THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS

SELECTED AND EDITED WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY

SIDNEY COLVIN

VOLUME I

LONDON METHUEN AND CO. 36 ESSEX STREET

Seventh Edition

First Published

November 1899

Second Edition

November 1899

Third Edition

April 1900

Fourth Edition

November 1900

Fifth Edition

January 1901

Sixth Edition

October 1902

Seventh Edition

December 1906

In the present edition, several minor errors and misprints have been corrected, and three new letters have been printed, one addressed to Mr. Austin Dobson (vol. i. p. 340), one to Mr. Rudyard Kipling (vol. ii. p. 215), and one to Mr. George Meredith (vol. ii. p. 302). The two former replace other letters which seemed of less interest; the last is an addition to the book.

S. C.

p. vCONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION

xv–xliv

I

STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS

Introductory

3

letters:—

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

15

To the Same

17

To the Same

19

To the Same

20

To Mrs. Churchill Babington

24

To Alison Cunningham

26

To Charles Baxter

27

To the Same

29

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

30

To the Same

32

To the Same

33

To Thomas Stevenson

36

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

38

To Charles Baxter

40

p. viII

STUDENT DAYS—continued ORDERED SOUTH

Letters:—

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

48

To Mrs. Sitwell

49

To the Same

51

To the Same

53

To the Same

57

To the Same

61

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

62

To Mrs. Sitwell

65

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

67

To the Same

69

To Mrs. Sitwell

71

To the Same

73

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

74

To Mrs. Sitwell

75

To the Same

77

To the Same

79

To the Same

81

To the Same

83

To Sidney Colvin

84

To Mrs. Sitwell

85

To Sidney Colvin

87

To Mrs. Sitwell

88

To the Same

88

To the Same

91

To the Same

92

p. viiTo the Same

95

To the Same

95

III

ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR EDINBURGH—PARIS—FONTAINEBLEAU

Letters:—

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

104

To Mrs. Sitwell

104

To Sidney Colvin

106

To Charles Baxter

109

To Sidney Colvin

110

To Mrs. Sitwell

111

To Mrs. de Mattos

112

To Mrs. Sitwell

114

To Sidney Colvin

115

To the Same

115

To Mrs. Sitwell

116

To W. E. Henley

117

To Mrs. Sitwell

118

To Sidney Colvin

119

To Mrs. Sitwell

120

To A. Patchett Martin

121

To the Same

122

To Sidney Colvin

124

To the Same

125

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

126

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

126

To the Same

127

p. viiiTo W. E. Henley

128

To Charles Baxter.

128

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

129

To W. E. Henley

129

To Edmund Gosse

130

To W. E. Henley

132

To Edmund Gosse

134

To Sidney Colvin

136

To Edmund Gosse

136

IV

THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT MONTEREY AND SAN FRANCISCO

letters:—

To Sidney Colvin

144

To the Same

144

To W. E. Henley

146

To Sidney Colvin

147

To the Same

148

To the Same

149

To Edmund Gosse

150

To W. E. Henley

151

To the Same

152

To P. G. Hamerton

155

To Edmund Gosse

156

To Sidney Colvin

157

To Edmund Gosse

158

To Sidney Colvin

160

To the Same

162

p. ixTo Charles Baxter

164

To Sidney Colvin

165

To W. E. Henley

167

To Sidney Colvin

169

To Edmund Gosse

169

To Dr. W. Bamford

170

To Sidney Colvin

171

To the Same

171

To the Same

172

To C. W. Stoddard

173

To Sidney Colvin

174

V

ALPINE WINTERS AND HIGHLAND SUMMERS

Letters:—

To A. G. Dew-Smith

185

To Thomas Stevenson

187

To Edmund Gosse

188

To the Same

189

To C. W. Stoddard

191

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

192

To Sidney Colvin

194

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

195

To Sidney Colvin

197

To Horatio F. Brown

199

To the Same

200

To the Same

200

p. xTo Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

201

To Edmund Gosse

202

To Sidney Colvin

204

To Professor Æneas Mackay

205

To the Same

205

To Edmund Gosse

206

To the Same

207

To P. G. Hamerton

208

To Sidney Colvin

209

To W. E. Henley

211

To the Same

212

To Sidney Colvin

213

To Dr. Alexander Japp

215

To Mrs. Sitwell

216

To Edmund Gosse

217

To the Same

218

To the Same

219

To W. E. Henley

219

To Dr. Alexander Japp

221

To W. E. Henley

222

To Thomas Stevenson

223

To P. G. Hamerton

224

To Charles Baxter

226

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

227

To Alison Cunningham

228

To Charles Baxter

228

To W. E. Henley

229

To the Same

230

To Alexander Ireland

233

To Edmund Gosse

235

To Dr. Alexander Japp

236

p. xiTo the Same

236

To W. E. Henley

238

To Mrs. T. Stevenson

240

To Edmund Gosse

241

To the Same

242

To W. E. Henley

242

VI

MARSEILLES AND HYÈRES

Letters:—

To the Editor of the New York Tribune

251

To R. A. M. Stevenson

252

To Thomas Stevenson

253

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

254

To Charles Baxter

254

To Alison Cunningham

256

To W. E. Henley

257

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

261

To Thomas Stevenson

262

To Mrs. Sitwell

263

To Edmund Gosse

265

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

266

To the Same

267

To Edmund Gosse

268

To the Same

269

To W. E. Henley

270

To the Same

271

To the Same

272

p. xiiTo the Same

273

To the Same

274

To Alison Cunningham

275

To W. E. Henley

277

To Edmund Gosse

278

To W. E. Henley

279

To Edmund Gosse

283

To Sidney Colvin

284

To W. H. Low

286

To R. A. M. Stevenson

288

To Thomas Stevenson

291

To W. H. Low

292

To W. E. Henley

294

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

295

To Sidney Colvin

296

To Mrs. Milne

297

To Miss Ferrier

299

To W. H. Low

300

To Thomas Stevenson

301

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

302

To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

303

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

304

To Sidney Colvin

305

To Mr. Dick

308

To Cosmo Monkhouse

310

To Edmund Gosse

312

To Miss Ferrier

313

To W. H. Low

314

To Thomas Stevenson

315

To Cosmo Monkhouse

316

To W. E. Henley

318

p. xiiiTo Edmund Gosse

319

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

320

To Sidney Colvin

321

VII

LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH

Letters:—

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

328

To W. E. Henley

328

To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell

330

To Andrew Chatto

331

To W. H. Low

332

To Thomas Stevenson

334

To W. E. Henley

335

To Thomas Stevenson

335

To Charles Baxter

337

To the Same

337

To Miss Ferrier

338

To Edmund Gosse

339

To Austin Dobson

340

To Henry James

341

To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

343

To W. E. Henley

344

To the Same

345

To H. A. Jones

346

To Sidney Colvin

346

To Thomas Stevenson

347

To Sidney Colvin

348

To the Same

349

p. xivTo J. A. Symonds

350

To Edmund Gosse

352

To W. H. Low

354

To P. G. Hamerton

356

To William Archer

358

To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin

359

To the Same

360

To W. H. Low

361

To W. E. Henley

363

To William Archer

364

To Thomas Stevenson

367

To Henry James

368

To William Archer

369

To the Same

371

To W. H. Low

374

Frontispiece—PORTRAIT OF R. L. STEVENSON, æt. 35 From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne

p. xvINTRODUCTION

One day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an illness which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the hands of his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with the request that it should be opened after his death. He recovered, as every one knows, and had strength enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in the Pacific Islands. When the end came, and the paper was opened, it was found to contain, among other things, the expression of his wish that I should be asked to prepare for publication ‘a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life.’ The journal letters written to myself from his Samoan home, subsequently to the date of the request, offered the readiest material towards fulfilling promptly a part at least of the duty thus laid upon me; and a selection from these was accordingly published in the autumn following his death. [xv]

The scanty leisure of an official life (chiefly employed as it was for several years in seeing my friend’s collected and posthumous works through the press) did not allow me to complete the remainder of my task without considerable delay. For one thing, the body of correspondence p. xviwhich came in from various quarters turned out much larger than had been anticipated, and the labour of sifting and arranging it much greater. The author of Treasure Island and Across the Plains and Weir of Hermiston did not love writing letters, and will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as one ‘essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary.’ That he was a bad correspondent had even come to be an accepted view among his friends; but in truth it was only during one particular period of his life (see below, vol. i. p. 103) that he at all deserved such a reproach. At other times, as is now apparent, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and occupations, and especially considering his

declared aversion for the task. His letters, it is true, were often the most informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit which is the despair of editors; but after his own whim and fashion he wrote a vast number; so that for every one here included some half-a-dozen at least have had to be rejected.

In considering the scale and plan on which my friend’s instruction should be carried out, it seemed necessary to take into account, not his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which, as time went on, he seemed likely to take ultimately in the world’s regard. The four or five years following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson’s name p. xviiseems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a greater immediate place in public attention; one especially has struck notes which appeal to dominant fibres in our Anglo-Saxon stock with irresistible force; but none has exercised Stevenson’s peculiar and personal

power to charm, to attach, and to inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style—qualities for which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little—he might seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative excitement and entertainment in the race.

By virtue, then, of this double appeal of form and matter; by his especial hold upon the young, in whose spirit so much of his best work was done; by his undecaying influence on other writers; by the spell which he still exercises from the grave, and exercises most strongly on those who are most familiar with the best company whether of the living or the dead, Stevenson’s name and memory, so far as can be judged at present, seem destined not to dwindle, but to grow. The voice of the advocatus diaboli has been heard against him, as it is right and proper that it should be heard p. xviiiagainst any man before his reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of ‘externality.’ But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island lagoon a

last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber—such a reader can only smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they reveal themselves to true masters only—are instinct at once with the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means, preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not express perfectly; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the Suicide Club, or the airy sentimental comedy of Providence and the Guitar, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his

quality cannot help striking notes from the heart of life and the inwardness p. xixof things deeper than will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with never a smile either of his own or of his reader’s, upon the most solemn enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician’s touch and insight.

Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this, surely, is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson’s own, in which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the ‘sedulous ape’ to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly he was always much of a reader; but it was life, not books, that always in the first degree allured and taught him.

‘He loved of life the myriad sides, Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep, As wallowing narwhals love the deep’—

so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed—to quote again a phrase of his own—to have been ‘eavesdropping at the door of his heart’; those which told of moods, impressions, experiences or cravings after experience, pains, pleasures, opinions or conflicts of the spirit, which in the eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already p. xxbeen his own. No man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand. The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would not follow a general rule—least of all if it was a prudential rule—of conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary

social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance of current usages might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. ‘Damp gingerbread puppets’ were to him the persons who lived and thought and felt and acted only as was expected of them. ‘To see people skipping all round us with their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth or man or woman, going automatically to offices and saying they are happy or unhappy, out of a sense of duty I suppose, surely at least from no sense of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that twinges—is it not like a bad dream?’ No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various p. xxiindeed and

many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree, but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own doings and feelings; these themselves came from springs of character and impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a child’s or actor’s gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life; [xxi] but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in him to pose for anything but what he truly was.

When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament, the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case p. xxiistrongly personal to himself. He may try his hand in youth at a Sentimental Journey, but R. L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other, he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing in style and temper much wider apart than Markheim and Jekyll and Hyde are from the

Murders in the Rue Morgue or William Wilson. He may set out to tell a pirate story for boys ‘exactly in the ancient way,’ and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly his own. Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and Ballantyne the brave for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few stronger contrasts than between any scene of Waverley or Redgauntlet and any scene of the Master of Ballantrae or Catriona, whether in their strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older master who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the younger, so much less opulently gifted as is probable—though we must remember that Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote Waverley—so infinitely more careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the pipe of Burns, and yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters

the heart and mind of a Scots poet who has his own outlook on life, his own special and profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.

p. xxiiiNot by reason, then, of ‘externality,’ for sure, nor yet of imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of happily inventing and soundly constructing a whole fable comparable to his unquestionable power of conceiving and presenting single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on the reader’s mind. And whether his figures are sustained