Archive for the ‘Colvin’ Category
Stevenson’s markings in Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie
Many thanks to on-site research by Hilary Beattie in the Fales Library in New York
In December 1891, Stevenson wrote to Colvin, ‘I have gone crazy over Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie (L7, 205). In a former post, his marked copy not then being accessible, I tried to guess what aspects could have made Stevenson so enthusiastic. Now Hilary Beattie has kindly visited the Fales Library in New York and listed all Stevenson’s marking in it.
From this listing, I have added annotations in green to the earlier post, indicating which of the passages that I identified were marked by him. So how did I do? Of the sixteen passages, 7 were marked, 9 not marked, but of these nine, four were similar to other marked passages. Of one long passage (2.1 in the previous post) I said, ‘I hereby predict that when the volume in the Fales Library can be consulted again, the pages containing the story of Manfred’s flight (SdI, 179–82) will be approvingly marked in Stevenson’s hand.’ This, I am glad to say, was one of the marked passages.
That a number of passages in the previous post were not marked does not mean they did not appeal: Stevenson may not have had a pencil in his hand as he was reading them, and certainly his annotating mood was not constant: markings are grouped in only a few of the twenty-six chapters: V–VI, XII–XV, and XVII–XIX.
Typically Stevenson made a vertical mark in the margin, occasionally doubled, and on one occasion he has underlined a sentence (these more emphatic markings are printed below in italics). Here follows a listing of all the marked passages with summaries and quoted passages, not in page order but grouped thematically as in the previous post. The page.line numbers are from Sensations d’Italie (Paris: Lemerre, 1891) while the quotations are from the English translation (New York: Cassell, 1892). Both of these are available on archive.org.
Given the subject matter, it is unsurprising that a large number of the markings are of passages dealing with aesthetics (among which, Bourget’s striking thesis that the meaning of a work of art changes and is not determined by its author, 129.12–132.4), but there are also interesting markings on questions of literary style, on how early works can appeal directly to modern sensibilities, and on the fate of artists who died in poverty.
1. Affinities with Montaigne
The striking metaphor of the ropemaker walking backwards (129–30) is part of a longer marked passage (129.12–132.4) about the meaning of a work of art not being fixed by the author (see below).
2. Affinities with Stevenson’s style and his thoughts on literary style
36.7–11: Monluc’s Commentaries describe the siege of Siena ‘in a style so bare and dry that the virile energy of the language resembles […] the silhouette of a fortress of the country.’ Books like this reveal the passions of such actions.
155.19–156.7: [Bourget praises lines by Carducci for their simplicity and Latin grandeur] Thanks to the ‘Roman vigor’ of the words, the ‘direct force’ of the image, and the ‘flowing and concise’ sentences, this poetry has ‘the charm of precision which is the distinctive characteristic of the genius of the Romans. It is at once sober and grand. It resembles, in some sort, an inscription cut on stone, and yet it is neither stiff nor conventional.’ This Latin ‘taste’ includes many ‘intellectual virtues’, the supreme virtues, greater than virtues that are more touching.
180.4–182. 20: Bourget’s story (in part using the words of the chronicler Jamsilla) of how the last Hohenstaufen Manfred sought refuge in Lucera ‘among his father’s Saracens’. Jamsilla narrates with ‘a rare mixture of strength and simplicity […] Tacitus only has passages equal to it, short, but which remain in the memory’. The chronicler describes [the house used for an overnight stay] in a few words of sober coloring which make a picture not to be forgotten, as “dimly white in the obscurity of the night.’ Arrived under the walls [Manfred] was obliged to make himself known — an incident so romantic as to seem taken from a romance — by his beautiful fair hair.’
3. Psychological concerns
Stevenson’s interest in the survival of primitive elements in the psyche is shown by his markings of passages in Bourget.
196.18–197.8: Sainte-Beuve was right, the ancient gods have never quite abandoned the earth. The ‘secret permanence of the old Olympians’ can be seen in these churches, where ‘the altar fronts are fragments of sarcophagi still adorned with pagan sculptures’ showing ‘the invincible need of the image, of the myth rendered palpable and concrete, of the mystic sensualism which is also a religion, but an unsatisfying and already impure religion.’
A passage on the cohabitation of the civilized and the savage is also found in 39.20–41.24 (see below).
4. Thoughts on art and aesthetics
37.14–38.17: Revisiting a familiar city you ‘forget entirely the Guide and to go at your pleasure to the rendezvous of beauty’; the works I like to revisit in Siena ‘affect me with that peculiar thrill which is no more to be reasoned about than love. Elsewhere we judge, we criticise; we analyze; here we feel.’
In the following marked passage the words given here in italics correspond to a double marginal line and concern the mixture of the civilized and the savage:
39.20–41.24: In Pintoricchio’s frescoes in the Library of Siena possess ‘what may be called the Shakespearean charm; so strongly impregnated with it are the historical dramas and romantic comedies of the great English poet. It is luxuriance, but refined luxuriance, elegance united to naturalness; something at once very civilized, very subtle, and at the same time a little savage. In them are to be found all the poetry of the Renaissance’ . ‘The painters of this divine school of Umbria had the inestimable gift possessed by Virgil, of uniting grace with pathos, of giving expression to that luxury of tears, that dreamy languor, tinged with melancholy — […] the melancholy of a being who is sad only because he exists, a dreaminess almost like that of the plant, so much does it resemble the tender and helpless resignation of the motionless flowers.’
The first part of the following marked passage seems to show interest in homosexuality at a time, before the Wilde trials, when it was not clearly defined or identified as defining a personality. The second part claims that a sympathetic interpretation tells us of the artist’s inner life, while his external acts give no clue to the ‘world of thoughts’ and ‘hidden motives’.
45.11–46–end: ‘The infamous appellation’ of the painter Sodoma seems unfounded and his disrepute probably derives from ‘an odd taste in dress, excessively shy manners, the pride of genius, and, perhaps, the dangerous habit of calumniating himself’ Perhaps, like Shakespeare he was ‘an impassioned friend’, which led to ‘unworthy accusations’. Did his reputation derive from ‘the somewhat sickly refinement of his art’?
For me ‘a certain sort of talent […] ‘a sympathetic interpretation of feeling’ (not facility of execution, nor ability with effects) ‘has always […] a close resemblance to the moral nature of the individual […] The facts of a man’s life are so little significant of his real nature!’ [underlined] ‘Do others, even, ever thoroughly understand our actions, and if they understand them are they able to unravel their hidden motives? Do we confide to others the world of thoughts that has stirred within us since we have come into existence […]? A sympathetic interpretation tells us of the artist’s moral nature, to his inner life—his external acts give no clue to the ‘world of thoughts’ and ‘hidden motives’ within.
49.1–14: I went to see two paintings in the Academy ‘Perhaps because of ‘a personal taste for a symbolism more vague, less clearly defined’.
The following long passage deals with contrasting styles and religious ideals; then it contrasts artists who depict the unidealized object with no indication of the artist’s feelings and those who bare their own soul. The latter have charm and Bourget prefers them.
116.5–121.end: Signorelli’s fresco-cycle in Orvieto cathedral. Fra Angelico’s ‘loving saviour’ contrasts with Signorelli’s ‘atrocious punishments represented on the spacious wall below. Never have the two aspects of the religious ideal — that of infinite mercy and that of implacable justice — been contrasted as they are on this ceiling and on this wall.’ In Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Dead a group of three recognize each other: ‘a touch of human pity, of merciful tenderness in the cruel painter. It is like the episode of Francesca among the horrors of the Divina Commedia, and by the force of contrast this gleam of pitying tenderness touches us all the more.’ This and his Last Judgement ‘dominate me and hold me enthralled. […] I feel that I am in the presence of two masterpieces of realism; that is to say, that art that leaves nothing to the imagination and which reproduces the object without idealizing it. […] He has copied this spectacle without infusing into it the faintest touch of personal feeling. His soul is not there nor his heart, but only his eye and his hand. […] There is no longer any need to inquire whether the man was sincere or not, what were the relations between his genius and his life, what moral crisis he passed through. The object is there, like something which exists in itself and by itself.’ But ‘this art, whose execution is so skillful, so conscientious, and so concise, is wanting in charm. This word, so vague in its signification, has been hackneyed by use, but it is the only one which expresses the magic of certain other works, shadowy, incomplete, of a style almost weak compared with the works of a Signorelli; of a softness bordering on mannerism, but by which one feels one’s self loved as by a person, and which one loves in the same way. There are two classes of artists who have always shared between them the dominion of the world: those who depict objects, effacing themselves altogether; and those whose works serve chiefly as a pretext to lay bare their own hearts. It is in vain that I admire the former with my whole strength and tell myself that they will never deceive me, while the sincerity of the others is often doubtful and they may always be suspected of posing — my sympathies go with the latter, it is with them I like to be’ [double marginal line]
The following passage was probably marked because of its bold idea that the meaning of a work of art is not determined by its author. This seems to anticipate Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1941), which suggests that the meaning of a work of literature depends on reader-response and the context of the work; and to anticipate Barthes’ idea of ‘the death of the author’(1967) that the author is not the ultimate authority on the text’s meaning.
129.12–132.4: the Umbrian painters touch our hearts so profoundly, but ‘they hardly suspected […] that they would one day be admired by the children of the most positive of ages.’ But did the author of the Imitation ‘suspect that passionate admirers of Adolphe, of Liaisons Dangereuses, and Rouge et Noir would find his pious manual as interesting a companion for their sleepless hours as the other three? [double marginal line]. ‘In every work of art […] there is […] a secret virtuality unsuspected by the creator of the work. Have you ever seen a ropemaker at his work, walking backward without looking where he is going? We are all, great and small, working like him, half consciously, half blindly, and above all we do not know what purpose our work will serve when it is finished. […] [A] book […] is not entirely the same a hundred years after it has been written. The words are unchanged, but do they preserve exactly the same signification? […] What reader of intellectual tastes does not understand that for a man of the seventeenth century Racine’s poetry was not what it has become for us? It will be answered: The work is the same, the change has taken place in yourself. This is a plausible explanation, but it will not bear analysis. It seems, in fact, as if we added something to the work by our manner of interpreting it in accordance with our own spiritual needs. In reality, what we seem to add to it it suggests to us. It had this possibility in it. […] [I]n the case of works which have remained truly living our modern sentiment has the right to make itself heard, however, it may differ from the conscious intention of the authors of those works.’
133.1–5: I remember the surprise mingled with emotion which I experienced on my first visit to […] that palace of Perugia […] to remark that certain refinements of our modern art are almost anticipated in them.’
134.1–end: Literature and all the arts ‘express […] shades of human feeling. […] The all-important question […] is always and everywhere to have soul. It is because the painters of the Umbrian school had so much soul that their works seem to us so new, so fresh, after so many years.’
The following criticizes over-reliance on environmental determinism (such as that of Taine):
156.21–157.7: Deterministic criticism does not give us an adequate explanation of genius, we cannot identify the necessary conditions for a work of art—much depends on ‘the personal factor’.
Yet Stevenson has a wavering view of realism and, like Bourget, also respected Taine:
218.15–18: ‘my beloved master Taine’
5. The fate of the artist
42.23–43.end: Pintoricchio—‘Unhappy genius!’—died in suffering after completing the frescoes.
149.21–151.10: Visit to the home where ‘the great pessimist writer’, Giacomo Leopardi, lived and wrote. The family have made the palace in which he lived a museum consecrated to his memory. In contrast, the house of ‘our beloved Balzac’ has been demolished and ‘a mean little house’ built in its place.
162.12–165.end: The Library of Leopardi’s house contains all his manuscripts—which made me think with bitterness of the dispersion of Balzac’s manuscripts eleven years ago with no effort by state or family to conserve them.’ It was Leopardi’s sister who gathered the manuscripts: ‘There is in every human being who has at any time produced a work of beauty, a something sacred which justifies and commands this posthumous devotion.’ My visit ended with ‘the sweet reflection that Love, whatever may be said, is stronger than Death.’ The poet still seems present in the old palace and you seem to hear his voice singing the verses of his ‘Ricordanze’: “Alas, Nerine, […] for thee never again — will spring return, never will love return again.”’
6. Characters with contrasting or complex personalities
224.6–-13: ‘I saw one of the prisoners [In Brindisi prison], an old man, affectionately petting a kitten lying beside a cat on the edge of the terrace. His black eyes and pallid lips smiled at times good-naturedly. Apparently the animals are accustomed to this old man, for the cat comes of her own accord to rub her head against his hand, on which the veins stand out like cords.’
See also 39.20–41.24 (above): the combination of the civilized and what is a little savage in Pintoricchio’s frescoes.
7. Miscellaneaous markings
147.2–5: ‘and of these tourists, how few know what the hero of divine love [St. Francis] really was who was born and died on this hill.’
152.10–15: The sculpture of the Madonna at Loreto is ‘imprisoned’ in jewels but has a sweet peaceful expression. Did Leopardi, who longed for oblivion, come here from nearby Recanati [and envy, like me, the simple faith of those praying there]?
Paul Bourget writes to Stevenson
A post contributed by Katherine Ashley
In 1891, Henry James sent Stevenson a copy of Paul Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie (1891). The book gave Stevenson a ‘literal thrill’ and he quickly requested more of his works. Bourget (1852-1935) was a poet, novelist, and playwright, but today he is mainly read by literary historians for his astute study of fin de siècle cultural malaise, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1885). He was also, like Stevenson, a traveller, and it is fitting that Stevenson’s introduction to him was via Sensations d’Italie, a book about Bourget’s travels in Tuscany, Umbria and Puglia.
The reasons for Stevenson’s enthusiasm for Sensations d’Italie are explored in an earlier post; a direct result of his reading is that he dedicated Across the Plains (1892) to Bourget.
To Stevenson’s consternation, Bourget did not immediately respond to the compliment. He complained to Sidney Colvin: ‘ain’t it manners in France to acknowledge a dedication? I have never heard a word from le Sieur Bourget, drat his impudence!’. He was even more to the point in a letter to James. Although the tone is good-humoured, there is an element of hurt and annoyance:
I thought Bourget was a friend of yours? And I thought the French were a polite race? He has taken my dedication with a stately silence that has surprised me into apoplexy. Did I go and dedicate my book to the nasty alien, and the ’n’orrid Frenchman, and the Bloody Furrineer? Well, I wouldn’t do it again; and unless his case is susceptible of Explanation, you might perhaps tell him so over the walnuts and the wine, by way of speeding the gay hours. Seriously, I thought my dedication worth a letter.
As it turns out, Bourget’s case was indeed ‘susceptible of Explanation’: work had prevented him from replying. The excuse seems reasonable, since Bourget spent the first months of 1892 in Rome, which resulted in his novel Cosmopolis (1893). He also published two other books around this time, La Terre promise (1892) and Un scrupule (1893).
Bourget’s contrite reply finally came, enclosed in James’s next letter to Stevenson. The manuscript is kept at Harvard University. It is transcribed and translated here.
Londres, le 3 août 93
Monsieur et cher confrère,
Je suis si coupablement en retard avec vous pour vous remercier de la dédicace du beau livre en tête duquel vous avez mis mon nom que je n’en finirais pas de m’en excuser. Le démon de la procrastination—ce mauvais génie de tous les imaginatifs—m’a joué des tours cruels dans ma vie. Il aurait commis le pire de ses méfaits s’il m’avait privé de la précieuse sympathie dont témoignait votre envoi—et venant de l’admirable artiste que vous êtes, cette sympathie m’avait tant touché. Peut-être trouverez-vous le mot de cette énigme de paresse dans une existence qui six mois durant, l’année dernière, a été celle d’un manœuvre littéraire esclavagé par un engagement imprudent—ce qui n’est rien lorsqu’on a le travail // facile, ce qui est beaucoup quand on ne peut pas « faire consciencieusement mauvais » comme disait je ne sais plus qui.
J’aurais voulu aussi, en vous remerciant, vous dire combien j’aime votre faculté et vision psychologique et comme il m’amuse en vous lisant de trouver entre ce que vous exprimez et ce que je sens sur des points analogues de singulières ressemblances d’âme. Croyez que, malgré mon silence, cette fraternité intellectuelle fait de vous un ami éloigné auquel je pense souvent. Je me réjouis de savoir par Henry James que vous avez retrouvé la santé sous le ciel où vous êtes réfugié. Que je voudrais pouvoir espérer qu’un jour nous nous rencontrerons, et que nous pourrons de vive // voix échanger quelques idées et parler des choses que nous aimons également ! Mais vous avez vraiment choisi l’asile presque inaccessible et je songe avec mélancolie que j’ai failli, voici des années, aller frapper à votre porte à Bournemouth. C’était un peu après vous avoir connu intellectuellement, et un autre démon, celui de la défiance, qui fait qu’on recule devant les rencontres les plus désirées, m’en a empêché. Voilà, Monsieur, beaucoup de diableries dans un petit billet qui devrait être toute chaleur et toute joie puisqu’il me permet de vous prouver ma gratitude d’esprit. Recevez-le comme une poignée de main bien sincère et croyez moi votre vrai et dévoué ami d’esprit.
Paul Bourget
Transcription: Katherine Ashley, Antoine Compagnon and Richard Dury
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London, 3 August 1893
My dear fellow,
I am so shamefully late in thanking you for the dedication to the fine book at the front of which you put my name, that I’ll never be done asking for forgiveness. The demon of procrastination—that evil genie of all creative people—has played cruel tricks in my life. He will have perpetrated his worst mischief if he has deprived me of the precious sympathy demonstrated by your dedication—and coming from the admirable artist that you are, this sympathy has touched me greatly. Perhaps you’ll find an explanation for my mysterious slowness in an existence that for six long months last year was that of literary labour enslaved by unwise commitment—which is nothing when the work comes // easily, but which is much when one cannot ‘in good conscience do bad work’, as someone whose name escapes me once said.
In thanking you, I’d also like to tell you how much I appreciate your abilities and psychological vision, and how it amuses me, when reading you, to find a singular likeness of temperament between what you express and what I feel on analogous points. Know that, despite my silence, this intellectual fraternity makes of you a distant friend of whom I often think. I’m delighted to learn from Henry James that you have regained your health under the skies where you have taken refuge. How I’d like to hope that we’ll meet one day, and that we’ll be able to exchange ideas in // person and speak of things that we both love equally. But you’ve truly chosen an almost inaccessible sanctuary, and I think with wistfulness that years ago I almost knocked on your door in Bournemouth. It was shortly after getting to know you intellectually, and I was prevented by another demon, the demon of no-confidence that makes us back away from the most desired encounters. That, sir, is a lot of devilry for a short note that ought to be all warmth and pleasure, since it allows me to show my gratefulness. Please accept it as a sincere handshake indeed and consider me your true and devoted like-minded friend.
Paul Bourget
Translation: Katherine Ashley
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See also the former post on Katherine Ashley’s recent study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
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Louis, Fanny and ‘Charles of Orleans’
When Stevenson first met Fanny Osbourne and fell in love he accepted an addition she suggested to his latest essay. Her contribution was first noted when preparing the essay for the upcoming New Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson’s Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
On 30 July 1876 Stevenson reported that his essay on ‘Charles of Orleans’ was finished and had been sent off to the Cornhill. The following month he left Edinburgh for London and then Antwerp where he was to begin his Inland Voyage river and canal journey on 25 August. In a letter to Colvin written just before leaving Edinburgh he still hadn’t heard from the Cornhill about the essay (Letters 2: 178, 181).
In the same letter to Colvin he said ‘I have an ultimate purpose of reaching Fontainebleau by water’, but he in fact ended at Pontoise, about about 17 km via the river Oise to the Seine below Paris. On 13 or 14 September he wrote to his mother from Pontoise mentioning ‘a bold, desperado sort of post card from my father; anent a proof of mine; which he has carefully violated as usual’ (Letters 2: 190). This can only refer to the ‘Charles of Orleans’ proofs. The same incident is alluded to at the end of An Inland Voyage, where he says a packet of letters picked up in Compiègne ended the holiday feeling and at their next stop, ‘a letter at Pontoise decided us’, and brought the trip to an end (Tusitala 17: 88, 110).
It is not clear whether it had been agreed that Thomas Stevenson would read the proofs when they arrived, or whether he took it upon himself to open the envelope: certainly, Stevenson did not welcome this interference, and two-and-a-half years later made sure his father did not see the proofs of Travels with a Donkey (Maixner: 64).
*
After Pontoise Stevenson and Simpson continued by rail to Paris and Grez, where they presumably arrived around 16 September—along with the two canoes (Lloyd Osbourne remembers them there). And there at the artist’s inn of Chez Chevillon, Stevenson met his future wife Fanny Osbourne. We have Lloyd Osbourne’s later recollection of Stevenson arriving, vaulting though the open window from the street and being greeted with delight by the company around the dinner table. Louis was attracted to Fanny first; Fanny, we know from her letters, was attracted to Bob Stevenson, but at a certain point he told her that his cousin was more worthy of her attention. (All this un-Victorian fluidity and freedom of relationships must have seemed like a new world to Louis.)
Anyway, they fell in love, ‘step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room’, as Stevenson puts it in ‘Falling in Love’. Lloyd Osbourne remembers how Stevenson and his mother ‘would sit and talk interminably on either side of the dining-room stove while everybody else was out and busy, under vast white umbrellas, in the fields’ (Tusitala 17: xi).
*
One day, Stevenson must have given Fanny those proofs of his latest essay, ‘Charles of Orleans’ to read. The text published in the Cornhill in December of that year contains the following passage:
The reader will remember how Villon’s mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty stock of theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her as she prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in the first infant school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues. So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time, to a liberal education in itself.
After reading the essay, Fanny suggested the parallel between knowledge conveyed through images in the Middle Ages and the images in the classroom of the infant school, and Stevenson (always interested in parallels between primitive and infant psychology) must have inserted it on the proofs.
We know this because when the essay was collected in Familiar Studies in 1882, Stevenson, replying to a letter from Alexander Japp, said, ‘The elephant was my wife’s: so she is proportionately elate you should have have picked it out for praise’ (Letters 3: 310).
Publishing Stevenson 1888-1894: David Balfour
The publication of David Balfour/Catriona is an interesting example of the unusual circumstances surrounding the publication of Stevenson’s works from 1888 to his death in 1894. It is explored briefly in Barry Menikoff’s recently-published edition of the David Balfour manuscript (as mentioned in a previous post, section 3) and at length in a previous article by Menikoff: ‘Towards the Production of a Text: Time, Space, and David Balfour‘ in Studies in the Novel 27.3 (1995), pp. 351-62.
In this article Menikoff tells the story of the competing players involved in periodical publication and book publication in London and New York: the McClure syndicate, Cassells and Scribner’s, Baxter and Colvin, all with different interests and priorities.
McClure and magazine serialization
S.S. McClure had ‘signed agreements to provide a story [to Atalanta and newspapers] before he had a text’ (358), so had to ‘cajole Stevenson to produce the manuscript fast enough’. The manuscript, however, was sent to Baxter, who then forwarded it to Cassells who started preparing proofs and passing them to Robert McClure (S.S. McClure’s brother and London agent). Time was passing and in December 1892 serialization began in Atalanta, but McClure’s were still without the final chapters — Cassell’s, who had the whole manuscript, did not feel the same urgency about getting proofs prepared.
In addition, Robert McClure needed to correct obvious mistakes in the proofs, but he had no access to the MS (and he refused to do this checking in Cassell’s office). In part, this was because the MS was too precious, but also in part because of rather snooty distrust of McClure (p. 357), and a view of magazine publication as not important. In the end, Colvin corrected the Atalanta proofs himself (359-60).
Book publication
Stevenson had repeatedly asked for proofs for the book publication and on 2 March 1893, two complete sets of Cassell’s proofs were sent out to Samoa: one clean set for Stevenson, and one with Colvin’s many ‘suggestions and corrections’ (359).
At this point, Cassells and Scribner’s started to get a bit impatient—this was another delay of at least three months (the journey took one month each way), so there was a risk (as actually happened) of the serialized version ending before the book publication (and this, it was felt, would have an adverse effect on sales). On 26 May 1893, the corrected proofs hadn’t arrived and Cassell sounded out Colvin as to whether he might correct the proofs in London so that the book could be got out quickly.
Colvin refused to do this, mainly, we might suspect, because he hoped not only for corrections but for revisions and improvements cued by his suggestions on the proofs. In June, Scribner’s accepted that they could not publish: ‘we must of course wait for Stevenson’s final corrections before publication’.
In July (over four months from dispatch of the proofs), Stevenson’s corrected proofs arrived in London. Colvin was crestfallen: somehow, most of his suggestions had been ignored!—’for all the alterations he has made, the book might as well have been out two months ago’, he complained.
Another complication in the process of book publication that Menikoff points out is the fact that Baxter and Stevenson had decided to change their business relationship with Scribner’s and had asked them to bid for the US copyright of David Balfour, rather than sign a contract and pay royalties as before (360; Stevenson’s letter is in L8: 569). (Baxter’s rather insensitive attitude to Scribner’s has already been seen in Glenda Norquay’s post about St Ives).
Colvin tidies up the record
I can add an interesting further detail to Menikoff’s account.
Stevenson sent Colvin a letter in early April 1893 in which he listed his first reactions to a number of Colvin’s proposals. These comments are to be found in volume 8 of the Letters (pp. 36-8; Letter 2549), and also in Colvin’s edition of the letters (Tusitala 35: 17-18). We have seen in a previous post how Colvin actually physically cut out parts of another letter from November 1894 referring to differing views about changes to Stevenson’s text. In Colvin’s edition of the April 1893 letter he (less drastically) leaves out a number of Stevenson’s comments from his edited text. These are obviously points that Colvin still felt sensitive about. They are as follows:
— Symon in the trial!
— Sow-gelding. I’ll try; but they had damnable tongues — (and have, ahem!)
— Dumkopf: all right: deleted.
— [Chapter XXX] […] About ‘no better than she should be’, you were wrong if you suppose Barbara would have stopped at that! You don’t know the brand as I do, and how they love the word that shocks.
— [slip 89.] O drew, drew! ‘see you naked.’
— [The end.] […] O come, I do not say that Alan kicked the sailor’s bottom; it is Alan who says so, and it is just the scornful word for him to use.
You seem to hint that Davie is not finished in the writing; which cuts me; and yet I think you deceive yourself.
Mehew identifies some of these in his notes, but now we have Menikoff’s edition of the manuscript text it shouldn’t be too difficult to identify them all. This, however, I generously leave to someone else.
The comment on ‘see you naked’ refers to the passage in the MS where Catriona says to David ‘I am thanking the good God he has let me see you naked’ (i.e. ‘undisguised’—see the post on Menikoff’s edition). But can anyone interpret ‘O drew, drew’?
New Light on Dark Women
This post is contributed by John F. Russell, author and editor of The Music of Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Song: ‘Dark Women’
Dark Women is a long poem in which Stevenson contrasts women of opposite hues, wonders at the shades of one particular woman’s nature and welcomes the consolation of her embrace.
Fanny is not mentioned by name in the verse, but in a letter to Colvin concerning the preparation of Songs of Travel (published in Scribner’s Magazine 75.iv, April 1924, p. 419), she says that in addition to the poem My Wife (”Trusty, dusky, vivid, true”), “There was another that Louis rather liked–I think it was called, ‘In praise of dark women’; what do you think of adding that? I only suggest the looking at it.”
Colvin chose instead to include in Songs of Travel only stanzas 2-3 of Dark Women:
Because of the poem’s personal nature Janet Adam Smith assumed that Colvin suppressed the remainder, which has since been published in varying six-stanza versions and by Lewis (2003) in an eight-stanza conflation of the various versions because no single manuscript represents the work in a clearly finished state.
In 1890 Stevenson wrote to the editor of Scribner’s Magazine concerning poems he wanted to publish under the titles Ballads and Songs of Travel.In a following letter he mentioned that many of them were written to music, and that he thought it would be a good idea to include the voice parts:
Booth, Bradford A. and Ernest Mehew. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995
In addition to other items, Beinecke manuscripts 5865-9 contain four versions of a list of poems intended for Ballads and Songs of Travel.
The list headed Posthumous Verses (apparently intended for publication after his death) contains 48 titles divided into four sections: Vailima, Underwoods, Verses and Songs:
Yale Gen MSS 664 box 43 folders 943-945 (Beinecke 6896)
Yale Gen MSS 664 box 43 folders 943-945 (Beinecke 6896)
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In the section “Songs,” number 43 has the title To You, Let Snow and Roses and is followed by a line count of 16 (which would seem to correspond to the version published in the Edinburgh Edition). It appears in the list together with titles such as Ditty, To an Air of Diabelli’s, To the Tune of Wandering Willie, and 16 others, 9 of which have been found to be associated with music and are listed in the index of the Music of Robert Louis Stevenson website.
Stevenson said on several occasions that he enjoyed the challenge of writing lyrics to music, and so it seems apparent that the reason To You, Let Snow and Roses appears in the section titled “Songs” rather than the other three sections is that it too was written to music.
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Yale Gen MSS 664 box 43 folders 943-945 (Beinecke 6894)
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A different (and clearly later) version of the list (B 6894) has 61 titles. Number 53 is Dark Women and has a line count of 24. RLS apparently considered To You, Let Snow and Roses complete enough to publish at the time but later expanded it to three stanzas and retitled it. Three varying six-stanza versions have been published (Strong 1899, Gosse 1908, Hellman 1925) and an eight-stanza (64-line) conflated version appears in Lewis’s Collected Poems (2003).
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A song—with music
Stevenson’s musically inspired poems occasionally contain clues to the melody in the title, subtitle or body of the poem, but in this case the only clues are the rhythm and meaning of the verse. Identifying the tune for this particular work would be hopeless, except that many of the scores Stevenson acquired for his musical studies have been identified and most of his original manuscript musical compositions and transcriptions are available. The proper place to begin searching for music he might have used for a poem is in the scores he collected and the manuscript copies he made, and so it is not haystacks that need to be looked in for this particular needle but in “those great stacks of music,” as Lloyd Osbourne called them.
Out of Stevenson’s more than 140 manuscript transcriptions of music, only one fits the poem properly. He called it Mozart, but its actual title is Duettino from Clemenza di Tito, Act I, Scene 3. Although it is a duet, Stevenson generally copied only from the first part, simplifying some rhythms, changing a few notes, and shortening the whole by six bars.
University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, Melodies for the flute by RLS, CX 2
A recording using the first stanza of Stevenson’s lyrics can be heard by clicking here. In the opera, Sesto and Annio sing these words:
Deh, prendi un dolce amplesso, / Amico mio fedel;
E ognor per me lo stesso / Ti serbi amico il ciel.
Ah, let me embrace you dearly, / My faithful friend,
And may heaven ever keep / Your friendship constant for me.
The texts of the opera and poem share the theme of friendship, and Stevenson even seems slightly surprised that it is “her of duskier lustre whose favour still I wear.” Although To You, Let Snow and Roses is a song for one voice, its two stanzas comparing two kinds of women produce a duet of its own kind. That the poem fits so well with the opera melody and that the two works share a similar theme should be proof enough that Mozart’s music inspired the poem; however some small details in Stevenson’s transcription add further evidence.
Transcription of RLS’s Mozart with the words of To You, Let Snow and Roses
RLS has written the expression mark “dolce” (sweetly) in the middle of the second line. The two bars of music that follow are alterations by Stevenson of Mozart. At this point in the opera the two voices sing separately and echo each other:
Mozart’s version of the highlighted section changed by RLS
If Stevenson had chosen to copy Mozart’s music exactly, he would have written the following, which is a compilation of the two voices:
Mozart
Stevenson
However, this particular line of the poem has too few syllables for too many notes, so he leaves some out and changes others. The result is a sweeter version of the melody which the lyrics implicitly dedicate to Fanny: “For her of duskier lustre.”Other changes RLS made in Mozart to accommodate his lyrics can be found in the last three bars of the song. To set the words “The rose be in her hair,” he added extra notes specifically for the words “be” and “her.” Because the first stanza of his lyrics finishes at this point, he ends his song and discards the remaining six bars of Mozart’s music:
Stevenson
Mozart
In To You, Let Snow and Roses Stevenson fused the two melodies of the Duettino into one air on the themes of friendship and color, but later he seemed to realize that by leaving out the operatic image of the embrace, he expressed only half the meaning he intended. Long after the music is silent, verse after searching verse follows in praise of a multitude of shades and colors, but the poem can only end when once again Lou finally embraces Fanny.
The Duettino reads,
Ah, let me embrace you dearly,
my faithful friend,
and may heaven ever keep
your friendship constant for me
The last stanza of Dark Women reads:
The defeats and the successes,
The strife, the race, the goal,
And the touch of a dusky woman
Was fairly worth the whole.
And sun and moon and morning,
With glory I recall,
But the clasp of a dusky woman
Outweighed them one and all.
John F. Russell
Scribner’s and Weir: a premature ‘puff’
This post is contributed by Glenda Norquay, presently working an edition of St. Ives for the Edition.
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In my last few days at Princeton I found an interesting little twist to the tangled narrative of Stone & Kimball and Scribner’s and the competition for his late fiction.
So sure were Scribner’s that they were going to get the publication rights of Weir of Hermiston in the United States that their editor, E.L. Burlingame wrote to Sidney Colvin on the 5 September 1895:
Edward L. Burlingame
There is one other great kindness that you could do us in this matter and that I think would be a great factor in the success of the publication. You have mentioned in your letters that both you and Henry James who had read “Weir of Hermiston” thought it beyond comparison the finest thing that Stevenson had done. If you were willing to let us quote you both as holding this opinion, and if you care to express it in words which imply a comparison, to let us quote you as saying that it reaches at least his highest level – I can think of nothing that would so quickly lead to the favorable recognition of our announcement of it. “The Fables”, the paper of extracts from the “Vailima Letters”, and perhaps the beginning of “St Ives” all preceding it, and two of them being comparatively minor things (of course I do not speak of the “Vailima” book) it is most important for us to prevent in the public mind the idea that this is a small matter, and to make known the truth that it is really the one upon which his ambition was specially centred during his last two or three years.
(1894 November 15 – 1895 September 13; 1894 November 15 – 1895 September 13; Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Box 901; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.)
While the evaluation of the other works as ‘small’ may be questioned (especially by the editor of one of them), the publishers were clearly aiming to make as much of Weir as they possibly could. Yet by the end of the year (9 December) Charles Scribner has this to communicate to Lemuel Bangs, their London representative:
There is nothing further to record about Stevenson’s story; it has been sold to the Cosmopolis and Stone & Kimball will publish it in this country. Baxter’s contract with Stone & Kimball knocked us out … but it was a high price to pay for an incomplete story and all things considered perhaps we are well off without it.
(L. W. Bangs; 1893 February-1900 January; Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Box 972; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.)
As my earlier blog noted, however, this did not diminish Scribner’s eventual pleasure in gaining control of all Stevenson’s work in the U.S..
The Ebb-Tide, 1st ed., 1894, published by Stone & Kimble
Weir of Hermiston, 1st ed., 1896, published by Charles Scribner’s & Sons
Sandbox: can an editor use a new title?
Labels
Titles and terminology are protected by a certain sanctity: they are labels used by society and (to confine ourselves to written language) contained in an unknowable number of documents that would become, with any change, inexact.
Yet one would still like to change some of them. Of inadequate terminology, the young Stevenson himself had something to say in his ‘Numbered Notes’ of 1873-74 (the, ahem!, new title that—in this sandbox anyway—I wish to use for the, let’s admit it, rather inadequate title ‘Selections From His Notebook’):
Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory, as being a series of petitiones principii—as being committed from beginning to end to former and less perfect theories. Look at the degraded terminology of Mechanics—the very name being a misnomer with its so-called mechanical powers and other misleading and incorrect expressions. Any attempt, again, to talk scientifically about heat or the variation of temperature involves, on the now proved dynamical hypothesis, a series of misstatements—a string of verbal confusions.
Titles
In the first volume of Stevenson’s uncollected essays, there are a few titles I am tempted to tweak. I hasten to add: only with minor works that seem to have been given inappropriate titles by other editors. Perhaps the best way to proceed would be to look at them one by one.
1. Dunoon
a.k.a. ‘A Retrospect’ (Edinburgh Edition; Swearingen); ‘Dunoon. Encounter with a Fortune-Teller, 1870’ and ‘Dunoon. Visit at a House in 1870 where R.L.S. had Spent a Week in Childhood’ (McKay and Yale finding aid)
Here we have an early manuscript (B 6174): five sheets written on both sides numbered 5–13, i.e. missing pp. 1–4 and, since the text started on p. 13 is truncated at the end of the page, missing following pages too. It consists of several separate pieces: on Hazlitt (abandoned), on Dunoon (the contrast between impressions on a recent revisitation and memories of a distant childhood visit) (which reaches a conclusion), on Imagination (just a paragraph, though possibly finished—a pensée) and Obermann (continued on lost sheets). These pieces are separated by short centred lines: apparently a collection of essay ideas written out neatly, on both sides of the sheets to save paper.
Then we have a later manuscript (B 6173—McKay thought it was earlier, hence the lower number), written on the same paper, in which RLS decided to link together his thoughts on Hazlitt and his anecdote about childhood memory (perhaps they were always intended to be linked, as he talks specifically of Hazlitt’s ‘On the Past and Future’ and adopts Hazlitt’s points in that essay that the future is nothing, while the past is a ‘real and substantial a part of our being’). However, he also decides to insert another element before the second part: the telling of his fortune by a crazy Highland woman on the occasion of the same recent revisitation Dunoon. Clearly, Dunoon had become a crossroads of timelines and an appropriate place for thinking about past and future. Unfortunately, he abandons the project shortly after starting to rewrite what is now the third section, the one about childhood memories, though the anecdote can be be picked up on the earlier draft, in front of RLS as he wrote.
A more accurate title would be perhaps ‘Dunoon: a prophecy and a recollection’ (‘recollection’ occurs eight times in the later draft), as this is announced in a summary sentence of the later draft:
What led me to the consideration of this subject and what has made me take up my pen tonight, is the rather strange coincidence of two very different accidents—a prophecy of my future and a return into my past.
However, following a principle of least intervention, I propose to call the (fragmentary) essay ‘Dunoon’, which is a name used by McKay and is also contained in Colvin’s note placed under the title ‘(A Fragment: written at Dunoon, 1870)’. Colvin’s title ‘A Retrospect’ only refers to the anecdote about childhood memory and seems therefore to be based on a misunderstanding of Stevenson’s intentions as shown in the quotation above.
One might add that Colvin’s essay is also not exactly the same as the one we will publish, as he ends the anecdote of how childhood memories clashed with impressions on a return visit with a note ‘[Added the next morning]—’ and then continues with the pensée about, not memory, but the imagination, as if it were part of the same text, which it clearly is not.
Is the proposed title a legitimate intervention, or should I add the other title after it: ‘Dunoon (A Retrospect)’?
2. Scotland and England
a.k.a. ‘Differences of Country’ (Swearingen), ‘Differences of Country. Beginning of an Essay’ (McKay), ‘”Differences of country…”‘ (Yale finding aid, i.e. identifying it as an incipit rather than a title)
This, an unpublished fragment of an essay, starts with a series of notes to guide composition, each one separated by a dot with a space on either side (a sort of linear bullet-list):
Differences of country . The Channel & Tra los Montes . North and south
La verte Écosse et la bonne Italie . Skelts Dramas . Trees . Scotch Scene
Scotch & English houses . The Hill farm . &c.
Unfortunately the MS ends in mid-sentence at the bottom of p. 3, so continued in a section now lost. What remains is a paragraph and a bit covering the first two points ‘Differences of country . The Channel & Tra los Montes’:
Summary:
(Para 1) The individuality of a country that we remember depends on significant physical differences (for instance, ‘A country with a long bare seaboard must leave a very different impression from one into which the bright sea enters deeply, and the firths run far inland and lie about the roots of mountains for all the world like lakes, and the islands are so thickly scattered that they make the sea-run between them look shrunken and tortuous like a firth’) and differences of landscape created by different cultures and tastes , basically unchanged for centuries (and he cites a medieval French illumination with features of the countryside still typical today).
(Para 2) The Channel has done much to influence English thought; in Gautier’s Tra los montes we read of how a traveller going south sees a gradual change from France into Spain… (And here the MS ends.)
On 14 January 1875 RLS writes to Colvin:
I shall have another PRTFL [Portfolio] paper, so soon as I am done with this story [‘When the Devil was Well’] […] The Prtfl paper will be about Scotland and England.
‘When the Devil was Well’ seems to be written on the same paper as this fragment (I’ll be checking this in the Beinecke), which (another clue to dating) makes reference to the typical landscape of Romney Marsh—undoubtedly showing the influence of Basil Champneys’ A Quiet Corner of England, which he read in Oct-Nov 1874 (cf L2: 79), his review being published in The Academy of 5 Dec 1874. The ‘Prtfl paper about Scotland and England’ also fits in well with the summary notes at the top of p. 1 of our MS, which seem to sketch out an introduction about differences of landscape between different countries before moving on to specific landscape differences between Scotland and England (an interest already present in the obvious evocation of Scottish lochs and islands in Para 1). The reference to Skelt’s Dramas must be to the memory he includes in ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’:
England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames—England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt.
So we have ‘Differences of country’, first item in a series of notes for the essay that is most probably the one ‘about Scotland and England’ referred to in the letter. I’d like to call it ‘Scotland and England’ Or should it be ‘Scotland and England (Differences of Country)’, or ‘Differences of Country (Scotland and England)’? Or no change at all?
3. Lay Morals (Man and Money)
‘Lay Morals’, an essay-treatise divided into four chapters, is a different case: as it is a well-know work, changing the title is not advisable. However, RLS never refers to it with this title, written in pencil by another hand at the top of the 1879 MS.
The first two chapters seem to have been given the title ‘What We Teach’ (which covers the content of these chapters quite well) in an outline sketch in a notebook, and RLS refers in a letter to the whole project as ‘Man and Money’ (L2, 308; late March 1879) (and we find the following titles in lists of planned essays in the 1870s: ‘Morality and Money’, ‘Money’, ‘On Money’ and ‘Money and Morals’). Even though this latter title seems to apply most to Chapter IV, it also embraces Chapter II, sections 9 and 10 (the long personal anecdote and about living on unearned income and the explanation of how ‘stealing’ covers certain kinds of common economic behaviour), as well as the criticism in Chapter III of the conventional doctrine of profit.
The traditional title, apparently supplied by Colvin, provides a general title for a text that is occupied with more than money (criticisms of conventional moral education and hypocrisy, the impossibility of governing conduct by precepts because of the continually changing nature of life, the guiding of conduct by an internal sense of right, the importance of accepting bodily desires, and how the privileged classes should make service correspond to income and not waste money on undesired luxuries). The ethics of money is certainly a major interest but its development in ch. IV seems to be unsuccessfully attached to ch. I and II on moral education and ch. III on how conduct is to be judged in the absence of a divine moral guide. This latter is certainly a constant theme of the essay (making ‘Lay Morals’ an appropriate title), even if never explicitly stated.
Given Stevenson’s one explicit reference, I would like to use the title ‘Lay Morals (Man and Money)’.
This would also have the advantage of distinguishing the work from the untitled 1883 fragment, which incorporates parts of ch. III and seems to have the same aim of bringing together Stevenson’s thoughts on morality in the form of a guide to the young (and specifically states this in an Introduction) but does not mention money, a dominant element in the earlier work. It might possibly be referred to as ‘Lay Morals (Youth and Morality)’ using for the second part a title in a list of planned essay titles in a notebook of early 1882—but I leave this to the editor of the later volume.
4. At Sea, A Night in the South of France, Time
a.k.a 1. ‘A Note at sea’, 2. ‘A night in France’ (Mckay, Yale finding aid, Swearingen), ‘Fragment of an Essay on Time’ (Osbourne auction catalogue, 1914), ‘On Time’ (Swearingen)
These are three fragments (the third untraced since publication in the 1923 Vailima Edition). For the first, ‘A Note’ seems more of a description of the type of document, left over from the title in the auction catalogue, when ‘At Sea’ would be more elegant. It seems close in style to the 1875 ‘Prose Poems’.
The second, previously believed to be part of the ‘Forest Notes’ drafts (it was written in the same notebook) was actually written in Mentone and records thoughts of hearing a piano playing Scottish airs (also mentioned in a letter of February 1874). Various more accurate titles could be imagined, but a minimum intervention would be to add ‘the South of’ to the title.
The third, though only 309 words, could possibly be finished, and it looks very similar in topic and style to the 1873–74 ‘Numbered Notes’: thoughts on various mainly philosophical topics. ‘On Time’ suggests a longer treatise, while ‘Time’ would be a sufficient title for this short piece (and in line with the titles of the ‘Numbered Notes’). Indeed ‘Time’ is the title used in the 1923 Vailima Edition and the Tusitala Edition that derives from it. As Swearingen indexes the item as ‘Time, On’ it will cause minimum confusion to adopt the shorter title, the one used in previous editions that included it.
However, in the first two cases, I can see I am forcing matters. ‘A Night in France’ is perhaps a good enough title. If I am honest, I can also see that I want to call the first ‘At Sea’ because I want to make it like the Prose Poems. So, in the end I am inclined resist title tweaking and to keep these two titles unchanged. (Or does anyone think ‘At Sea’ would be permissible?)
Sandbox
Using this free area of play has been very useful: as I wrote I started to get second thoughts, to see matters from another side, started to suspect my own motives. Any helpful contributions to the debate will be welcomed.
Colvin steps in with vim
Sidney Colvin, as we know, acted as editor of Stevenson’s works while he was in the South Seas and then after his death. It is a curious human frailty to regard our own point-of-view as having a higher status than that of others, and Colvin was no less human in this respect than any of the rest of us. It is not often, however, that we have an example of his feeling of being right pursued to the extent illustrated below.
Talk and Talkers
In ‘Talk and Talkers’ (1882) Stevenson, in a kaleidoscopic sequence of similes, brilliantly characterizes (and imitates) the conversational style of his cousin Bob:
He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. […] I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these impersonations
After the essay was reprinted in Memories and Portraits in 1887, Colvin wrote to Stevenson, taking him to task for his Latin:
in another essay you have ‘with or by his vim‘, where equally of course it ought if anything to be vi, not objective but ablative. But the rule is that when you borrow a Latin word in an English sentence that way, you don’t decline it at all, but treat it like an English word, content yourself with the nominative for all cases alike, […] vis. Please have […] vim altered on the plates [i.e. on the stereotyped plates produced to print the volume]
But RLS wasn’t going to have any of this and replied (L6, 86; 24 Dec 1887):
vim is a good Scottish at least – if not (as I am tempted to think) a good English word; never a thought of Latin was in my mind; I used a current and a very general and definite colloquialism. Thank you for your explanations.
Edinburgh Edition
Despite that dismissal (‘Thank you for your explanations…’), Colvin was clearly not happy about ‘vim’ and in preparing the essay for publication in the first volume of the Edinburgh Edition he felt this and a series of other things ought to be changed. He either sent proofs or a series of points to RLS , to which RLS replied in early November 1894, clearly irritated at the liberties Colvin was taking (L8, 384). Interestingly, two passages of Stevenson’s comments about Colvin’s changes, amounting to over seventy words, have been actually cut out of the letter. (Who could have done this? One suspects of course that it was Colvin himself, erasing Stevenson’s objections from the record.) What remains includes the following:
always make a reference to me before correcting. I should say as to vim that it is a word always used in my family — and I suspect always used in Scotland — and is in consequence familiar and dear to my ears. Whether or not I shall be pleased with the substitution of vigour I cannot tell, not having the context before me.
Unfortunately, volume I of the Edinburgh Edition was published later that same month, undoubtedly before this letter could reach Colvin, so we don’t know if he would have made any changes as a result. The word printed in the essay there is ‘vigour’. (However, in the 1924 Tusitala edition it is once more ‘vim’; perhaps Colvin had a part in restoring it.)
vim
Incidentally, the OED (in a fascicule published in 1917) says the word is ‘originally US’ and takes the side of RLS as to its non-Latin origin: ‘Commonly regarded as from Latin vim, accusative singular of vis strength, energy; but the early adverbial use […] suggests a purely imitative or interjectional origin.’
Citations start from the Yale Literary Review 1850 (where it seems to be presented as a Latin word), then two citations from Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” (1850), and N.Y Herald (1875).
Google Advanced Book Search, however, reveals a use in 1876 in The Life of a Scottish Probationer by James Brown, Minister of St. James’s church, Paisley (the fiddler ‘whacked off’ a series of Irish dance tunes ‘with inconceivable vim and vigour’), the first UK use found so far, which suggests that the word may have been adopted early in Scotland — or even that it had an unrecorded history in Scotland before being taken across the Atlantic. (It is not in the online SND, however.) Indeed RLS’s comment (‘vim […] is a word always used in my family […] and is in consequence familiar and dear to my ears’) strongly suggests that he heard it in Edinburgh in the 1850s and 60s.
The one-volume Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English (1912, reduced from the earlier 7-volume Slang and its Analogues) defines the word as ‘Spirit, activity, energy’: orig. Univ. slang [Latin]. (1869)’, which suggests that one of the two editors, John S. Farmer or W. E. Henley, or one of their contributors, had heard the word in this (and presumably British) context about that year.
EdRLS 