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.

Paul Bourget

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]?

Stevenson in Homburg, 1862

Stevenson visited Germany on four occasions: 1. Homburg (now Bad Homburg vor der Höhe) with his parents, July—August 1862; 2. The following year travelling home from Italy with his parents (Munich—Augsburg—Nuremberg—Frankfurt—Cologne) in May 1863; 3. Frankfurt during his first summer vacation as a student with Walter Simpson, July—August 1872; 4. And finally, for a few days, joining his parents at Wiesbaden in September 1875.

Although steeped in French culture, Stevenson was also attracted to German thought and literature.The 1872 stay in Frankfurt was to improve his German. After the death of his friend James Walter Ferrier, Stevenson remembered that Ferrier, probably in the early 1870s, ‘had [=? had made] a pretty full translation of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, which we read together, as well as the second part of Goethe’s Faust, […] he helping me with the German’ (Letters 4: 206). He quotes Goethe and Heine in German several times in his letters from 1872 to 1875 (Letters 1: 289, 316, 403; Letters 2: 13, 72, 81, 122) and read Heine’s love poems together with Fanny Sitwell in the summer of 1873 (Letters 2: 31).

His German experiences are reflected in ‘Will O’ the Mill’ (1878) and Prince Otto (1885) as well as an abandoned essay on Homburg, ‘An Onlooker in Hell’, for a series, planned in 1890, to be called ‘Random Memories’. This latter is now in the NLS (MS 3112, ff. 308-311) and will be published in our Essays V, presently being prepared by Lesley Graham

But to return to his first experience of Germany, not yet twelve years old, in the summer of 1862. A reader of this blog, Thomas Obst, lives a few miles from Bad Homburg and, after some local research, kindly supplies the following facts and images.

The family were among the new arrivals between 14 and 16 July announced in the Kur- und Bade-Liste dated 17 July 1862. With them was Margaret Stevenson’s brother Mackintosh Balfour, travelling to Homburg, like Thomas Stevenson, for a health cure. They all stayed at the house of the widow Zahn, No. 3 Kisseleffstrasse, a quiet street leading from the main street, Louisenstrasse, to the Park and its Casino.

Almost opposite, on the corner of Louisen- and Kisseffstrasse, was the Russischerhof, or Hotel de Russie, where the Stevenson party took their meals. The building on the corner (right) is certainly the former hotel. Stevenson later stayed in this hotel in 1875: after meeting his parents at Wiesbaden on 2 September, he travelled with them to Homburg and Mainz before leaving them to return to Paris. The Stevenson party is announced in the Homburger Fremden-Liste recording arrivals from 4 to 8 September.

No. 3 Kisseleffstrasse (left) looks more modern. But notice a small dark rectangle on the left of the ground-floor facade. This is a plaque placed there in 2018 commemorating Stevenson’s stay (and also that of Nikolai Gogol), and the inscription starts ‘This building was built in 1844 as a hotel’, which means that the present building, at least in its basic structure and fenestration, is the one where Stevenson and his parents stayed in 1862:

The Stevenson who stayed in Homburg in 1875 was very different from the boy who stayed there in 1862: in 1875 he had graduated from University in July, had already begun publishing literary works in magazines and was in the middle of a formative experience in France living with art students. After arriving in Paris from Germany on 6 September, he proceeded to Barbizon and there met and fell in love with his future wife Fanny Osbourne.

Spielbank (casino), Bad Homburg, ‘that glorified garden-house’

However that early experience in Homburg remained in his memory. In late 1890, searching for subjects for a second series of Scribner’s Magazine essays he sketched out some headings for an essay on his experience of gambling establishements and then wrote a few paragraphs about Bad Homburg. Here, to end, is an extract of part of that text:

[…] I heard first in Homburg the continuous ringing of counted money on the tables of a gaming house. Sitting on the terrace, I became suddenly aware of it with a thrill of the pleasure of hearing not yet forgotten; a fine band of music played there daily, and I have forgot the music; but I think when I come to lie dying, I shall still be able to recal (as I do now) the more delicate concert from within. I thought then already, as I think still today, that there are few sounds to be compared with it in nature. It chanced I was to hear it again and yet again in the course of my vagrant life; and it is a singular thought to me now and in this far away place, that the song of the money is still going on in Europe, like the song of birds, perennial.

Homburg was then near an end; Blanc [François Blanc, director of the Homburg casino] had received a formal warning [gambling was to be outlawed in German in 1872]; he was already (as I was to see next year [1863]) timidly breaking ground elsewhere for another palace of fate [from 1860 in Monaco]; but the original establishment was still humming with gulls and ringing with their money. There were many circumstances to delight a boy abroad for the first time; the taste of mulberries; the sweet water in our house well; the English chapel opening down a long stair into an archway in the old Schloss, the pond with the carp, the vast green rambling ground of forest; the terrace before the Kursaal where the band played and the crowd of visitors walked to and fro in summer raiment […] But the centrepiece of all was that glorified garden-house that sang all day with gold and silver. The barbaric splendour of its decoration, the gold room, the patterns on the tables, the hopping of the roulette ball, the high dry voice of the croupier, the song of the money—and perhaps above all the sense that the place was a temple of wickedness, and that attraction of inverted horror which it is so easy and so dangerous to arouse in children — held me in bondage to the image of the Kursaal itself. Sometimes my father took me in, and I would wander, a twelve-year-old observer, about the crowded tables. The large liveried footmen were an awful joy to me; I had picked up that they served as spies upon the visitors; and I would place myself near one, try to follow the direction of his glances, and thrill all over with the sense of secrecy and peril. […]



‘the terrace before the Kursaal where the band played’

RLS and French literature

A post by Katherine Ashley: thoughts on her study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Literary Relations at the Fin de Siecle (EUP, 2022)

When we look at how Stevenson interpreted French literary history, how he responded to established and emerging theories of the novel in France, and how he devoured both popular and literary French novels, we can also see how all of these things informed his own writing. From the way that he argues against Naturalism in order to reassert the importance of the romance tradition, to the stylistic apprenticeship that he undertook in earnest and in jest, we see an author developing an approach to literature that went against dominant theories of the Victorian realist novel and challenged conceptions of what “the art of fiction” might entail.

To a new generation of French writers, Stevenson became a beacon of change, presenting a pathway out of the perceived dead end that the French novel had run up against.

Naturalism, with its emphasis on scientific positivism, could only take the novel so far; Decadence, with its emphasis on aestheticism, contained the seeds of its own demise. Stevenson, translated and published in popular and highbrow venues, touted as a bestselling children’s author but also as the figurehead of a cosmopolitan revival, showed that readable page-turners could also be stylistic tours-de-force. This reminded French authors and critics that form and style could themselves be part of the intrigue and the adventure of reading and writing.

This study of reciprocal influence reveals much about the literary debates that rocked late-nineteenth-century Britain and France. To retrace the readings and the relationships – both on an individual level (Stevenson) and on a macro level (Franco-British literature) – required wading through nineteenth-century newspapers, journals, correspondence and novels. This might seem dry, but it was brought to life by the ebullient and boisterous personality at the heart of my research. Stevenson’s voice was a reminder that at the end of the day, literary history is in part the history of individuals who valued the imaginative, creative qualities of language and dedicated their lives to it. For Stevenson, being a man of letters sometimes meant “sedulously aping” literary masters, but it also involved play and fun, spontaneity and pleasure. When researching my book, it was Stevenson’s exuberant multilingual outbursts, his hilarious spoofing of contemporary writers and texts, or the silly French lessons like the one he gave to his stepson Lloyd Osbourne that brought the subject and the subject matter to life.

Table of contents, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature

.

.

---

Stevenson and Pacific Christianity

A post contributed by L. M. Ratnapalan

author of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, March 2023)

Studying Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific writings and their contribution to anthropology, I was struck by their many references to religion: local beliefs and practices, churches, nuns, pastors, and converts. The published studies of Stevenson that I read focussed almost entirely on his view of Western missionaries. The consensus was: he was a critical friend of missionaries considering them to be ‘by far the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific’, but that he found their attempts to change Polynesian habits led to consequences that were ‘bloodier than a bombardment’.(1) These studies, however, typically paid little attention to the wider world of Pacific Christianity. Above all, the indigenous Christians Stevenson wrote so much about were hardly discussed at all.

I believe that the reasons for this are at least partly cultural. Growing up in Britain, I had come to think of Christianity as a personal belief, held by a diminishing number of people, who mainly practiced it in private. But when I moved to South Korea in 2012 I was struck by the centrality of Christianity, its practices and discourses, even in a modern city like Seoul: bright crosses light up the night sky; people pray with a rosary in the park; Church attendance is important; and the most popular evening talk show featured a famous pastor as a weekly contributor.

Neon crosses in Seoul

While living in Britain, I had gained the impression that organized religion was everywhere in decline and that secularization was the dominant force; now I could see that the bigger story was not the shrinking of religious affiliation but rather the explosive growth of Christianity (and Islam). The religious picture of the world was undergoing transformation and the key agents were indigenous Christians from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Island Pacific.(2) The vast majority of the world’s Christians now live outside Europe.(3)

In most Pacific Islands comfortably 95 per cent of the population describe themselves as Christian.(3) With this understanding, I felt that I was in a better position to analyze Stevenson’s South Seas writing. A well-known image of the author and his family in Samoa will help to explain what I mean.

Vailima family, May 1892

Seated and standing around the Stevensons, Osbournes, and their maid are Pacific Islanders, but who were they? The household retinue was composed not only of Samoans but also of Islanders from many other parts of the Pacific. For example, while the cook Talolo (seated directly in front of RLS) was Samoan, Savea (seated far left), who worked on the plantation, was probably a Wallis Islander, and Arrick (seated in front of Talolo) was from the New Hebrides. Yet though they originated from widely separated communities, they were united in a common Christian culture. The workers on the Stevenson estate reflected a mobile Pacific world in which Christianity was common currency, a situation also reflected in Stevenson’s writings, featuring the Pacific-wide movement of Islanders and religious talk.

My project developed to become a study of the impact of Pacific Islands Christianity on Robert Louis Stevenson. I argue that ‘the Beach of Falesá’ could be seen as a meditation on the social effects of missionaries in the Islands.(5) His Pacific fiction deserves reassessment, I thought, in the light of his fascination with the difference between Islanders’ adoption of Christianity as an outward façade (‘indigenization’) and a deeper cultural and spiritual engagement with it (‘inculturation’).(6) The quickness with which he was able to absorb what he experienced was remarkable. During the period 1888–94, as he moved from Pacific traveller to Samoan resident, he progressed from a somewhat sceptical assessment of the efficacy of local religious conversions to a view that mixed the personal with the political. (7) In a forthcoming book, I explore how his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing guided Stevenson’s understanding of Pacific culture, and how Pacific Islanders in turn helped to change the way that he thought about Christianity.(8)

A personal shift of viewpoint has produced these conclusions. Stevenson once wrote that ‘There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign’.(9) In the Pacific, he found that ideas such as Christianity could also cover great distances to become foreign to the traveller, and so light up ‘the contrasts of the earth’.

L. M. Ratnapalan, Yonsei University

---

(1) Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Penguin, 1998), 64, 34.
(2) Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith
(New York: Orbis, 1996); Jehu J. Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
(3) Pew Research Center, ‘Global Christianity – A Report on the size and distribution of the World’s Christian population’ (2011): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/
(4) Kenneth R. Ross, Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, and Todd M. Johnson, eds. Christianity in Oceania
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
(5) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘Missionary Christianity and Culture in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá”’, Religion and Literature, 53.3 (2021).
(6) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘Half Christian: Indigenization and Inculturation in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, Scottish Literary Review 12, 1 (2020).
(7) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘“Our Father’s Footprints”: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Anthropology of Conversion, 1888-1894’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 11.1 (forthcoming).
(8) L. M. Ratnapalan, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, scheduled March 2023).
(9) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 113-4.

Images

Seoul: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2011/06/15/features/Blinded-by-the-light-Seouls-neon-pollution/2937613.html

Vailima family: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17887450.story-samoas-love-robert-louis-stevenson/

Upcoming volume: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-robert-louis-stevenson-and-the-pacific.html

Stevenson and Bourget: an enigma

Why was RLS so enthusiastic about Sensations d’Italie?

Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget (1852–1935), French critic, essayist, novelist and poet, much appreciated in his own day, is not now widely known even in France. The publisher’s presentation of an introductory volume Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget? (2007) begins by saying that he is now ‘little known, even scorned’ (‘méconnu, voire méprisé’). Quite a downfall for a writer who was nominated for the Nobel prize no fewer than four times.

Stevenson’s reaction to Sensations d’Italie

Bourget’s friend Henry James sent Stevenson a copy of Sensations d’Italie (1891), which he later described to Stevenson as ‘one of the most exquisite things of our time’ (Letters of Henry James, I, p. 188). Stevenson was enthusiastic—sent off immediately for all Bourget’s essays and at the same time wrote ‘I have gone crazy over Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie (L7, 197, 205) and told James ‘I am delighted beyond expression by Bourget’s book; he has phrases which effect me almost like Montaigne’ and the following day told him, ‘I have just been breakfasting at Baiae and Brindisi, and this charm of Bourget hag-rides me. […] I have read no new book for years that gave me the same literary thrill as his Sensations d’Italie‘ (L7, 210–11) Not only this, but he looked forward to meeting Bourget on a planned trip to Europe and dedicated Across the Plains to him, the only one of his volumes not dedicated to a personal friend or family member.

You cannot step twice into the same book

Some years ago, inspired by such an impressive recommendation, I bought a second-hand copy of Sensations d’Italie, expecting it to be a cross between Montaigne and Proust and promising myself an exquisite reading experience. Unfortunately, what struck me then were the mentions of trains and inns and long appreciations of paintings. It did not resemble Stevenson’s own travel writing: there are no descriptions of his feelings or of the people he meets, no detached irony.

Why was Stevenson so enthusiastic? The best way to answer this question would be to look at his copy of the book with his scorings and approving underlinings. It is in the Fales Library of New York University on Washington Square in Manhattan—which unfortunately is closed because of the present pandemic emergency, and probably will be closed after that as closure for renovation was planned from May to September 2020.

NYU Bobst Library, containing (3rd floor) the Fales LIbrary (special collections)

Stevenson’s copy being unavailable, I decided to re-read the copy I had with a fresh eye, suppressing the expectations of the previous occasion.

Amazingly, this time I read a different book. I noticed the essayistic passages about art and artistry, the ethical, psychological and aesthetic passages and the embedded narratives with striking and memorable details. The uncomfortable trains and inns were still there, but this time they faded into the background.

What Stevenson may have appreciated

We cannot be certain about what Stevenson liked about Sensations d’Italie but we can make an educated guess, especially concerning aspects that might have found an echo in his own thinking. When Stevenson’s copy of Sensations d’Italie becomes available again, it will be interesting to see which of the following passages are marked. (Quotations are from the 1892 English translation, Impressions of Italy, with page references followed by page references of Sensations d’Italie.)

[March 2024: Stevenson’s copy has now been consulted (the results can be found here) and the following ‘educated guesses’ annotated according to the markings found there.

.

1. Affiinities with Montaigne

One clue from Stevenson’s letters on the book is his praise for ‘phrases which effect me almost like Montaigne’. I think perhaps he may be thinking here of Montaigne’s striking metaphors (such as that of the give and take of conversation being like playing tennis). Here is what seems a Montaigne-like metaphor:

1.1 In every work of art, whether it be a picture or a book, a statue or a piece of music, there is a hidden principle of life, that is to say, 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. (126; SdI, 129–30)

[marked]

2. Affinities with Stevenson’s style:

2.1 Chapter 17 begins realistically with the ‘local train which moves almost like a steam tramway’ across ‘the vast plain of Apulia’ but then it changes register to the imaginative picturesque as Bourget’s destination reminds him of the story of how Manfred, last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty of Sicily, following defeat by Charles of Anjou and the revolt of his barons, sought refuge in Lucera ‘among his father’s Saracens’.

The story, too long to quote in full here, reminds me of Stevenson’s praise of ‘the poetry of circumstance’, ‘the fitness in events and places’, and ‘fit and striking incident’, ‘which stamps the story home like an illustration’ (in ‘A Gossip on Romance’). It has elements that are similar to the assassination of Archbishop Sharp that had long fascinated Stevenson and that he recounts in ‘The History of Fife’. In short, 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.

Bourget says that the story is recorded by a chronicler ‘with a rare mixture of strength and simplicity’ (reminding me of Stevenson’s attraction to the prose of the Covenanters), it is a kind of passage that is ‘short, but which remain in the memory’ (‘si courtes mais qui restent dans l’esprit‘), like the ‘striking incident’ praised by Stevenson in ‘A Gossip on Romance’. Bourget then quotes the words of the chronicler:

He accordingly set out on a November night, accompanied by a scanty escort, to ride across this plain of Tavoliere to an asylum of which he was not even sure. The rain was falling. ‘It augmented,’ says Jamsilla, ‘the darkness of the night. The prince and his companions were unable to see one another. They could recognize each other only by the sound of the voice and by the touch. They did not even know whither the road they were following led, for they had ridden across the open country in order to throw possible pursuers off the scent.’ (175; SdI, 180–1)

After a bivouac overnight Manfred arrived at the walls of Lucera where ‘he was obliged to make himself known — an incident so romantic as to seem taken from a romance [trait si romanesque qu’il en semble romantique] — by his beautiful fair hair.’ The Moors had orders not to admit him, but said he could get round the order by entering through the sewer. Manfred prepared to do this and then (in the words of the chronicler) ‘This humiliation of the son of their beloved emperor awakened their remorse. They broke down the gates and Manfred entered in triumph.’

[this whole episode is marked]

2.2 The only clue from his letters as to what part of Bourget’s book he might have found fascinating is the comment, ‘I have just been breakfasting at Baiae and Brindisi, and this charm of Bourget hag-rides me’. It should be mentioned, however, that Bourget does not go near Baiae or Naples, so Stevenson has just introduced that name for the alliteration to suggest a large part of southern Italy. Brindisi, however, is there and is associated with a haunting impression:

by having heard, by hearing still, the clanking of the chains worn by the galley-slaves resounding through the castle on the seashore. I have seen many prisons and many abodes of misery, […], but nothing has pierced my heart like the sound of those chains, forever and forever accompanying my steps, as I walked through the courts and the halls of the fortress. […] The noise made by each one, walking with his heavy step, is slight ; but all these slight sounds of iron clanking against iron unite together in a sort of metallic roar, making the whole fortress vibrate. It is indistinct, mysterious, sinister’ (217–18; SdI, 222–3)

[not marked, though he does mark a vignette of contrasting misery and affection from the same prison (SdI, 224.6–13]

This reminds me of the haunting sound of the waves in Treasure Island and in other texts by Stevenson.

2.3 Perhaps too Stevenson appreciated impressionistic descriptions that reminded him of his writing in the 1870s, such as:

Little girls […] whisper and laugh together and shake their pretty heads, bright patches on the dark background of the church [taches clairs sur le fond obscur de l’église]. (74; SdI, 75)

[not marked]

.

3. Ethical concerns

3.1 Stevenson admired those who did what they thought was right and bravely faced the consequences, like the Covenanters and Yoshida-Torajiri, with his ‘stubborn superiority to defeat’, and Bourget provides us with another example of such a type. In ch. 21 he visits the castle of duke Sigismondo Castromediano: a ‘deserted manor’ where everything shows ‘a strange abandonment’, yet inhabited by the eighty-year old Duke who

has suffered all the tortures of a proscription as cruel as that of the companions of the Stuart conspirator. He threw himself, heart and soul, into the movement against the Bourbons of Naples, after the events of 1848. Arrested and condemned to death, his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life in the galleys, and, refusing to sue for pardon, he was for eleven years a galley-slave. (241; SdI, 246)

Eventually he escaped to England and returned at the time of Garibaldi. The castle ‘he has left untouched whether from a stoical indifference in regard to the comforts of life, acquired in misfortune, or from pride in his sufferings’ (242; SdI, 247).

[not marked]

.

4. Psychological concerns

4.1 From about 1880 Stevenson was increasingly interested in how we can understand the world-view of people from very different cultural traditions, and we find this too in Bourget:

[the myths of the ancients:] the human feeling which underlies their religious ideal makes it possible for us to have communion with them, in spite of the differences of creeds and customs. (92; SdI, 95)

[not marked, but see the related next item]

4.2 In two essays written in 1887 ‘Pastoral’ and ‘The Manse’, Stevenson speculates on inherited primitive memories and how his ancestors are a part of him and he found some similar thoughts in Bourget:

the innumerable threads which heredity inextricably weaves into our being, so that in the sincere Christians of to-day their pagan ancestors, and other ancestors of still darker beliefs, live again (273; SdI, 279).

[not marked, but a related idea about pagan survivals is (SdI, 196.18–197.8)]

4.3 The following passage has various echoes in Stevenson’s idea of constant variation in identity;

[T]he varying complexity of the I [la complexité changeante du moi] (56–7; SdI, 58)

[not marked]

4.4 In Bourget, Stevenson would have found ideas that were close to his own about the moral nature of the artist, about ‘the sympathetic interpretation of feeling’, and about the hidden feelings and motives that he explores in ‘The Lantern Bearers’:

talent has always, and without exception, a close resemblance to the moral nature of the individual. I mean a certain sort of talent; that which consists neither in facility of execution, nor a profound knowledge of effects, but in a sympathetic interpretation of feeling. The facts of a man’s life are so little significant of his real nature! The likeness of us which our actions stamp on the imagination of others is so deceptive! 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: our inmost feelings, the secret tragedy of our hopes and our sorrows, the pangs of wounded self-love, the disappointment of ideals overthrown? (45; SdI, 46)

[marked, and the sentence on ‘The facts of a man’s life’ is underlined]

4.5 Neither the doctrines of these believers nor their prejudices concern us any longer; it is their I — like ours in its secret needs, but which possessed what we so greatly desire — yes, it is this pious and heroic I which kindles our fervor from the depths of the impenetrable abyss into which it has returned. (140; SdI, 143–4)

[not marked]

5. Thoughts on art and aesthetics

Finally, Stevenson was interested not only in theories of narrative and in technique and style but also in the philosophy of art, the nature of artistic genius, common elements of all the arts, the relationship between the artist and the finished work, the elusive charm of the artistic experience. Bourget too was interested in these aesthetic questions and in his book Stevenson would have found a writer with whom he could engage in an exchange of ideas.

5.1 ‘Why, recognizing in every human action something of unconsciousness and of destiny, should we not admit that the genius of the great artists was greater than they themselves knew?’ (53; SdI, 53)

[not marked, but a similar idea is marked (Sens, pp. 129.12–132.4)]

5.2 Is the purpose of literature, then — I mean literature which is worthy of the name — different from that of the other arts — music and architecture, sculpture and painting ? Like them, and in a language of its own, what does it express but shades of human feeling? (130; SdI, 133–4)

[marked]

5.3 The supreme gift reveals itself in them [artists of genius], as it does wherever it is met with, by the master virtue, unerring clearness of vision. (137; SdI, 140–1)

[not marked]

5.4 This word [charm], so vague in its signification, […] is the only one which expresses the magic of certain […] works, shadowy, incomplete, […] 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. (117–18; SdI, 120–1)

[marked; the final passage beginning ‘There are two classes of artist’ has a double marginal line]

5.5 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 ? (127; SdI, 130)

[marked]

An unpublished letter from Stevenson to Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), 1885

This post is contributed by Lesley Graham, presently working on Uncollected Essays 1880–1894 for the Edition.

Earlier this year a manuscript letter by Robert Louis Stevenson was found by Petersfield Bookshop between the pages of a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Letters to his Family and Friends (ed. Sydney Colvin). The bookshop posted photographs of the two-page letter to their Twitter account (23 July 2019).  The letter does not appear in the eight-volume Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale Univ. Press, 1994-5) and is transcribed below for the first time.

Violet Paget (1856–1935) wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. She was an essayist, travel writer, critic and author of supernatural and short fiction with a scholarly interest in eighteenth-century Italy. When this letter was written in 1885, having lived in various parts of Europe, she was dividing her time between her family home in Florence and extended visits to England. She and Stevenson shared many friends and acquaintances — Henry James, J. A. Symonds, Horatio Brown, John Singer Sargent, Anne Jenkin etc. — but they do not appear ever to have met in person. Two letters from Paget to Stevenson are held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, but have never been published in full (Yale, GEN MSS 664 box 17 folder 453; B 5363-5364). The earlier of these is dated 6th August 1885 and written on stationery marked 5 via Garibaldi, Florence. It is Paget’s first contact with Stevenson and clearly prompted the reply published here. The second is dated August 10, 1886. Stevenson’s unfinished reply to this later letter appears in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (vol. 5, p. 306).

Stevenson’s letter touches on three topics: a discussion of the necessary permissions for the translation of two of his works into Italian; acknowledgment of receipt of a work by Vernon Lee, and most interestingly a sympathetic discussion of the character of Prince Charles Edward Stuart and what Stevenson sees as Vernon Lee’s unflattering and one-sided treatment of him as a repulsive drunk in her account of the life of his wife (Princess Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emmanuele of Stolberg-Gedern, 1752–1824) in The Countess of Albany (London: W. H. Allen, 1884). Stevenson mentioned the prince in Kidnapped the following year, 1886:

‘the Prince was a gracious, spirited boy, like the son of a race of polite kings, but not so wise as Solomon. I gathered, too, that while he was in the Cage, he was often drunk; so the fault that has since, by all accounts, made such a wreck of him, had even then begun to show itself. (R. L. Stevenson, Kidnapped (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 162)

He was also to write about the Prince several years later in the novel fragment The Young Chevalier (1892), which paints a brief but psychologically nuanced  portrayal of

a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary excess (in Weir of Hermiston and other fragments, the Edinburgh Edition, vol. 26 (Edinburgh: Constable, 1897), pp. 82–3)

— a portrait in line with the plea for indulgence expressed in this letter.  (For more on Stevenson’s treatment of the Young Pretender, see Lesley Graham, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Young Chevalier’: Unimagined Space”, in Macinnes, German & Graham (eds), Living with Jacobitism, 1690-1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London : Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 63–83.)

The bottom right hand corner of the first page of the letter is torn and the ends of four lines are consequently missing. In each case, our best guess as to the missing words or letters has been inserted between square brackets with a question mark.

Skerryvore
Bournemouth
Oct 14. 1885

Dear Madam,
I shall attend to the affair of Signora Santarelli [1] with my best diligence, which is a relative diligence. It is right, however, that I should explain to you how I stand. If the permission be granted in the case of the first series it will be of the grace of Messrs Chatto & Windus; and if in the case of the second, [2] Signora Santarelli will have to divide her thanks between the authors and Messrs Longman. So far as the authors are concerned, it is already done; neither my wife nor I would dream of denying any invalid what may possibly prove to be an entertainment: we have both unfortunately too much reason to sympathise with the sick.

            Your Prince [3] has arrived only this morning; and I have only read the introduction: if the rest be at all of a piece with it, you have sent me a great treat.

            I believe we have two more common friends than you all[ude?] to [4]: Symonds [5] and Prince Charlie. I, who had mostly s[tolen?] the bright pages of Charle’s [sic] Stuart’s life, felt it as perhaps[s a?] defect in your very interesting “Countess of Albany”, that yo[u had] failed to bring out the contrast. He was a bright boy; rather he was the bright boy of history, full of dash, full of endurance[,] full of a superficial [6] generosity, of blood more than of mind; he lived through great feats and dangers not unworthily. I should have liked perhaps, if you could not screw out a tear over so base a fall, that you had smiled a little sadly. We may all fall as low before we are done with it, and not have the picturesque and generous to look back upon. And indeed if you introduce your pretty countess to the bottle and keep her for months in Hebridean caves [7] with no other consolation, I suspect she would sink as low.

            I am a fault finder in grain [8] and you must not wonder if I sieze [sic] on the occasion of your letter to pick this quarrel which I have long been musing.

(I am amused at the way in which I have bracketed the living lion and the dead dog, [9] but I meant no disrespect to either, surely not to Symonds), With many thanks Believe me

Yours truly
Robert Louis Stevenson

Miss Paget.

NOTES

[1] Signora Sofia Fortini-Santarelli: translator, wife of Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli of Florence who owned relics of the Young Pretender. She translated various works of Herbert Spencer, Ouida, and Symonds’s The Renaissance in Italy. In her letter, Paget describes her as “a lady who has taken to translating for the pastime which her recuperation affords her in a maiming & incurable malady”.

[2] the first series … the second: New Arabian Nights (1882) and More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter(1885). The latter was written in collaboration with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. 

[3] Your Prince: Vernon Lee, The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet Show in Narrative (1883), a harlequinade.

[4] common friends: Paget had mentioned Henry James and John Sargent as friends they had in common.

[5] Symonds: John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), essayist, poet, and biographer best known for his cultural history of the Italian Renaissance.

[6] superficial: after this word Stevenson wrote, then deleted, ‘and not very wise’.

[7] in Hebridean caves: Charles hid out in some remote refuges in Benbecula and South Uist between April and June 1746.

[8] in grain: through and through, by nature (from ‘dyed in grain’, ingrained).

[9] the living lion and the dead dog: i.e. the two “acquaintances” they have in common: J. A. Symonds and Charles Edward Stuart.

 

Lesley Graham
University of Bordeaux

Some College Memories and the view from 17 Heriot Row / 2

Stevenson’s Study

Following the contribution from Neil Macara Brown, we can confirm that Stevenson’s study, which he sketched out in a letter in 1873 (Letters 1, 323), was indeed on the west side of the front of the house:

The bottom left (SW) room is the only one on the top floor with a window opposite and to the right of the door and with a fireplace on the right-hand wall as you enter. Stevenson has got the proportions wrong; he has also left out one of the windows and the one window he draws does not correlate to the either of the windows in the other plan. It is unlikely, however, that he would have made a mistake about the relative positions of door, window and fireplace.

Here’s Stevenson’s plan the right way up with his description of it:

The long Bookcase (A. A. A) is only about 3 feet 6 [high], so it is nice to sit on top of, especially in the corner, for I have a thorough child’s delight in perches of all sorts. The Box [near the door] is full of papers. Of course you see where I sit—on the chair that I have cross-hatched [i.e. behind the table], shut in among books and with the light in front all the day and at my right [from a gas lamp over the mantlepiece?]. I am going to buy a wicker arm chair so I shall have three chairs soon. I may say that in my sketch it [the chair?] has somehow got bigger than three times its right bigness, which is very odd; for I wish it were just a little smaller. Don’t you like the arrangement? (Letters 1, 324; to Fanny Sitwell, 1 Oct 1873)

Some College Memories’ and the view from 17 Heriot Row

A post contributed by Richard Dury and John Macfie

‘Some College Memories’

In 1886 RLS, along with other illustrious former students, was asked to contribute to an anthology, the submitted manuscripts for which were then auctioned at a ‘Fancy Fair’ to raise funds for a Students’ Union house (Teviot Row House, opened in 1889).  His contribution, ‘Some College Memories’, was then included in The New Amphion, being the Book of the Edinburgh Union Fancy Fair published in November 1886, and later in Memories and Portraits (1887).

In the penultimate paragraph of this essay he warns present-day students about studying too hard by means of a moral tale about a student who studied hard for an exam, revising all night, and who then, as morning approached, looked out from his high room—inexplicably, the sight of the dawn filled him with nameless terror; he ran into the street but still had the memory and fear of his past fear. He was unable to write anything for the exam, and that night he had brain fever.

Here is how he describes the night of study and the coming of dawn:

It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high up, and the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. Day was breaking, the cast was tinging with strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless terror seized upon his mind.

This story is one of several thinly-disguised personal anecdotes in Stevenson’s essays which the reader knows must be about the writer, but which the writer continues to write in the third person, keeping a straight face all the time (the most unforgettable one is in ‘A Chapter on Dreams’). (I find the word ‘camp’ quite useful to describe such a situation where speaker and listener both know the joke but no-one is going to admit it.)

The many details of what was went on in the students mind are enough to show this is a personal anecdote, and the reference to ‘my student’ may (if you’re with me on this) be equivalent to a wink at the reader. But the point of the present post is not this: rather it is about the student’s house and the views from it—do they actually correspond to the views from Stevenson’s home at 17 Heriot Row?

The view from Stevenson’s window

This house has front windows looking approximately south from which the dawn could be seen, and back windows looking downhill over ‘dwindling suburbs’. Where was Stevenson’s room situated and with what view? and how can we square this with the view seen by the student? At this point we have the pleasure—and honour—to include a contribution from the present resident of the house, John Macfie, whose letter on the matter I here copy into the post.

Stevenson’s rooms, on the south

The front of the 17 Heriot Row faces southeast by south, the back northwest by north. Traditionally, the two rooms at the front of the second floor, the bottom two bedrooms on the plan below, were Louis’s rooms.

These correspond to the top three windows in the following drawing:

As I understand it, Thomas Stevenson raised what was originally an attic-and-dormer storey on the south front to full height, so Louis could have a proper pair of rooms. It is certain that the present frontage is an alteration, as it breaks the symmetrical pattern of the original facade. There is in fact a connecting door between to two rooms not shown on the plan.

The second-floor rooms

The arrangements for the other rooms on the top floor are a little speculative, but this is what seems likely to me, reading from the top left of the plan:

• Top left bedroom: visitors or servants?
• Between the top left and top right bedrooms, not on the plan, a w.c., there by at latest 1890.
• Top right bedroom: this originally connected (the blocked door itself was there until a few years ago) to the room to the south, the present bathroom, to form a suite of sitting room and sleeping box that was quite a common pattern in houses like this until it was forbidden on safety grounds (fumes from gas lights in confined spaces being potentially lethal) on the early 1900’s. My guess is that this was Cummy’s room after she stopped sleeping in the same room with Louis.
• Store: this has the feel of a sleeping box as well, with light borrowed from the skylight-lit bathroom via windows high in the wall, and ventilation slots in both the windows and the door. It may originally have been associated with the bottom right bedroom.
• Bottom right bedroom: traditionally Louis’s night nursery then bedroom.
• Bottom left bedroom: traditionally Louis’s day nursery then study.

Views from the windows

Though dawn’s early light would have been visible from the two front rooms, there would have been no dwindling suburbs or country horizons visible from here: allowing for the trees in the gardens being a century and a half smaller, the view would have been up the hill to the house-fronts of Queen Street.

The best candidate as the source of the country view described in ‘Some College Memories’ is the upper right bedroom, ‘Cummy’s room’. The photograph below was taken from that room and looks northwest by north down to Newhaven and Granton. The land falls away as described.

If you look at the 1877 Ordnance Survey 6-inch to the mile map here, from the NLS map archive, you will see that while not exactly open country, much of the intervening space was green. In the photograph, the white arcaded buildings are in the Botanical Gardens.

As for the sunrise, an early summer sunrise (exam time) would certainly have been visible from the windows at the back. According to timeanddate.com, the sun rose in Edinburgh on 21st June at about 4:25 am and roughly in the NE, definitely within your field of view from up there.

And the window in the essay?

The view of the dwindling suburbs and the country horizon corresponds to the view from one of the  back rooms on the top floor of 17 Heriot Row. RLS could go into one or both of these back rooms if no-one else was there, and Cummy’s old room was possibly unoccupied after she left the family in 1871. It seems, then, that during his ‘all-nighter’ he stared out of the back window as well as the front, and it was from these he surveyed the distant countryside and saw the sun rise. So he description in the essay is not of what he saw from his rooms at the front, but what he saw from one of the back rooms, which he possibly also used or anyway had access to.

More…

Two stones: antiquarianism in St. Ives

A post contributed by Neil Macara Brown

In ‘Going into St. Ives’ (JSS 10, 2013), I tried to show how Stevenson makes that novel ring true, even in its smallest details. On his many travels in the story, the eponymous hero visits two obscure places in Scotland featuring old stones: one near Merchiston in Edinburgh; the other, by a drove road somewhere in Ettrick Forest in the Borders. Sites for these stones are suggested here.

 The Douglas stone

The first stone is seen by St. Ives when returning to Edinburgh from Swanston, and his roistering encounter with the drunken Six Feet High Club at the Hunters’ Tryst inn.

 

‘Hard by Merchiston’ he chances, fortuitously, upon the lawyer, Mr. Robbie. ‘Merchiston’ was a villa suburb by Stevenson’s day, but in 1814 when St. Ives is set, comprised the policies surrounding Merchiston Tower, once home of mathematician, John Napier, and now Edinburgh Napier University, on Colinton Road.

St. Ives had spotted Robbie stooping low in endeavouring to decipher a stone, built ‘sideways’ into a wall and offering ‘traces of heraldic sculpture.’ Because the stone bears a chevron on a chief three mullets (i.e. five-pointed stars), St. Ives suggests it resembles the crest of a Douglas family. Robbie concurs, but states that without knowing the tinctures (colours) involved, and because the whole thing is ‘so battered and broken up’, no-one could venture a definitive opinion. Through this common interest in heraldry St. Ives contrives to ingratiate himself with the weekend antiquarian who, unknowingly, has business with the Frenchman the next day…

The stone in question appears similar to one recorded by John Geddie, in his ‘Sculptured Stones of Edinburgh III: Miscellaneous’ (The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club Vol. 3, 1910): one of a cache of such, mainly ecclesiastical, built into the walls of an outhouse attached to the then Bloomsbury Laundry in Grange Loan (Newbattle Terrace), near its junction with Canaan Lane, about half a mile from Merchiston Tower. He suggests that the ecclesiastical stones, mainly richly decorated canopies of altar-tombs, may have come from the chapel of St. Roque noted in Scott’s Provincial Antiquities, which was sited a short distance to the east in the grounds of the Astley Ainslie Hospital; but as to the origins of the secular stones no explanation is offered.

from a 1914 map of Edinbugh (NLS)

Geddie continues, however, that among the other sculptured fragments collected in this ‘nook’, beside a canopied recess, is a memorial panel. Bearing a long Latin inscription, this is defaced and made only partly readable on account of a strip of two or three inches on the right-hand side of the stone having been used in sharpening a knife. This, he says, commemorates “Thomas Douglasius [Douglas]” of the Cavers branch of that illustrious family, a man honourable in business, the holder of offices in the city and its suburbs, and the possessor, according to the inscription, of many virtues, who died on the 9th of August “MDC_”. Geddie adds it was erected by Richard Douglas, advocate, Robert Bennet, and Robert Blackwood, the lamenting heirs under his testament.’ His footnote fleshes out that in 1679 the ‘second bailie’ of Edinburgh was a Thomas Douglas, and, according to the Register of Interments in Greyfriars’ Churchyard, one Thomas Douglas, merchant in Edinburgh, was buried 15th August 1686. He was ‘second brother to Douglas of Cavers’, and the son of Sir William Douglas of Cavers and of his second wife, a daughter of Sir James Macgill.

Most interestingly, Geddie also states that the arms of Thomas Douglas are recorded in the Lyon Office for 1680-87, and are shown in G. Harvey Johnston’s Heraldry of the Douglases (1907), p.94. There, the Douglas of Edinburgh arms are described as: Argent, a man’s heart proper, on a chief azure three mullets of the first, within a bordure of the second charged with [5] crescents of the field. The associated crest comprises: A dexter hand holding a broken spear endways proper. The motto: Do or die. 

The peculiar setting of the canopied recess (or, ogee-shaped niche) can be seen in a photograph taken by F. M. Chrystal in c1900, which can be viewed on the Canmore website.

My contention is that Stevenson was clearly describing this stone in St.Ives, despite his only partial recall of the Douglas arms, which he may never have been able to view fully anyway. Given his great interest in Covenanting matters, he is likely to have admired the long involvement of the Cavers family in that religious tradition, from its inception in 1638. As to how he knew of the actual Douglas stone, he possibly saw it almost thirty years before writing St. Ives, while staying in 1865 with George Norman Williamson, a fellow pupil at Thomson’s School in Frederick Street, at his home in Whitehouse Terrace, a part of Grange Loan lying eastwards of the stone. A photo taken in early summer 1865 shows Stevenson, aged fourteen-and-a-half and in a dark, top-buttoned jacket, standing in the bowered garden of 8 Whitehouse Terrace, a short walk from the Douglas stone.

 

8 Whitehouse Terrace, Edinburgh (between Morningside Road and Kilgraston Road)

Robert Thomson and H.C. Baildon (not clear which is which) and RLS, early summer 1865, 8 Whitehouse Terrace, Edinburgh (photograph posted on flickr.com by “rmanders” (Richard Anderson), from a family photo album which identifies the two men).

The central and southern parts of the former Bloomsbury laundry site were visited by me recently; the northern part only seen, unsatisfactorily, through a gate and over a wall. The laundry, marked on an OS map for 1914, is demolished, its blocked-up doors and windows ghostly reminders in the boundary wall to the street. The grounds hold four residences, one a block of flats. A helpful resident, of thirty years standing, directed me into the adjacent grounds of the Astley Ainslie, where the ecclesiastical stones are now displayed uniformly in a stepped, panelled wall setting, probably executed sometime within the last fifty or sixty years. At the base of this striking ensemble lies a forlorn, secular stone also recorded by Geddie; a lintel with the arms of Marjoribanks impaled beside those of Trotter of Mortonhall – also showing three mullets on a chief – but not, of course, the stone which so excited St. Ives. If the Douglas stone survives, might it lie in the old laundry garden at its north end?

The Cockburn stone

The second stone was seen by St. Ives in an earlier scene, when, during his flight south as an escaped prisoner-of-war with the two crusty drovers, he enjoyed briefly the company of Walter Scott and his daughter. They, being on on horseback, had overtaken the slow-moving droving party on a stretch of heath somewhere in the Ettrick Forest. Engaging St. Ives in conversation, Scott directed his attention to ‘a little fragment of broken wall no greater than a tombstone’, and told him the story of its earlier inhabitants. Scott was, of course, then utterly unknown to St. Ives, and it was only years after, when ‘diverting himself with a Waverley Novel’, that he says that he came upon ‘the identical narrative’ related to him by the ‘Great Unknown’ himself by the wayside. (No Waverley novel, however, makes mention of the place and historical incident described below.)

This episode rightly for the reader recalls Scott’s own stirring tale ‘The Two Drovers’. However, it is also suggested here that this ‘broken wall’ is in fact the tombstone of the 16th century Border reiver, Piers Cockburn of Henderland, and his wife, Marjory. This is to be seen on Chapel Knowe, among the scant remains of the foundations of the Kirk of Henderland above the Megget Valley. Branching west from St. Mary’s Loch, this vale lies at the end of an old hill road running from the head of the Manor Valley, south-west of Peebles – an alternative droving route to the main one through the Gypsy Glen, south-east of that ‘heaven’ (as Stevenson calls it in ‘Popular Authors’), where he holidayed in 1864 and 1865. (The name ‘Henderland’ will be familiar from Kidnapped as that of the friendly catechist, whom David Balfour meets while wandering across Morvern.).

Nearby, Piers Cockburn was hanged over the door of his tower by James V, during the royal raid of the Borders in 1529. This was, as noted by Scott in his Border Antiquities (1814), also fatal to fellow freebooters like Johnie Armstrang, and Adam Scott of Tushielaw, Sir Walter’s own ancestor.

The tomb cover-slab was, according to the ‘Canmore’ online site, found within Henderland Kirk during the 18th century and, in 1841, its three broken pieces were repaired and erected on supporting stones, ‘table-wise’, above its original position. The whole resembles a short section of wall, as Stevenson has it in his tale, but it has since been enclosed by a railing. The inscription on the stone suggests that it was cut in the 16th century, on a 14th century memorial carved with a sword and other emblems. Although defaced and in a Gothic script, according to William Chambers’s Guide to Peebles and its Vicinity (1856), it reads simply ‘here lyis perys of Cokburne and hys Wyfe mariory’.

The execution of Cockburn and its aftermath are traditionally associated with the fragment of romantic ballad known as ’The Lament of the Border Widow’. Included by Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, it was, he claimed, collected from ‘recitation in the Forest of Ettrick’; but in cold fact, the ‘Shirra’ (Sheriff) had it from the shepherd, James Hogg. Close to the tower, where the Henderland Burn rushes through the rocky chasm of the Dow Linn, beside a cataract lies ‘The Lady’s Seat’, where Marjory Cockburn is said to have retreated during the execution of her husband – so as to drown out the tumultuous din which accompanied his dying.

I sew’d his sheet, making my mane;
I watch’d the corpse, myself alane;
I watch’d his body night and day;
No living creature came that way.

I took his body on my back,
And whiles I gaed, and whiles I sat;
I digg’d a grave, and laid him in,
And happ’d him with the sod sae green.