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TUSITALA

We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he

Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of the west

Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,

Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaëa crest.

Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,

Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world’s delight,

Looks o’er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the sails

Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.

Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow,

Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,

Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,

Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.

Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea,

Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent tides

Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,

When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.

Before attempting to give any “reminiscences” of Mr. Stevenson, it is right to observe that reminiscences of him can best be found in his own works. In his essay on “Child’s Play,” and in his “Child’s Garden of Verse,” he gave to the world his vivid recollections of his imaginative infancy. In other essays he spoke of his boyhood, his health, his dreams, his methods of work and study. “The Silverado Squatters” reveals part of his experience in America. The Parisian scenes in “The Wrecker” are inspired by his sojourn in French Bohemia; his journeys are recorded in “Travels with a Donkey” and “An Inland Voyage”; while his South Sea sketches, which appeared in periodicals, deal with his Oceanic adventures. He was the most autobiographical of authors, with an egoism nearly as complete, and to us as delightful, as the egoism of Montaigne. Thus, the proper sources of information about the author of “Kidnapped” are in his delightful books.

“John’s own John,” as Dr. Holmes says, may be very unlike his neighbour’s John; but in the case of Mr. Stevenson, his Louis was very similar to my Louis; I mean that, as he presents his personality to the world in his writings, even so did that personality appear to me in our intercourse. The man I knew was always a boy.

“Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,”

he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the lad was never “gone.” Like Keats and Shelley, he was, and he looked, of the immortally young. He and I were at school together, but I was an elderly boy of seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of “gytes,” as the members of the lowest form are called. Like all Scotch people, we had a vague family connection; a great-uncle of his, I fancy, married an aunt of my own, called for her beauty, “The Flower of Ettrick.” So we had both heard; but these things were before our day. A lady of my kindred remembers carrying Stevenson about when he was “a rather peevish baby,” and I have seen a beautiful photograph of him, like one of Raffael’s children, taken when his years were three or four. But I never had heard of his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the interests of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the British Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson. He looked as, in my eyes, he always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth oval face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common, large lucid eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot remember, if brown, certainly light brown. On appealing to the authority of a lady, I learn that brown was the hue. His colour was a trifle hectic, as is not unusual at Mentone, but he seemed, under his big blue cloak, to be of slender, yet agile frame. He was like nobody else whom I ever met. There was a sort of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech. His cloak and Tyrolese hat (he would admit the innocent impeachment) were decidedly dear to him. On the frontier of Italy, why should he not do as the Italians do? It would have been well for me if I could have imitated the wearing of the cloak!

I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly favourable. “Here,” I thought, “is one of your æsthetic young men, though a very clever one.” What the talk was about, I do not remember; probably of books. Mr. Stevenson afterwards told me that I had spoken of Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, as a fine writer, but added that “he was not a British sportsman.” Mr. Stevenson himself, to my surprise, was unable to walk beyond a very short distance, and, as it soon appeared, he thought his thread of life was nearly spun. He had just written his essay, “Ordered South,” the first of his published works, for his “Pentland Rising” pamphlet was unknown, a boy’s performance. On reading “Ordered South,” I saw, at once, that here was a new writer, a writer indeed; one who could do what none of us, nous autres, could rival, or approach. I was instantly “sealed of the Tribe of Louis,” an admirer, a devotee, a fanatic, if you please. At least my taste has never altered. From this essay it is plain enough that the author (as is so common in youth, but with better reason than many have) thought himself doomed. Most of us have gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown such a wise and gay acceptance of the apparently inevitable? We parted; I remember little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much more of life than his senior will ever do. For he ran forth to embrace life like a lover: his motto was never Lucy Ashton’s—

“Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,

Easy live and quiet die.”

Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford. I make no hand of reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said, with one exception, which is not going to be published. I heard of him, writing essays in the Portfolio and the Cornhill, those delightful views of life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid, so wise, so exquisite, which all should know. How we looked for “R. L. S.” at the end of an article, and how devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young one!

About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received a brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, in his essay on his old college magazine, he called “Glasgow Brown.” What his real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never knew. G. B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper. Would I contribute? G. B. came to see me. Mr. Stevenson has described him, not as I would have described him: like Mr. Bill Sikes’s dog, I have the Christian peculiarity of not liking dogs “as are not of my breed.” G. B.’s paper, London, was to start next week. He had no writer of political leading articles. Would I do a “leader”? But I was not in favour of Lord Lytton’s Afghan policy. How could I do a Tory leader? Well, I did a neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes! I found presently some other scribes for G. B.

What a paper that was! I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of gold, in handfuls of bank-notes. Nobody ever read London, or advertised in it, or heard of it. It was full of the most wonderfully clever verses in old French forms. They were (it afterwards appeared) by Mr. W. E. Henley. Mr. Stevenson himself astonished and delighted the public of London (that is, the contributors) by his “New Arabian Nights.” Nobody knew about them but ourselves, a fortunate few. Poor G. B. died and Mr. Henley became the editor. I may not name the contributors, the flower of the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new race. But one lion, a distinguished and learned lion, said already that fiction, not essay, was Mr. Stevenson’s field. Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say whether I would be more sorry to lose Virginibus Puerisque and “Studies of Men and Books,” or “Treasure Island” and “Catriona.” With the decease of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, London struggled and disappeared.

Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Saville Club, in Saville Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking-rooms. Here, or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was Two Men. I said “ ‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Poe,” and declared that it would never do. But his “Brownies,” in a vision of the night, showed him a central scene, and he wrote “Jekyll and Hyde.” My “friend of these days and of all days,” Mr. Charles Longman, sent me the manuscript. In a very commonplace London drawing-room, at 10.30 P.m., I began to read it. Arriving at the place where Utterson the lawyer, and the butler wait outside the Doctor’s room, I threw down the manuscript and fled in a hurry. I had no taste for solitude any more. The story won its great success, partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be), more by its terrible, lucid, visionary power. I remember Mr. Stevenson telling me, at this time, that he was doing some “regular crawlers,” for this purist had a boyish habit of slang, and I think it was he who called Julius Cæsar “the howlingest cheese who ever lived.” One of the “crawlers” was “Thrawn Janet”; after “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (but certainly after it), to my taste, it seems the most wonderful story of the “supernatural” in our language.

Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey, Montépin, and, of course, Gaboriau. There was nothing of the “cultured person” about him. Concerning a novel dear to culture, he said that he would die by my side, in the last ditch, proclaiming it the worst fiction in the world. I make haste to add that I have only known two men of letters as free as Mr. Stevenson, not only from literary jealousy, but from the writer’s natural, if exaggerated, distaste for work which, though in his own line, is very different in aim and method from his own. I do not remember another case in which he dispraised any book. I do remember his observations on a novel then and now very popular, but not to his taste, nor, indeed, by any means, impeccable, though stirring; his censure and praise were both just. From his occasional fine efforts, the author of this romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of brushwood, of ineffectual matter. It was so, no doubt, as the writer spoken of would be ready to acknowledge. But he was an improviser of genius, and Mr. Stevenson was a conscious artist.

Of course we did by no means always agree in literary estimates; no two people do. But when certain works—in his line in one way—were stupidly set up as rivals of his, the person who was most irritated was not he, but his equally magnanimous contemporary. There was no thought of rivalry or competition in either mind. The younger romancists who arose after Mr. Stevenson went to Samoa were his friends by correspondence; from them, who never saw his face, I hear of his sympathy and encouragement. Every writer knows the special temptations of his tribe: they were temptations not even felt, I do believe, by Mr. Stevenson. His heart was far too high, his nature was in every way as generous as his hand was open. It is in thinking of these things that one feels afresh the greatness of the world’s loss; for “a good heart is much more than style,” writes one who knew him only by way of letters.

It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque story together. There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.