Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 7

became the Stevensons' summer home, the undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability." He was loudly rebellious, and too impatient to follow the ordinary rules of life or the sage advice, "Jowk and let the jaw gae by."
An impression has arisen, because of his revolt in these years against convention and creeds, that he was thwarted and unappreciated in his home and its surroundings. On the contrary, he was at liberty to indulge his Bohemian tastes and do much as he listed. His father gave him a seemingly inadequate allowance. Yet Thomas Stevenson was not a miserly man. He begged his son to go to his tailor's, for he disapproved of the youth's scuffy, mounte- bankish appearance. He supplied him with an allowance for travel--in fact, R. L. S. had all his bills paid, and his own study in a very hospitable home. R, L. S. owned books, and jewels were the only things he felt tempted to buy. The 1 pound a month allowance, when he left school, raised soon after to 82 pounds a year, was to keep the money from dropping out of that hole in the pocket of his ragged jacket, which never seemed to get sewed up. Books he had in plenty, but his parents naturally did not treat him to strings of flashing stones to wear over his shabby velvet coat, or twine round his battered straw hat. His money affairs, like the table of Weir of Hermiston, were likely all his life "just mismanaged." By the time he settled in Samoa, his literary earnings were thousands a year; and by then his quiet-living, hard-working father was dead, leaving an ample fortune. Still he seemed haunted by fear of lack of means.
Louis' love and admiration for his father was deep and sincere. At his home, when guests gathered round the engineer's table, the boy, with his eyes sparkling, listened to his father's "strange, humorous vein of talk," then glanced round with a smile of expectation to see how much others appreciated their host's well-told tales. "My father was always my dearest," he wrote. This was a high certificate of appreciation, when we remember he had the most devoted of mothers. It hurt the son to the quick to deal his "dearest" a staggering blow, and decline to follow his hereditary profession. Louis had tried to be an engineer. He liked the swinging, smoking seas on which they struggled for a site for sheltering masonry. As in the case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student," as he calls himself, enjoyed "its atmosphere of good-fellowship, its vivid and varied interests, its traditions of honourable labour and success." "Speculative evenings," says R. L. S., "form pretty salient milestones on our intellectual journey." He had gripped a deal of the foundations of his hereditary trade when seemingly but a consistent idler. He mastered the intricacies of law, and took to the abhorred office stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery. He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue. W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, medicine, mangold- wurzel, with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and felicity of utterance."
Along with this ready affluence of speech, the youth had what good talkers often lack, viz., the patience to hearken to others. Stevenson shone best in what he called a little committee of talkers, though his father and he used to argue a question together for days; but, in the Speculative, he had at first to be a listener. A candid fellow-member says, "I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective,