Painting by W. Hatherell.
"Took down the folds of her hair—shook it
round her face and the pool repeated her
thus veiled."
Prince Otto.
A DAY WITH
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
BY MAURICE CLARE
LONDON
HODDER & STOUGHTON
1910
In the same Series.
Dickens.
Thackeray.
A DAY WITH STEVENSON.
Supposing that in the monthof April, 1886, you had arrived,a guest foreseen, at the pleasantivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth,which had recently adoptedthe name of Skerryvore, andthat you had been permitted toenter its doors—you might account yourself asomewhat favoured person. For the masterof the house, "that rickety and cloisteredspectre," as he termed himself, the "pallidbrute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevilin a biscuit," might be invisible for thenonce—shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak forfear of inducing hemorrhage. Or again, youmight yourself be afflicted with an obviouscold: in which case you would not be admittedinto his presence, lest you left contagion ofthat cold.
But if fate befriended you, you wouldchance upon the most remarkable personality,it might be, that you had yet encountered. Alean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphaticof gesture—pacing up and down the room as hetalked—burning with hectic energy—a man ofrich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin:mutable, mirthful, brilliant—above all "vital,"as he had described himself, "wholly vital witha buoyance of life" which had upborne himhitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.
Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-sixyears old: and ever since his sixth year, when,as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamedthat he "heard the noise of pens writing," hisaim had been set unswervingly toward the onegoal. Born of a strong and strenuous family,the great lighthouse builders of the north, hewas not, like them, intent upon the subjugationof obstinate stone, the ordering and ordainingof rocks and seas. Dhu Heartach and the BellRock and Skerryvore he could admire at adistance: but the material which cried aloud tohim for mastery, was much more plastic,—yet,to him, no less stubborn. "I imagine," hedeclared, "nobody ever had such pains to learna trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in andday out." His fastidious soul refused to becontented with a facile and slipshod utterance.A passionate quest: after le mot propre, which hadled him, in his own phrase, to "play the sedulusape" to all the great prose writers of thepast—and a sense of style such as no man had ever soanxiously and assiduously developed inhimself—these had achieved their own re