, Henrietta Smith, a daughter of the Rev. George Smith of Galston, to whose gift as a preacher Burns refers scoffingly in the Holy Fair, is said to have been a woman of uncommon beauty and charm of manner. Their daughter, Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, suffered in early and middle life from chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have inherited from her some of his constitutional weakness as well as of his social and intellectual vivacity and his taste for letters. Robert Louis (baptized Robert Lewis Balfour) Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, and was the only child of his parents. His health was infirm from the first, and he was with difficulty kept alive by the combined care of a capable and watchful mother and a perfectly devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham; to whom his lifelong gratitude will be found touchingly expressed in the course of the following letters. In 1858 he was near dying of a gastric fever, and was at all times subject to acute catarrhal and bronchial affections and extreme nervous excitability. In January 1853 his parents moved to 1 Inverleith Terrace, and in May 1857 to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in the manse of Colinton on the Water of Leith, the home of his maternal grandfather. Of this place his childish recollections were happy and idyllic, while those of city life were coloured rather by impressions of sickness, fever, and nocturnal terrors. If, however, he suffered much as a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures, of imagination. Illness confined him much within the house, but imagination kept him always content and busy. In the days of the Crimean war some one gave the child a cheap toy sword; and when his father depreciated it, he said, ‘I tell you, the sword is of gold, and the sheath of silver, and the boy is very well off and quite contented.’ As disabilities closed in on him in after life, he would never grumble at any gift, however niggardly, of fortune, and the anecdote is as characteristic of the man as of the child. He was eager and full of invention in every kind of play, whether solitary or sociable, and seems to have been treated as something of a small, sickly prince among a whole cousinhood of playmates of both the Balfour and the Stevenson connections. He was also a greedy reader, or rather listener to reading; for it was not until his eighth year that he began to read easily or habitually to himself. He has recorded how his first conscious impression of pleasure from the sound and cadence of words was received from certain passages in M‘Cheyne’s hymns as recited to him by his nurse. Bible stories, the Pilgrim’s Progress, and Mayne Reid’s tales were especially, and it would seem equally, his delight. He began early to take pleasure in attempts at composition of his own. A history of Moses, dictated in his sixth year, and an account of travels in Perth, in his ninth, are still extant. Ill health prevented him getting much regular or continuous schooling. He attended first (1858–61) a preparatory school kept by a Mr. Henderson in India Street; and next (at intervals for some time after the autumn of 1861) the Edinburgh Academy. One of his tutors at the former school writes: ‘He was the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling, ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun.’ From very early days, both as child and boy, he must have had something of that power to charm which distinguished him above other men in after life. ‘I loike that bo-o-o-o-y,’ a heavy Dutchman was heard saying to himself over and over again, whom at the age of about thirteen he had held in amused conversation during a whole passage from Ostend. The same quality, with the signs which he always showed of quick natural intelligence when he chose to learn, must have helped to spare him many punishments from teachers which he earned by persistent and ingenious truantry. ‘I think,’ remarks his mother, ‘they liked talking to him better than teaching him.’
For a few months in the autumn of 1863, when his parents had been ordered to winter at Mentone for the sake of his mother’s health, he was sent to a boarding-school kept by a Mr. Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. It is not my intention to treat the reader to the series of childish and boyish letters of these days which parental fondness has preserved. But here is one written from his English school when he was about thirteen, which is both amusing in itself and had a certain influence on his destiny, inasmuch as his appeal led to his being taken out to join his parents on the French Riviera; which from that day forward he never ceased to love, and for which the longing, amid the gloom of Edinburgh winters, often afterwards gripped him by the heart.
Spring Grove School, 12th November 1863.
MA CHERE MAMAN,—Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous écrit ce lettre. Ma grande gatteaux est arrivé il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait 17 shillings. Sur la soirée de Monseigneur Faux il y etait quelques belles feux d’artifice. Mais les polissons entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared quickly, but we charged them out of the field. Je suis presque driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’ll est possible. I hope you will find your house at Mentone nice. I have been obliged to stop from writing by the want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.
My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well, and I wish to get home.
Do take me with you.
R. Stevenson.
2 Sulyarde Terrace, Torquay, Thursday (April 1866).
RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE,—I write to make a request of the most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous—nay, elephantine—sum of money for drugs and physician’s fees, and the most expensive time of the twelve months was March.
But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and the general ailments of the human race have been successfully braved by yours truly.
Does not this deserve remuneration?
I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to your justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your purse.
My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more—my sense of justice forbids the receipt of less—than half-a-crown.—Greeting from, Sir, your most affectionate and needy son,
R. Stevenson.
