A LETTER TO R. A. M. STEVENSON
VAILIMA, September 1894
[Stevenson had received from his cousin a
letter announcing, among other things, the
birth of a son, and rambling suggestively,
as may be guessed from the following reply,
over many disconnected themes: the ethnology
of Scotland, paternity and heredity,
civilisation versus primitive customs and
instincts, the story of their own descent,
the method of writing in collaboration,
education, sex and Christianity, anarchism,
etc.; all which matters are here discursively
touched on. "Old Skene" is, of course, the
great Scottish antiquarian and historian,
William Forbes Skene, in whose firm (Edwards & Skene,
W.S.) Stevenson had for a time served,
irregularly enough, as an unpaid clerk.]
DEAR BOB, -- You are in error about the
Picts. They were a Gaelic race, spoke a
Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence
that I know of that they were blacker
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
come from nobody knows; but I recognise
with you the fact that the whole of Britain
is rapidly and progressively becoming more
pigmented; 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
islander, which seems half negro, to the
"bleached" pretty women of the Marquesas
(close by on the map), who come 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 furnish to-day
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 a Pictish place. But
the fact is, we don't know their frontiers.
Tell some of your journalist friends with
a good style to popularise 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 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 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 each 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 trivial 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 dam' 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. Civilisation has become
reflex with us; you might think that hunger
was the name of the best sauce; but hunger
to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy
night is the name of something quite different.
I defend civilisation 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 David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the Wrights,
married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26,
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 connection
always tends to confuse a student of the family,
Thomas Smith being doubly our great-grandfather.
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 Gaelic-Celtic sharps? you
might ask what the name means. It puzzles me.
I find a M'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
some one.
Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head;
they superimposed their language, they scarce
modified the race; only in Berwickshire and
Roxburgh have they very largely affected the
place names. The Scandinavians did much more
to Scotland than the Angles. The Saxons didn't
come.
Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it
is in the matter of the book, of course, that
collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is
superficially 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 been just meeting 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
collaboration is that you can't explain 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 fifteen
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 any one 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? These are the impossibilities
of collaboration. Its immediate advantage
is to focus two minds together on the stuff,
and to produce in consequence an extraordinarily
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
last 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 exhaust the
category.
If I had to begin again -- I know not --
si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait . . .
I know not at all -- I believe I should try
to honour Sex more religiously. The worst
of our education is that Christianity does
not recognise and hallow Sex. It looks
askance at it, over its shoulder, oppressed
as it is by reminiscences of hermits and
Asiatic self-tortures. 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.
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! it's
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.
. . . 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, not 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
personnel, but God knows what they may
believe when they come to do so; it can't be
stranger or more improbable than what
Christianity 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 to stereotype 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 years old, and forty, and five, and
the next moment you are freezing at an imaginary
eighty; you are never the plain forty-four
that you should be by dates. (The most
philosophical language is the Gaelic, which
has no present tense -- and the most useless.)
How, then, to choose some former age, and
stick there?
R. L. S.
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