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THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
1868-1882
I
STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
To Charles Baxter
ОглавлениеOn the way home with Sir Walter Simpson from Germany. The L.J.R. herein mentioned was a short-lived Essay Club of only six members; its meetings were held in a public-house in Advocate’s Close; the meaning of its initials (as recently divulged by Mr. Baxter) was Liberty, Justice, Reverence; no doubt understood by the members in some fresh and esoteric sense of their own.
Boulogne Sur Mer, Wednesday, 3rd or 4th September 1872.
Blame me not that this epistle
Is the first you have from me.
Idleness has held me fettered,
But at last the times are bettered
And once more I wet my whistle
Here, in France beside the sea.
All the green and idle weather
I have had in sun and shower,
Such an easy warm subsistence,
Such an indolent existence
I should find it hard to sever
Day from day and hour from hour.
Many a tract-provided ranter
May upbraid me, dark and sour,
Many a bland Utilitarian
Or excited Millenarian,
– “Pereunt et imputantur
You must speak to every hour.”
But (the very term’s deceptive)
You at least, my friend, will see,
That in sunny grassy meadows
Trailed across by moving shadows
To be actively receptive
Is as much as man can be.
He that all the winter grapples
Difficulties, thrust and ward —
Needs to cheer him thro’ his duty
Memories of sun and beauty
Orchards with the russet apples
Lying scattered on the sward.
Many such I keep in prison,
Keep them here at heart unseen,
Till my muse again rehearses
Long years hence, and in my verses
You shall meet them rearisen
Ever comely, ever green.
You know how they never perish,
How, in time of later art,
Memories consecrate and sweeten
These defaced and tempest-beaten
Flowers of former years we cherish,
Half a life, against our heart.
Most, those love-fruits withered greenly,
Those frail, sickly amourettes,
How they brighten with the distance
Take new strength and new existence
Till we see them sitting queenly
Crowned and courted by regrets!
All that loveliest and best is,
Aureole-fashion round their head,
They that looked in life but plainly,
How they stir our spirits vainly
When they come to us Alcestis-
like returning from the dead!
Not the old love but another,
Bright she comes at Memory’s call
Our forgotten vows reviving
To a newer, livelier living,
As the dead child to the mother
Seems the fairest child of all.
Thus our Goethe, sacred master,
Travelling backward thro’ his youth,
Surely wandered wrong in trying
To renew the old, undying
Loves that cling in memory faster
Than they ever lived in truth.
So; en voilà assez de mauvais vers. Let us finish with a word or two in honest prose, tho’ indeed I shall so soon be back again and, if you be in town as I hope, so soon get linked again down the Lothian road by a cigar or two and a liquor, that it is perhaps scarce worth the postage to send my letter on before me. I have just been long enough away to be satisfied and even anxious to get home again and talk the matter over with my friends. I shall have plenty to tell you; and principally plenty that I do not care to write; and I daresay, you, too, will have a lot of gossip. What about Ferrier? Is the L.J.R. think you to go naked and unashamed this winter? He with his charming idiosyncrasy was in my eyes the vine-leaf that preserved our self-respect. All the rest of us are such shadows, compared to his full-flavoured personality; but I must not spoil my own début. I am trenching upon one of the essayettes which I propose to introduce as a novelty this year before that august assembly. For we must not let it die. It is a sickly baby, but what with nursing, and pap, and the like, I do not see why it should not have a stout manhood after all, and perhaps a green old age. Eh! when we are old (if we ever should be) that too will be one of those cherished memories I have been so rhapsodizing over. We must consecrate our room. We must make it a museum of bright recollections; so that we may go back there white-headed, and say “Vixi.” After all, new countries, sun, music, and all the rest can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there – say, in Advocate’s Close!
Simpson and I got on very well together, and made a very suitable pair. I like him much better than I did when I started which was almost more than I hoped for.
If you should chance to see Bob, give him my news or if you have the letter about you, let him see it. – Ever your Affct. friend,
R. L. Stevenson.
