R. L. S. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON

[January ? 1869. Scotland]. Awful hurry. Here is xmas cheque endorsed. Signed: R L. S. 1 p. At the end of the note Stevenson writes: Tuesday, Jan 26th It is pricked deep in my calendar till then. R. L. S.'s cousin Bob was with the Stevenson family at Heriot Row from January 25 until February 1, 1869, according to R. L. S.'s mother's diary, and his cousin Maud Wilson Babington was married on January 28 of that year.

STEVENSON (Robert Louis)

AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED to his cousin, Robert Alan M. Stevenson. 5 pages, 8vo. Monaco and Mentone. n.d.

231-10-0.

A remarkably fine letter describing his life at Monaco and Mentone with Colvin, discussing musical and other matters, and making various references to his work including his "covenanting stories."

"I am at Monaco with Colvin, sitting outside in the sun on a seat behind the Cassino. The band ( one of the best in Europe) is just tuning up. . . . Appropriately enough there is a piece of Chopin's in the programme, a Marche Funébre- from which I expect great things, if I can only manage to listen to it, which is doubtful; the last time I went to the band, I had to come out straight, the brass made me quite mad and all my nerves got tense and stiff like whipcord. . . . Directin, a good band is very proud work and gives opportunity for much grace, if you can be graceful. I feel as if I could be damned graceful at it, but perhaps the more solid requirements of the metier might go to blazes. Do you remember our old proposition of the Messiah, with me to conduct, and you for tenor, H. Hart soprano, etc? The recollection fills me with laughter. Has the sun of Jink then set? God forbid, as St. Paul would say, but rather it is risen again and this mortal has put on immortality. Shine sweet sun forever upon the dusty ways of life. Thee often shall the wayfarer, or at the peep of morning or at noon, in devious error sunken, pause to hail. etc. A propos of the music I have been hearing, a finely lyrical idea very sweet and pretty in itself has just been crushed out of existence by the whole weight of the orchestra. . . . .

Colvin being here makes things very jolly for me. Yesterday I dined with Sir Charles Dilke and his wife; Sir C. is a joke, awful bon gargon, and in such funny clothes, republican clo' I suppose. You know, he is the man who proposed to suppress the monarchy and got so much chaffed a few years ago. He is about thirty; and just hell on laughing at jokes, his joke, your joke, my joke, anybody's joke.

"Sunday, January 4th.

"I have been a long while, nearly a fortnight since I wrote this last scrap. In the interval, I got your letter which amused me much.

Colvin and I are back again at Mentone, Hotel Mirabeau.
A man shot himself at the gaming tables, when Colvin was in
the room; he was a Pole, and had played everything; this
gave us a distaste to the place, some left.

I did hear Chopin's Marche Funèbre and Mendelssohn's
Hebrides Overture; I enjoyed them awfully, but I was ill
for three days after, so you see what it is to have played
out your nerves.

Colvin and I get on awfully well; it is very jolly his
being here, but he goes shortly and I shall feel very
lonely...

It is strange how long it takes one to recover, if you
have once broken down. I am much better, but horribly weak
and not able for any work. I have not written above a few
pages all these two months and these are not fit for fodder. . .

No one would refuse to look at a sunset because a sunset
cannot last. And besides, old man, the devil is not dead
yet; there is life and hope in both of us; and the 'who
knows?' may be answered some day with an affirmative.

Colvin thinks rather well of my covenanting stories, and
thinks if I string two or three of them out, it looks like
coin; so that is a consolation."

(Vailima, Sept. 1894)

Dear Bob:

You are in error about the Picts. They were Ghaelic race, spoke a
Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they were black-
er than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly Celts; their
name shows it-- the "cold croft," it means; so does their country. Where
the _black_ Scotch came from nobody knows; but I recognize with you the fact
that the whole of Britain is rapidly and progressively becoming more pig-
mented; already in one man's life, I can decidedly trace a difference in
the children about a school door. But colour is not an essential part of
a man or a race. Take my Polynesians, an Asiatic people probably from the
neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf. They range through any amount of shades,
from the burnt hue of the Low Archipelago islands which seems half negro,
to the "bleached" pretty women of the Marquesas (close by on the map) who
came out for a festival no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to
vary directly with the degree of exposure to the sun. And as with negroes
the babes are born white; only it should seem a _little sack_ of pigment at
the lower part of the spine which presently spreads over the whole field.
Very puzzling. But to return-- the Picts _eestain_ furnish today perhaps a
third of the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons,
and the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was Pictish
place. But the fact is, we dont know their frontiers. Tell some of your
journalist friends with a good style to popularize old Skene; or say your
prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian, and I was his
blessed clerk and _did_ not know it; and you will not be in a state of grace

2

about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact is-- it's not interesting to the public-- but it's interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing-- this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh-century, always undistinguished but clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen; THE SIGHT OF BELLE AND HER 12 YEAR OLD BOY, ALREADY RATHER TALLER THAN HERSELF, IS ENOUGH TO TURN MY HAIR GREY; AS FOR FANNY AND HER BROOD, IT IS INSANE TO THINK OF. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic-- or maenadic-- foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and 'I could wish my days to be bound to each' by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and whether I wish it or not.

I remember very well your attitude to life, this conventional surface of it. You had none of that curiosity for the social stage-directions, the triveal *ficelles* of the business; it is simian, but that is how the wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn't imitate, hence you kept free-- a wild dog, outside the kennel-- and came damn near starving for your pains.. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in which we were brought up. Civilization had become reflex with us; you might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; and hunger to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something quite different.

3

I defined civilization for the thing it is, for the thing it has _come_ to be; the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb multitudes back? They don't do anything _because_; they do things, write able articles, stitch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse. Go and reason with monkeys!

No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double great-grandmother, the daughter of Théodore David Lillie sometime deacon of the Wrights, married (1st) Alan Stevenson, who died 16th May 26th 1774, 'at Santt Kittes of a fiver,' by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th June 1772; and second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower and already the father of our grandmother. This improbable double relation connection always tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith being doubly our great grandfather.

YOUR IDEA ABOUT THE CUP IS PROBABLY CORRECT. O, GET STEVENSON THE ARCHITECT TO PUT HIS BACK TO THE WHEEL, IT IS HIGHLY POSSIBLE HE MAY CLEAR UP SOME OF THE AMBIQUITIES: WE HAVE THIS WHOLE GROUP IN GLASGOW ABOUT 200 YEARS AGO, AND WE KNOW THEY ARE RELATED BUT NOT HOW.

I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration. My mother collared one of the photos of course. The other is stuck up on my wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Ghaelic-Celtic sharps? You might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a _Mc_Stein and a _MacStephane_; and our own great grandfather always called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at least three _places_ called Stevenson-- _Stevenson_ in Cunningham, _Stevenson_ in Peebles, and _Stevenson_ in Haddington. And it was not the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find someone.

"MAGUIRE GRAHAM BALFOUR A CELT?" SAY YOU. BUT THAT IS JUST WHAT HE IS; HIS NAME BEWRAYS HIM. BALFOUR COLD CROFT. Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy

4

out of your head; they superimposed their language, they scarce modelfied
the race; only in Berwickshire and Roxburgh, have they very largely affec-
ted the place names. The Scandinavians did much more to Scotland then the
Angles. The Saxons didn't come.

Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is the matter of the
book, of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is super-
ficially all mine, in the sense that the last copy is all in my hand. Lloyd
did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the Barbizon scene;
it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest; I had the best
service from him on the character of Nares. You see we had just been meet-
ing the man, and his memory was full of the man's words and ways. And
Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple; the great difficulty of col-
laboration is that you can't TELL what you mean. I know what kind of effect
I mean a character to give-- what kind of tache he is to make; but how am
I to tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was necessary to say, 'Make
him so-and-so;' and this was all right for Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon
Dodd, whom we both knew, but for Bellairs, for instance-- a man with whom
I passed ten minutes 15 years ago-- what was I to say? and what could Lloyd
do? I, as a personal artist, can begin a character with only a haze in
my head, but how if I have to translate the haze into words before I begin?
In our manner of collaboration (which I think the only possible, I mean
that of one person being responsible, and giving the coup de pouce to every
part of the work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying
to explain to my collaborator what style I wished a passage to be treated
in. These are the times that illustrate to a man the inadequacy of spoken
language. Now, to be just to written language-- I can (or could) find a
language for my every mood, but how could I tell anyone beforehand, what
this effect was to be, which it would take every art that I possessed, and
hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection and rejection, to produce?

5

These are the impossibilities of collaboration. Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on the stuff, and to produce in consequence an extraordinary greater richness of purview, consideration and invention. The hardest chapter of all was "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers". You would not believe what that cost us before it assumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd wrote it at least thrice, and I at least five times-- this is from memory. And was that chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that I should ask the question! Two classes of men, the artist and the educationalist, are sworn, on soul and conscience, not to ask it. You get an ordinary, grinning red-headed boy, and you have to educate him. Faith supports you; you give your valuable hours, the boy does not seem to profit; but that way your duty lies, for which you are paid, and you must persevere. Education has always seemed to me one of the few possible and dignified ways of life. A sailor, a shepherd, a schoolmaster-- to a less degree, a soldier-- and (I don't know why, upon my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster's unofficial assistant, and a kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost exhausts the category.

If I had to begin again-- I know not-- si jeunesse savait, vieillesse pouvait.-- I know not at all-- I believe I should DO AS I HAVE DONE- EXCEPT THAT I believe I should try TO BE MORE CHASTE IN EARLY YOUTH, and honour Sex more religiously. THE DAMNED THING of our education is that Xtianity does not recognize and hallow Sex. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder, oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic self-torturers. WHEN I CAME TO MYSELF FAIRLY ABOUT 25 I RECOGNIZED ONCE FOR ALL THE LINGA-- LINGAM AND THE YONI AS THE TRUE RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS. AN EYE ALSO MIGHT DO. It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and hallow most. Well, it is so: I cannot be wiser than my generation.

C

But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! its dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron "gentleman" and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short, AND BEHOLD! THE INTRODUCTION OF CONDUCT INTO RELIGION, THEIR PROLONGED LIAISON LOOKS AS IF IT WERE GOING TO BE FRUITFUL. There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me hugely: anarchy-- I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity's sake) commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind 'em: (did you see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the new testament over again) people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this then a new *Drive* among the monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more, the gross, dull MOST unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top just like the early Christians. That is of course they will step into power as a *personal*, but God knows what they may believe when they come to do so: it can't be FUNNIER or more improbable than what Xtianity had come to be by the same time.

Your letter was easily read, the pagination presented no difficulty, and I read it with much edification and gusto. To look back, and stereo-type one bygone humour-- what a hopeless thing! The mind runs ever in a thousand eddies like a river between cliffs. You (the ego) are always spinning round in it, east, west, north and south. You are twenty, and forty, and five, and the next moment you are freezing at an imaginary eighty; you

are never plain forty-four that you should be by dates. (The most philo-
sophical language is the Ghailic which has no present tense-- and the
most useless). How then to choose some former age, and stick there?

R. L. S.

Printed in the _Letters_, with the exception of the words typed in capitals;
these were omitted.

The original of this letter is owned by the Texas University Library.

R. L. S. TO HIS COUSIN, ROBERT ALAN

MOWBRAY STEVENSON

[March, 1975]. 17 Heriot Row Edinburgh. My dear old man, I shall be with you somewhere about the 20th or 22nd. Signed: Robert Louis Stevenson. 4 pp. Dated in pencil in an unknown hand at the top of p. 1. Stevenson writes about his plan to meet his cousin Bob in Paris, and his hope that the latter can rig up a mattress in your studio so that R. L. S. may be relieved of hotel fees. He writes of his meeting with W. E. Henley in the Infirmary at Edinburgh.