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Robert Louis Stevenson. Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records
Robert Louis Stevenson – A Biographical Primer
Memories And Portraits. NOTE
CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES [15]
CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY
CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL
CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE
CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET
CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON—CIVIL ENGINEER
CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS
CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS [105]
CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS’S
CHAPTER XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE [168a]
Footnotes:
Records Of A Family Of Engineers. INTRODUCTION - THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
CHAPTER I - DOMESTIC ANNALS
CHAPTER II - THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
CHAPTER III - THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
I - RANDOM MEMORIES
II - RANDOM MEMORIES
III - A CHAPTER ON DREAMS
IV - BEGGARS
V - THE LANTERN-BEARERS
Later Essays. I - FONTAINEBLEAU
II - A NOTE ON REALISM
III - ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
IV - THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS
V - BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME
VI - THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW
VII - LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART
VIII - PULVIS ET UMBRA
IX - A CHRISTMAS SERMON
X - FATHER DAMIEN
XI - MY FIRST BOOK—“TREASURE ISLAND”
XII - THE GENESIS OF “THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE”
XIII - RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
XIV - REFLECTIONS AND REMARKS ON HUMAN LIFE
XV - THE IDEAL HOUSE
Lay Morals
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
Prayers Written For Family Use At Vailima
Virginibus Puerisque And Other Papers “VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE”
CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
ORDERED SOUTH
ÆS TRIPLEX
EL DORADO
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN
CHILD’S PLAY
WALKING TOURS
PAN’S PIPES
A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS
FOOTNOTES
Отрывок из книги
By Sidney Colvin
The Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveller was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on 13 Nov. 1850. He was baptised Robert Louis Balfour, but from about his eighteenth year dropped the use of the third christian name and changed the spelling of the second to Louis; signing thereafter Robert Louis in full, and being called always Louis by his family and intimate friends. On both sides of the house he was sprung from capable and cultivated stock. His father, Thomas Stevenson [q. v.], was a member of the distinguished Edinburgh firm of civil engineers [see under Stevenson, Robert; Stevenson, David; and Stevenson, Alan]. His mother was Margaret Isabella (d. 14 May 1897), youngest daughter of Lewis Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of Colinton in Midlothian, and grandson to James Balfour (1705–1795) [q. v.], professor at Edinburgh first of moral philosophy and afterwards of the law of nature and of nations. His mother's father was described by his grandson in the essay called ‘The Manse.’ Robert Louis was his parents' only child. His mother was subject in early and middle life to chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have inherited from her some of his constitutional weakness as well as of his intellectual vivacity and taste for letters. His health was infirm from the first. He suffered from frequent bronchial affections and acute nervous excitability, and in the autumn of 1858 was near dying of a gastric fever. In January 1853 his parents moved to No. 1 Inverleith Terrace, and in May 1857 to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the father's death in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in the manse at Colinton on the water of Leith, the home of his maternal grandfather. If he suffered much as a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures, of imagination. He was eager in every kind of play, and made the most of all the amusements natural to an only child kept much indoors by ill-health. The child in him never died; and the zest with which in after life he would throw himself into the pursuits of children and young boys was on his own account as much as on theirs. This spirit is illustrated in the pieces which he wrote and published under the title ‘A Child's Garden of Verses,’ as well as in a number of retrospective essays and fragments referring with peculiar insight and freshness of memory to that period of life (‘Child's Play,’ ‘Notes of Childhood,’ ‘Rosa quo locorum,’ and others unpublished).
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The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs “but in their proper place”; who say “poo’ fellow, poo’ fellow,” and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire “the creature’s instinct”; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The “dog’s instinct” and the “automaton-dog,” in this age of psychology and science, sound like strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working independently of his control, the heart, like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views and understands, as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he came “trailing clouds of glory.” But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master must conduct their steps by deduction and observation.
The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of meta-physic. At the same blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many. He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw; and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, like the human, gentleman demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne’s “je ne sais quoi de généreux.” He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.
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