Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 8

and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful." In one of his essays, touching on this select assemblage, Louis sketches what the editor of the History of the Speculative Society, just published, calls "a little Dutch picture; it focuses in vivid colour the associations which rise in the memory at the name of the Spec.--the stately old room aglow with many candles, the books, the portraits, the pious commemoration of the dead,--famous men and our fathers that begat us." "Stevenson," Mr Dickson goes on to say, "is the most famous man of letters who has belonged to the Society since Scott. No more interesting personality has ever been of our number, and no one has in the public eye been more closely identified with the Society." "Oh, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in Edinburgh," Louis exclaims, and twice he was President of the "worshipful society."
A contemporary of Stevenson's, Sheriff Guthrie, wrote in 1899, "I knew Louis first in the Speculative Society; second, as a fellow student in the University Law Classes; third, being called to the Scottish Bar about the same time as a brother-in-law; and last, as a friend with many interests in common. In the Speculative he spoke frequently, and read some papers. We recognised his brilliancy, and we delighted in his vivacity; but we misread the horoscope of his future. We voted him a light horseman, lacking two essentials for success--diligence and health. We wondered where he had got the deftness and rhythm of his style, not knowing that the labour out of which it was evoked was of itself sufficient to refute our estimate of his powers of work. As to his health, we forgot behind that slender, angular frame was not only a father's iron constitution and a mother's nervous vitality, but his own cheerful spirit and indomitable will." The Sheriff, in this letter to me, recalls several reminiscences of Stevenson-some in a playful or contrariwise vein, and another memory illustrates, he says, "the sweet reasonableness which mingled with his wayward Bohemianism"; but space does not allow me to quote more than how, "It seems but yesterday that I met Louis in the Parliament House, and said I heard he had got a case. And I seem to see the twinkle in his eye and the toss of his arms as he answered, 'Yes, my boy, you'll see how I'll stick in, now that I've tasted blood.'"
Louis' mother showed this friend, Mr. Guthrie, a succession of her boy's photographs, ending in wig and gown as an advocate. "That is what I call from Baby to Bar," she said; and then added, beginning with a smile, and ending with a break in her voice, "I said to Louis once that the next collection would be from Bar to Baronet, and he replied, 'It will be from Bar to Burial.'" Except at the "dear old Spec.," he mixed little his equals in Edinburgh. As a writer in Blackwood points out, at the period he had grown into swallow-tails, Edinburgh was by no means devoid of intellectual company, which even a famed Robert Louis need not have despised. But he abhorred constraint and codes of rules. He was a born adventurer and practical experimentist in life, and he explains he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and womenkind. His insatiable curiosity made him thirst to taste of the bitter as well as the sweet, to be pricked by the thorn as well as smell the rose. He was quick to see the humorous side of a tale or episode, but he was tenderly sensitive to ridicule. When he appeared among his legal brothers-in-law in the Parliament House, a wit there among the unemployed advocates in the old hall called him the Gifted Boy. He winced under the laugh, and fled from "the interminable patter of legal feet." He had cultivated notoriety by his shabby dress and lank locks. He did not realise, as an American says, "If you look as if you had slept in your clothes most men will jump to the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your shoulders." In a corridor in the Parliament House, where the men called to the Bar keep open-mouthed boxes for documents to be slipped in, one bore on its plate the inscription R. L. Stevenson. When that alien-looking advocate with unsuspected gifts had cast off the wig and gown, and had busied himself for years filling up reams of paper with his thoughts and studies on people, places, and things, sightseers going through the Courts would