Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (898 page)
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Authors: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
We have got settled down in Frankfurt, and like the place very much. Simpson and I seem to get on very well together. We suit each other capitally; and it is 44 an awful joke to be living (two would-be advocates, and one a baronet) in this supremely mean abode.
The abode is, however, a great improvement on the hotel, and I think we shall grow quite fond of it. — Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. Stevenson.
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson
13 Rosengasse, Frankfurt, Tuesday Morning, August 1872.
... Last night I was at the theatre and heard
Die Judin
(
La Juive
), and was thereby terribly excited. At last, in the middle of the fifth act, which was perfectly beastly, I had to slope. I could stand even seeing the cauldron with the sham fire beneath, and the two hateful executioners in red; but when at last the girl’s courage breaks down, and, grasping her father’s arm, she cries out — O so shudderfully! — I thought it high time to be out of that
galère
, and so I do not know yet whether it ends well or ill; but if I ever afterwards find that they do carry things to the extremity, I shall think more meanly of my species. It was raining and cold outside, so I went into a
Bierhalle
, and sat and brooded over a
Schnitt
(half-glass) for nearly an hour. An opera is far more
real
than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all — an opera — would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to
live
in one; but I don’t know in what quarter of the globe 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
flourishous
aria.
I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to you; but not to give you news. There is a great stir of life, in a quiet, almost country fashion, all about us here. Some one is hammering a beef-steak in the 45
rez-de-chaussée
: there is a great clink of pitchers and noise of the pump-handle at the public well in the little square-kin round the corner. The children, all seemingly within a month, and certainly none above five, that always go halting and stumbling up and down the roadway, are ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the gutter, trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their
Muttersprache;
but they, too, make themselves heard from time to time in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that comes down to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up the Gasse. Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve out of our window), and such continual visitation of grey doves and big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a perfect aviary.
I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy nastiness that looks like
dead porridge
, if you can take the conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, there comes into his house a continual round of visitors that puts me in mind of the luncheon hour at home. As he has thus no ostensible avocation, we have named him “the W.S.” to give a flavour of respectability to the street.
Enough of the Gasse. The weather is here much colder. It rained a good deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to-day, and we can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet there is no more excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river, except for cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life. The Main is very swift. In one part of the baths it is next door to impossible to swim against it, and I suspect that, out in the open, it would be quite impossible. — Adieu, my dear mother, and believe me, ever your affectionate son,
Robert Louis Stevenson
(
Rentier
).
To Charles Baxter
On the way home with Sir Walter Simpson from Germany. The L.J.R. herein mentioned was a short-lived Essay Club of only six members; its meetings were held in a public-house in Advocate’s Close; the meaning of its initials (as recently divulged by Mr. Baxter) was Liberty, Justice, Reverence; no doubt understood by the members in some fresh and esoteric sense of their own.
Boulogne Sur Mer, Wednesday
,
3rd or 4th September 1872.
Blame me not that this epistle Is the first you have from me. Idleness has held me fettered, But at last the times are bettered And once more I wet my whistle Here, in France beside the sea. All the green and idle weather I have had in sun and shower, Such an easy warm subsistence, Such an indolent existence I should find it hard to sever Day from day and hour from hour. Many a tract-provided ranter May upbraid me, dark and sour, Many a bland Utilitarian Or excited Millenarian, — ” You must speak to every hour.” But (the very term’s deceptive) You at least, my friend, will see, That in sunny grassy meadows Trailed across by moving shadows To be actively receptive Is as much as man can be. He that all the winter grapples Difficulties, thrust and ward — Needs to cheer him thro’ his duty Memories of sun and beauty Orchards with the russet apples Lying scattered on the sward. Many such I keep in prison, Keep them here at heart unseen, Till my muse again rehearses Long years hence, and in my verses You shall meet them rearisen Ever comely, ever green. You know how they never perish, How, in time of later art, Memories consecrate and sweeten These defaced and tempest-beaten Flowers of former years we cherish, Half a life, against our heart. Most, those love-fruits withered greenly, Those frail, sickly amourettes, How they brighten with the distance Take new strength and new existence Till we see them sitting queenly Crowned and courted by regrets! All that loveliest and best is, Aureole-fashion round their head, They that looked in life but plainly, How they stir our spirits vainly When they come to us Alcestis- like returning from the dead! Not the old love but another, Bright she comes at Memory’s call Our forgotten vows reviving To a newer, livelier living, As the dead child to the mother Seems the fairest child of all. Thus our Goethe, sacred master, Travelling backward thro’ his youth, Surely wandered wrong in trying To renew the old, undying Loves that cling in memory faster Than they ever lived in truth. |
So;
en voilà assez de mauvais vers.
Let us finish with a word or two in honest prose, tho’ indeed I shall so soon be back again and, if you be in town as I hope, so soon get linked again down the Lothian road by a cigar or two and a liquor, that it is perhaps scarce worth the postage to send my letter on before me. I have just been long enough away to be satisfied and even anxious to get home again and talk the matter over with my friends. I shall have plenty to tell you; and principally plenty that I do not care to write; and I daresay, you, too, will have a lot of gossip. What about Ferrier? Is the L.J.R. think you to go naked and unashamed this winter? He with his charming idiosyncrasy was in my eyes the vine-leaf that preserved our self-respect. All the rest of us are such shadows, compared to his full-flavoured personality; but I must not spoil my own
début
. I am trenching upon one of the essayettes which I propose to introduce as a novelty this year before that august assembly. For we must not let it die. It is a sickly baby, but what with nursing, and pap, and the like, I do not see why it should not have a stout manhood after all, and perhaps a green old age. Eh! when we are old (if we ever should be) that too will be one of those cherished memories I 49 have been so rhapsodizing over. We must consecrate our room. We must make it a museum of bright recollections; so that we may go back there white-headed, and say “Vixi.” After all, new countries, sun, music, and all the rest can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there — say, in Advocate’s Close!
Simpson and I got on very well together, and made a very suitable pair. I like him much better than I did when I started which was almost more than I hoped for.
If you should chance to see Bob, give him my news or if you have the letter about you, let him see it. — Ever your Affct. friend,
R. L. Stevenson.
To Charles Baxter
Through the jesting tenor of this letter is to be discerned a vein of more than half serious thinking very characteristic of R. L. S. alike as youth and man.
17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, October 1872.
MY DEAR BAXTER, — I am gum-boiled and face swollen to an unprecedented degree. It is very depressing to suffer from gibber that cannot be brought to a head. I cannot speak it, because my face is so swollen and stiff that enunciation must be deliberate — a thing your true gibberer cannot hold up his head under; and writ gibber is somehow not gibber at all, it does not come forth, does not
flow
, with that fine irrational freedom that it loves in speech — it does not afford relief to the packed bosom.
Hence I am suffering from
suppressed gibber
— an uneasy complaint; and like all cases of suppressed humours, this hath a nasty tendency to the brain. Therefore (the more confused I get, the more I lean on Thus’s and Hences and Therefores) you must not be down upon me, most 50 noble Festus, altho’ this letter should smack of some infirmity of judgment. I speak the words of soberness and truth; and would you were not almost but altogether as I am, except this swelling. Lord, Lord, if we could change personalities how we should hate it. How I should rebel at the office, repugn under the Ulster coat, and repudiate your monkish humours thus unjustly and suddenly thrust upon poor, infidel me! And as for you — why, my dear Charles, “a mouse that hath its lodging in a cat’s ear” would not be so uneasy as you in your new conditions. I do not see how your temperament would come thro’ the feverish longings to do things that cannot then (or perhaps ever) be accomplished, the feverish unrests and damnable indecisions, that it takes all my easy-going spirits to come through. A vane can live out anything in the shape of a wind; and that is how I can be, and am, a more serious person than you. Just as the light French seemed very serious to Sterne, light L. Stevenson can afford to bob about over the top of any deep sea of prospect or retrospect, where ironclad C. Baxter would incontinently go down with all hands. A fool is generally the wisest person out. The wise man must shut his eyes to all the perils and horrors that lie round him; but the cap and bells can go bobbing along the most slippery ledges and the bauble will not stir up sleeping lions. Hurray! for motley, for a good sound
insouciance
, for a healthy philosophic carelessness!
My dear Baxter, a word in your ear — ”DON’T YOU WISH YOU WERE A FOOL?” How easy the world would go on with you — literally on castors. The only reason a wise man can assign for getting drunk is that he wishes to enjoy for a while the blessed immunities and sunshiny weather of the land of fooldom. But a fool, who dwells ever there, has no excuse at all.
That
is a happy land, if you like — and not so far away either. Take a fool’s advice and let us strive without ceasing to get into it. Hark in your ear again: “THEY ALLOW PEOPLE TO REASON 51 IN THAT LAND.” I wish I could take you by the hand and lead you away into its pleasant boundaries. There is no custom-house on the frontier, and you may take in what books you will. There are no manners and customs; but men and women grow up, like trees in a still, well-walled garden, “at their own sweet will.” There is no prescribed or customary folly — no motley, cap, or bauble: out of the well of each one’s own innate absurdity he is allowed and encouraged freely to draw and to communicate; and it is a strange thing how this natural fooling comes so nigh to one’s better thoughts of wisdom; and stranger still, that all this discord of people speaking in their own natural moods and keys, masses itself into a far more perfect harmony than all the dismal, official unison in which they sing in other countries. Part-singing seems best all the world over.
I who live in England must wear the hackneyed symbols of the profession, to show that I have (at least) consular immunities, coming as I do out of another land, where they are not so wise as they are here, but fancy that God likes what he makes and is not best pleased with us when we deface and dissemble all that he has given us and put about us to one common standard of — — Highty-Tighty! — when was a jester obliged to finish his sentence? I cut so strong a pirouette that all my bells jingle, and come down in an attitude, with one hand upon my hip. The evening’s entertainment is over, — ”and if our kyind friends — — ”
Hurrah! I feel relieved. I have put out my gibber, and if you have read thus far, you will have taken it in. I wonder if you will ever come this length. I shall try a trap for you, and insult you here, on this last page. “O Baxter what a damned humbug you are!” There, — shall this insult bloom and die unseen, or will you come toward me, when next we meet, with a face deformed with anger and demand speedy and bloody satisfaction.
Nous verrons
, which is French.