Margaret Moyes Black

“ If strength and force of intellect characterised Mr Thomas Stevenson, his wife, Margaret Balfour, had no less powerful an individuality; in beauty of person, in grace of manner, in the brilliance of a quick and flashing feminine intelligence—that was deep as well as bright—she was a fitting helpmate for her husband, and the very mother to sympathise with and encourage a son whose genius showed itself in quaint sayings, in dainty ways, and in chivalrous thoughts almost from his infancy. ”

“ Not a house or an abiding place merely, whence the business or the gaieties of life could be comfortably indulged in, but a home where, however much the amusements of the Scotch capital were shared in and appreciated, the truest happiness lay around the quiet fireside where the mother, father, and son loved and understood each other with a love the deeper, that the intense Scotch reticence of all made it, like a hidden jewel, the more precious because so rarely displayed to strangers' eyes. ”

“ It is perhaps impossible for those who knew Mr Stevenson and came under the influence of the rare attraction of his charming personality, to assign to him and to his work a suitable place in the world of letters. Probably it is still too early for anyone to say what rank will in the future be held by the man who in his life-time assuredly stood among the masters of his craft. Fame, while he lived, was his, and, better than fame, such love as is seldom given by the public to the writer whose books delight it. ”

“ Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close, she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself, while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long feathers droop to the best advantage. ”

“ There was something so strong and manly in Mr Thomas Stevenson, something so sweetly womanly in his wife. A beautiful woman always, because hers was the beauty of soul, as well as of feature, in those early seventies, one cannot imagine anyone more graceful, more gracious, or more charming than she was.
It would also be difficult to imagine a wife or mother more sympathetic or more sensible. She could always see the fun of things; she never objected to clubs and men's dinners, and the excuse for a night away from the home hearth, that is so dear to the best of men. ”

“ Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible thing without him, and so Mrs Stevenson, with her son and daughter, by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is [Pg 149] like a body without a soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and become once more a solitude—a green place of birds and trees. ”

“ One can take up a volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books. ”

“ Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict, to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were the index. ”

“ If other young folk so loved it what a depth of interest must not that noble story have had for the grandson of the hero, whose childish soul was full of chivalry and romance, and whose boyish eyes saw visions of the future and pictures of the past as no ordinary child could see them, for his was the gift of genius, and even the commonplace things of life were glorified to him. ”

“ Condemned by his delicate and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who, even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease. ”

“ A pleasant state of matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling. ”

“ In the fresh salt breeze that, as it were, blows keen from the sea in Treasure Island, in The Merry Men, and about the sad house of Durrisdeer in The Master of Ballantrae, we recognise the magic wooing of the mighty ocean that made of the Stevensons builders of lighthouses and harbours, and masters of the rough, wild coasts where the waves beat and the spray dashes, and the sea draws all who love it to ride upon its breast in ships. ”

“ Mr Stevenson listened gravely to all these things. He professed a real interest in them. He even remembered the names of the puppets and the parts they had played, and so gained for himself an enduring niche in the heart that had bitterly resented the mockery of the others. It is quite possible that a nature so gentle and so appreciative as his really felt the sympathy. The juniors are rarely mistaken as to the genuineness of the feelings of their elders, and his interest certainly rang true to the youthful mind. ”

“ To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting phase of the character of the great Reformer—who so enjoyed brow-beating Queen Mary—that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the Reformer as to the ladies. ”

“ And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of suffering and bloodshed, going down into the hospitals during the brief war, and himself helping to tend and comfort the wounded and the dying. In his interest in native affairs he had, as in all else that made up life for him, the thorough sympathy of his wife, and also of the other members of his most united household. ”

“ His son's refusal to become a civil engineer, and to take his natural position in the family business, was undoubtedly a great trial to a man of Mr Thomas Stevenson's character and professional traditions. That business had in it not only wealth, honour, and success, but, to every Stevenson, the glamour of romance, the fascination of adventure, and to the father his firm's history appealed strongly. ”

“ He knew that he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he met in his young manhood, is not surprising.
The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty young woman in a ball gown. ”

“ Life at a boarding school was misery to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis, and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In Random Memories he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is taken. ”

“ Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well, and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first reading one is inclined to believe.
Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom he chose for his wife. ”

“ Many people have all through life a closer acquaintance with 'the globe granite under foot' than with 'the feather bed of civilisation,' and daily bread even more than a holiday is a thing to be worked for. But Mr Stevenson's lines had hitherto fallen in very pleasant places, and he had not as yet entered as seriously as he had to do later into the bitter battle of life. ”

“ In days when discontent and extravagance have done so much to lessen, at least upon the surface of things, the sacredness of home, and weaken the solemnity of marriage, it is comforting and pleasant to look back upon such a home as that was, and to realise that it is possible, in the midst of a busy life of work and of pleasure, to preserve an inner holy of holies around the domestic hearth, into which no jarring discord, no paltry worldly worry, can come, because love is there. ”

“ In days when the wearing of cricketing clothes, except in the playing fields, was in Scotland still so uncommon that it is on authentic record that an elderly unmarried lady in an east coast watering place, on meeting in its high street a young man in boating flannels, was so shocked at the innovation that she promptly went home, leaving all her shopping undone and her tea-drinking and friendly gossip forgotten, such an apparition as that in the open cab required more courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. ”

“ Monuments are cold things whereby to perpetuate love and admiration; an 'arbour of Corinthian columns,' which one paper recently suggested, would have appealed to Mr Stevenson himself only as an atrocity in stone. His sole sympathy with stone was when it served the noble purpose to which his father had put it, and, as lighthouse or harbour, contributed to the service of man. If the memorial might have been too costly in the form of a small shore-light, a lifeboat seemed a thing that would have been dear to his own heart. ”

“ Not only he but his wife cheerfully took a turn in weeding, and, hot, tired, and with skins blistered by the poisonous plants with which war had to be waged by hand, they themselves did as much as, if not more than, their Samoan assistants to eradicate [Pg 134] the noxious growths and make the precious blades of grass spring up in their place. Yet glad as they were to welcome the grass, Mr Stevenson, as he pulled the weeds up, hated to cause their death, and felt that they were victims in the great war of life against life of which the world is full. ”

“ His style, too—strong and virile as it is in his tales—attains, one almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. ”

“ It is not a memory of much moment, perhaps, but it shows that even at an age when most young men are too keenly concerned with themselves and their own affairs to take much trouble for those who are a few years their juniors, Mr Stevenson had thought and sympathy to spare for the small joys and sorrows, the interests, and the 'make-believes' that had amused a lonely child, and which, after all, in one form or another, make up a good deal of life to most of us. ”

“ Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson held no stern views of everyday life, no gayer or brighter household could be found than theirs. None certainly existed where young folk received a warmer welcome, whether the family were established for the winter at 17 Heriot Row, or were spending the summer at Swanston, that delightful nook, nestling in the shelter of the Pentland hills, where the old-fashioned flowers had so sweet a scent, the rustic sounds of country life were so full of charming music, and where the home trio themselves loved ”

“ Possibly it was before this access of propriety temporarily had him in its grasp that one day we saw him in Princes Street 'taking the air' in an open cab with a Stevenson cousin, attired in like manner with himself. In those days fashionable people often walked in Princes Street in the afternoon, so what was our dismay, in the midst of quite a crowd of the gay world, to see that open cab, at a word of command from Robert Louis, draw near the pavement as we approached, when two battered straw hats were lifted to us with quite a Parisian grace. ”