Title: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: August 1, 1996 [eBook #622]
Most recently updated: August 25, 2019
Language: English
Credits: Transcribed from the 1906 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price
Transcribed from the 1906 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
SELECTED AND
EDITED WITH
NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
VOLUME I
LONDON
METHUEN AND CO.
36 ESSEX STREET
Seventh Edition
First Published |
November 1899 |
Second Edition |
November 1899 |
Third Edition |
April 1900 |
Fourth Edition |
November 1900 |
Fifth Edition |
January 1901 |
Sixth Edition |
October 1902 |
Seventh Edition |
December 1906 |
In the present edition, several minor errors and misprints have been corrected, and three new letters have been printed, one addressed to Mr. Austin Dobson (vol. i. p. 340), one to Mr. Rudyard Kipling (vol. ii. p. 215), and one to Mr. George Meredith (vol. ii. p. 302). The two former replace other letters which seemed of less interest; the last is an addition to the book.
S. C.
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PAGE |
INTRODUCTION |
xv–xliv |
I STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH |
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Introductory |
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letters:— |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Churchill Babington |
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To Alison Cunningham |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Charles Baxter |
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STUDENT
DAYS—continued |
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Letters:— |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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III ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR |
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Letters:— |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Mrs. de Mattos |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To A. Patchett Martin |
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To the Same |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To the Same |
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To Charles Baxter. |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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IV THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT |
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letters:— |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Same |
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To P. G. Hamerton |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Dr. W. Bamford |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To C. W. Stoddard |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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V ALPINE WINTERS |
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Letters:— |
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To A. G. Dew-Smith |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To the Same |
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To C. W. Stoddard |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Horatio F. Brown |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Professor Æneas Mackay |
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To the Same |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To the Same |
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To P. G. Hamerton |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Same |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Dr. Alexander Japp |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Dr. Alexander Japp |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To P. G. Hamerton |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Alison Cunningham |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Same |
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To Alexander Ireland |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Dr. Alexander Japp |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Mrs. T. Stevenson |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To the Same |
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To W. E. Henley |
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VI MARSEILLES AND HYÈRES |
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Letters:— |
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To the Editor of the New York Tribune |
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To R. A. M. Stevenson |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To Alison Cunningham |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Sitwell |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To the Same |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To the Same |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To the Same |
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To Alison Cunningham |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To W. H. Low |
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To R. A. M. Stevenson |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To W. H. Low |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mrs. Milne |
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To Miss Ferrier |
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To W. H. Low |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Mr. Dick |
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To Cosmo Monkhouse |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Miss Ferrier |
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To W. H. Low |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Cosmo Monkhouse |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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VII LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH |
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Letters:— |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell |
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To Andrew Chatto |
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To W. H. Low |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Charles Baxter |
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To the Same |
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To Miss Ferrier |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To Austin Dobson |
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To Henry James |
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To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To the Same |
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To H. A. Jones |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Sidney Colvin |
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To the Same |
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To Edmund Gosse |
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To W. H. Low |
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To P. G. Hamerton |
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To William Archer |
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To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin |
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To the Same |
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To W. H. Low |
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To W. E. Henley |
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To William Archer |
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To Thomas Stevenson |
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To Henry James |
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To William Archer |
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To the Same |
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To W. H. Low |
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Frontispiece—PORTRAIT
OF R. L. STEVENSON, æt. 35
From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd
Osbourne
One day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an illness which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the hands of his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with the request that it should be opened after his death. He recovered, as every one knows, and had strength enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in the Pacific Islands. When the end came, and the paper was opened, it was found to contain, among other things, the expression of his wish that I should be asked to prepare for publication ‘a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life.’ The journal letters written to myself from his Samoan home, subsequently to the date of the request, offered the readiest material towards fulfilling promptly a part at least of the duty thus laid upon me; and a selection from these was accordingly published in the autumn following his death. [xv]
The scanty leisure of an official life (chiefly employed as it was for several years in seeing my friend’s collected and posthumous works through the press) did not allow me to complete the remainder of my task without considerable delay. For one thing, the body of correspondence which came in from various quarters turned out much larger than had been anticipated, and the labour of sifting and arranging it much greater. The author of Treasure Island and Across the Plains and Weir of Hermiston did not love writing letters, and will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as one ‘essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary.’ That he was a bad correspondent had even come to be an accepted view among his friends; but in truth it was only during one particular period of his life (see below, vol. i. p. 103) that he at all deserved such a reproach. At other times, as is now apparent, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and occupations, and especially considering his declared aversion for the task. His letters, it is true, were often the most informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit which is the despair of editors; but after his own whim and fashion he wrote a vast number; so that for every one here included some half-a-dozen at least have had to be rejected.
In considering the scale and plan on which my friend’s instruction should be carried out, it seemed necessary to take into account, not his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which, as time went on, he seemed likely to take ultimately in the world’s regard. The four or five years following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson’s name seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a greater immediate place in public attention; one especially has struck notes which appeal to dominant fibres in our Anglo-Saxon stock with irresistible force; but none has exercised Stevenson’s peculiar and personal power to charm, to attach, and to inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style—qualities for which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little—he might seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative excitement and entertainment in the race.
By virtue, then, of this double appeal of form and matter; by his especial hold upon the young, in whose spirit so much of his best work was done; by his undecaying influence on other writers; by the spell which he still exercises from the grave, and exercises most strongly on those who are most familiar with the best company whether of the living or the dead, Stevenson’s name and memory, so far as can be judged at present, seem destined not to dwindle, but to grow. The voice of the advocatus diaboli has been heard against him, as it is right and proper that it should be heard against any man before his reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of ‘externality.’ But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island lagoon a last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber—such a reader can only smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they reveal themselves to true masters only—are instinct at once with the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means, preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not express perfectly; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the Suicide Club, or the airy sentimental comedy of Providence and the Guitar, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality cannot help striking notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of things deeper than will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with never a smile either of his own or of his reader’s, upon the most solemn enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician’s touch and insight.
Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this, surely, is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson’s own, in which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the ‘sedulous ape’ to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly he was always much of a reader; but it was life, not books, that always in the first degree allured and taught him.
‘He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep’—
so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed—to quote again a phrase of his own—to have been ‘eavesdropping at the door of his heart’; those which told of moods, impressions, experiences or cravings after experience, pains, pleasures, opinions or conflicts of the spirit, which in the eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand. The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would not follow a general rule—least of all if it was a prudential rule—of conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance of current usages might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. ‘Damp gingerbread puppets’ were to him the persons who lived and thought and felt and acted only as was expected of them. ‘To see people skipping all round us with their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth or man or woman, going automatically to offices and saying they are happy or unhappy, out of a sense of duty I suppose, surely at least from no sense of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that twinges—is it not like a bad dream?’ No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various indeed and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree, but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own doings and feelings; these themselves came from springs of character and impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a child’s or actor’s gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life; [xxi] but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in him to pose for anything but what he truly was.
When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament, the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case strongly personal to himself. He may try his hand in youth at a Sentimental Journey, but R. L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other, he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing in style and temper much wider apart than Markheim and Jekyll and Hyde are from the Murders in the Rue Morgue or William Wilson. He may set out to tell a pirate story for boys ‘exactly in the ancient way,’ and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly his own. Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and Ballantyne the brave for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few stronger contrasts than between any scene of Waverley or Redgauntlet and any scene of the Master of Ballantrae or Catriona, whether in their strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older master who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the younger, so much less opulently gifted as is probable—though we must remember that Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote Waverley—so infinitely more careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the pipe of Burns, and yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters the heart and mind of a Scots poet who has his own outlook on life, his own special and profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.