Various

“ And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man’s nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. ”

“ In my journeys round the island, in the most remote districts, I was frequently delighted by coming suddenly upon the usual inclosure [Pg 75] of rough stones which mark the resting-place of a chief, always in a beautiful spot and invariably commanding a wide and splendid view. This may also have been Stevenson’s object in selecting the summit of the hill for his grave. The labor required to carry him to his last resting-place was immense, as many as sixty Samoans being employed, while only nineteen Europeans braved the difficulties of the ascent to be present at the sad offices. ”

“ The view by day is superb; mountain, valley, reef and palm, with the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf around the distant reef, while overhead the solitary tropic bird wings its silent flight through the dazzling azure of the skies. No more beautiful spot for a grave can be [Pg 76] imagined; the majestic voice of those southern seas he loved so well makes melody in the very air around his grave. No spot more typical of the Pacific could have been found ”

“ The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others ”

“ He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. ”

“ It is all sweet, and true, and gracious. The heaven seems kinder to the earth while we read, and in the new portrait Tusitala’s large dark eyes gleam at us from beneath the penthouse of his brows with a gipsy-like and transitory suggestion. ”

“ The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular case. “I have,” he said, “no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.” Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly clear. ”

“ In 1879 Stevenson set sail for the new world taking ship as a mere emigrant, crossing the ocean as a steerage passenger and afterwards by emigrant train, across the American continent to the Golden Gate; a rude but romantic method of travel for one who had been nurtured in comfort and a chronic sufferer from ill health; a long journey though destined to be but the beginnings of a wandering after peace and health which [Pg 9] latterly brought him to “Vailima” by the shore of that “ultimate island where now rest the remains of the beloved “Tusitala.” ”

“ Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music of his country, and, like Congreve’s Jeremy, had a “reasonable ear” for a jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent Novello’s house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ and listen to his daughter’s singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they ever hear music or not. ”

“ If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author’s [Pg 32] folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support ”

“ Moore sang Irish songs, Tom Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him; and if Shakespeare wasn’t musical he ought to have been considering the way in which he has spoken of the man who “hath no music in his soul.” In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people—some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.
To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged it would be somewhat difficult to say. ”

“ Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don’t want it—the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an important article. ”

“ Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error—the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching [Pg 29] to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate. ”

“ In a small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, “A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals.” I heard that Stevenson was fond of “supping full of horrors,” and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me that on some days he was the most charming of companions—brilliant, witty and fascinating ”

“ Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised instrument. “Played on my pipe,” “took to tootling on the flageolet,” are entries which [Pg 90] constantly occur, the context always making it clear that “pipe” is synonymous with flageolet. ”

“ And yet I cannot help putting it on record that what impresses me most in these volumes, wherein are so many things lovely and of good report, is the way in which, in order that one friend may shine like a city set on a hill, the other friend consistently retires himself into deepest shade. ”

“ The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book; a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feeling—those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its [Pg 28] address lies farther back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself ”

“ Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that instrument. ”

“ Of Horace he had many and good editions, and they seemed read and used; but of the Greek tragedians I found only “Sophocles” in Prof. Campbell’s translation, and no edition of his plays save a small “Œdipus the King.” This was a great shock to me, for even supposing that Stevenson [Pg 68] was only “a maker of phrases” (as many people will tell you, above all here, “for a prophet is not without honor,” etc.) , still phrases must have some basis in education, and a man who is evidently careless of his masters of ancient language is not likely to prove a brilliant coiner of words. ”

“ I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall—imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!” Here, as some one has remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man—the tinsel and the humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real. ”

“ ON BERANGER From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of what he finished. “I am a good little bit of a poet,” he says himself, “clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a modest choice of subjects (le coin ou je me [Pg 58] suis confine) , have brought some success.” ”

“ If God only gives me tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy: work and science calm the mind, and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey, not without hope of coming to the inn before nightfall. ”

“ Imperial; with a moustache, without a moustache; young, youthful, dashing, Byronic; not so youthful, middle-aged; looking in this like a modern Manfred; in that like an epitome of the fashions, wearing a debonair demeanour and a degage tie; as a boy, as a barrister; on horseback, in a boat. There was a portrait taken by Mrs. Stevenson in 1885, and one lent by Virgil Williams ”

“ It is advisedly said that the elder Stevenson made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, his property to be that of his son’s step-child after the death of his son and that son’s wife. It is well known that Stevenson’s mother was with his family in Samoa, and this dignified and conservative lady also followed the custom of the country which the family followed, in homely phrase, “going bare-footed” at home. Pictures of Stevenson in his Samoa home, enjoying the freedom of this native fashion, have been common enough. ”

“ That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural, but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far. When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that “I write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano until I go to bed.” At this time the whistle was Osborne’s instrument. “You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!” Stevenson exclaimed to his father, “Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano ”

“ This divine made Stevenson a present of a religious book of his own writing to read on the journey to Scotland, and the whimsical fear of Stevenson that he might not read it all while crossing the continent and the Atlantic was characteristic. But if he felt that this was not sufficiently light reading for a steamer journey he appreciated the gift, and in return sent Dr. Scott a book on a like topic written by his father in Scotland.
“People are very much like folks”; the fairy tales which are told about the famous are very likely to need large grains of salt in the taking. ”

“ Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia where they arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as also Stevenson’s step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining years of Stevenson’s life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him as he worked in his exile in a far away land.
Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both native and European. ”

“ Eight months were spent in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Gate when he succumbed to a severe illness which proved a serious draft on his powers.
In 1880, Stevenson, then in his thirty-first year, was married to Mrs. Osbourne, an American lady whom he had known in France, and with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs. Stevenson took up his abode in an abandoned mining camp at Juan Silverado, situated in the mountains of the Coast range. The life here can be no more pleasantly referred to than by recalling the record which was given to the public in “Silverado Squatters.” ”

“ I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I have always some childishness on hand.” To play a bass of any kind on a tin whistle must indeed have been “no joke.” But the instrument appears to have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” When he sent the manuscript for publication he could not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he tentatively fixed on “The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c.” ”