In a previous post I suggested that the nonsense poem ‘A Legend’ in the issue of London for 3 August 1878 was by Stevenson.
This is now confirmed by the last item on Andrew Lang’s ‘At the Sign of the Ship’ column in Longman’s Magazine, 7 (Apr 1886): 664-5:
Lang gives the definition supplied by Stevenson ‘to tap hurriedly with crutches’ but the rest is his; and ‘or a stick, like the blind man, Pew, in “Treasure Island”‘ is his winking acknowledgement that he knows the identity of the author. This fits into the custom of playful allusions to fellow writers by periodical writers at the time, perhaps especially by Andrew Lang. This is then followed by ‘This useful word, “unknown to Keats” etc.’—a mock-philological comment and quotation invented by Lang entering into the spirit of the game.
The present contribution has been kindly provided by John F. Russell
Beginning around 1890 Stevenson began compiling lists of contents for Songs of Travel like the following included in a letter to Edward Burlingame:
Letters 6: 371
One manuscript similar to the eleventh title on that list, To Schubert’s Ninth, is described by George McKay:
George L. McKay, A Stevenson Library (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961)
The title of what is probably the actual manuscript he describes is slightly different, however:
Yale, GEN MSS 664 Box 29 Folder 681
The underlined word McKay transcribed as “Ninth” lacks the dot over the letter “I” and the first letter is “M” not “N”. The correct transcription is the German word “Muth” (courage) and refers to song number XXII in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise.
Booth and Mehew also transcribed the word incorrectly in letter 2211. In manuscript, the list for Songs of Travel appears as follows:
Yale, GEN MSS 664 Box 1 Folder 17 (= Letter 2211)
Enlarged, entry XI appears:
Shown side by side, the two words in manuscript are almost identical:
Title XI in the list of contents for Songs of Travel in letter 2211 therefore should read “To Schubert’s Muth” not “To Schubert’s Ninth.” Together the two manuscripts show conclusively that Stevenson’s poem ‘Vagabond’ was written to Schubert’s music for ‘Muth’ (in Winterreise) and not to any melody from Schubert’s Ninth Symphony.
Some time back we looked at a page of mysterious story titles (Yale, B 6530), that seem to be organized according to archetypal story-types. Now another scrap of manuscript has been identified with a similar listing. But first, a summary of the of the previous posting.
1. Mysterious titles, late 1888/early 1889 (Yale, B 6530)
Here is the transcription:
talisman …..Excellent old melodrama: the bottle Imp. …..Aladdin, Pollock [?]
Mistaken identity. …..on a cue from a French author: the Twins …..Humorous [?]: les trois Bossus. …..Metempsychosis: from Magics [?]. The Body Changer. …..Scientific, from an Axxxx xxxx Hoyten[?]: The Sand Bag [Bug?].
Revenge: …..Rahero.
Return of the Husband: …..Ulysses. (concealed [?] ^disguised^ Prince) …..Colonel Chabert …. Enoch Arden
Additional notes:
1. ‘The Sand Bag’ is possibly ‘The Sand Boy’, which looks like it could be:
Ottilie Wildemuth [1817-77], Der Sandbub’: oder, Wer hat’s am besten? (available in part in Google Books in the collection of Wildemuth’s tales Für Freistunden (Stuttgart, 1868), though probably published earlier).
This is a children’s moral tale, translated at least once: The Little Sand Boy; or Who is Best Off? (Edinburgh, 1877), 63 pp., though it may well have been translated previously as William the Sand Boy. Translated from the German (London, [1863]).
2. ‘on a cue from a French author’, as previously remarked, reminds us of Stevenson’s own proposed titles ‘ The Bottle Imp: A Cue from an Old Melodrama’ and ‘The Waif Woman: A Cue from a Saga’ (L7, 436; Dec 1892).
The curious phrase ‘on a cue from’ meaning ‘from an idea in’ or ‘based on’ seems to have been used for the first time in Recreations of a Recluse (1870) and Cues from All Quarters, or Literary Musings of a Clerical Recluse (1871), published anonymously by the Rev. Francis Jacox. Several of the essays in these volumes have a title like ‘About a Little Candle’s Far-Thrown Beams—A Cue from Shakespeare’, and develop thoughts from a literary ‘text’. Google Advanced Book Search reveals no other uses before Stevenson
2. More mysterious titles, 1887-88? (from Notebook 53)
In one of Stevenson’s notebooks we find the following:
Notebook 53 (Yale, GM 664 34, 820), back f. 4
Vendetta
Treasure Disguised Prince <Disguised> & reverse. Scott’s Pirate. Ulysses & Suitors. Guest [?] ……………………Husband and Wife:-
1. Return of the Husband. Ulysses. Agamemnon.
False accusation…………………………….The House[?] of an [?our] unknown ill …And we, the wise of ?now…………………Bind us upon the altar …Not other wise in youth are fared[?]; …[verse continues for rest of page and onto the following page]
In the transcription the words in red correspond to words in the post-November 1888 list, while ‘Vendetta’ here in blue is similar to ‘Revenge’ in the other list.
The new list seems again to be universal story-types, but must be earlier. The Notebook contains war-games correspondence and maps, which date from one of the winters in Davos, i.e. 1880-81 or 1881-82, there is a list of chapter titles for ‘The Merry Men’ (mid-1881), a draft dedication for the New Arabian Nights (early 1882), a draft for ‘The Foreigner at Home’ (late 1881), notes for a Hazlitt biography (projected Dec 1881—late 1882)—so it looks as if the Notebook was mainly used 1881-82.
There is however an outline of chapters for Catriona/David Balfour headed ‘D.B. sequel.’, starting ‘I. Mr Stewart | II. An old friend at Lieth [sic]’ (back f. 6v., so quite near the list of mysterious titles). This must date from after May 1887, when Stevenson agreed to write a sequel to Kidnapped to be delivered ‘as soon as possible’ (Swearingen, 167), up to some time before September 1890, when Stevenson said he had one chapter of David Balfour finished (L7, 423).
So while the list on the loose sheet is almost certainly late 1888/early 1889, this notebook list could considerably earlier (1881–82, with most of the rest of the contents), a little earlier (May 1887 or shortly after, when David Balfour was first planned), or could be from the same period as the other list (before September 1890 when writing from David Balfour actually started). The lack of any mention of ‘Rahero’ or ‘The Bottle Imp’ in the notebook list suggests that it might ‘fit’ best with mid-1887 when the outline of David Balfour on a nearby notebook page was possibly made.
It is possible that both lists are connected with what became the volume Ballads (1890), the first of which, ‘Ticonderoga’, was written in May 1887. After completing this Stevenson perhaps started thinking of a volume of similar poems and drew up this list of universal story types. The rest of the volume ‘belongs mainly to the early South Seas period, 1888-90’ (Lewis, Coll. Poems, 458), which could correspond to a slightly later dating of the notebook list, though before November 1888, when Stevenson learnt the story of Rahero.
If these two lists correspond to brain-storming to find good subjects for what Stevenson called ‘ballads’, then it is possible that ‘The Bottle Imp’ in the longer list was first considered as a subject for a narrative poem before becoming the short prose narrative we know, written between December 1889 and January 1890.
Those who follow this blog will know of our search for possible unnoticed articles by Stevenson in London magazine—ending up with a closer analysis of 1878 payments for work on London, after which I concluded that I would need to look more closely at the four numbers of 13 July to 3 August 1878. R.-L. Abrahamson and myself had already looked through these numbers, but found nothing that we thought was even possibly by Stevenson, apart from ‘A Story-teller’ and a note on George Eliot (for 13 July), and notes from ‘a correspondent in Paris’ (for 20 July). We suspected that a poem on 13 July (from comments in a letter by Henley) might be by Stevenson, but we were interested in prose. To tell the truth, I was prepared to let it rest there: if whatever was in the 27 July and 3 August numbers had not been distinctive enough to be visible to us before, and there was no guarantee that another trip to London would be accompanied by sudden enlightenment.
A (deceptive) letter from Lang changes the picture
Then I was looking through Marysa Demoor’s useful edition of letters from Andrew Lang to Stevenson and my eye was caught by an undated letter from 1877 in which he says, ‘I’ve sent for the new book on Villon’, which probably refers to Longnon’s innovative biographical study, which must have been published in February 1877, as the Academy gives a report of the publication in its ‘Paris Letter’ in the issue of 3 March (95–6). Andrew Lang seems to be indirectly praising Stevenson in this letter when he writes,
‘I wish your C. B. would get a political fellow as good in his way as the author of Balzac’s correspondence and George Eliot’ (Demoor, 42–3).
By ‘C. B.’ he meant the editor of London, Robert Glasgow Brown, who Lang thought was ‘Caldwell Brown’ (Demoor, 6n); by ‘Balzac’s Correspondence’ he is referring to the review article with that title in the second issue of London on 10 February 1877, p. 44. This is an article that R.-L. Abrahamson and myself identified as probably by Stevenson on our first look into London at the old Colindale Newspaper Library back in January 2013. It hasn’t previously been reported here—well, we’ve got to keep something for the album. When I saw Lang’s letter I thought: could he be indirectly praising Stevenson for the article on ‘Balzac’s Correspondence’—and for another on George Eliot too? That decided it: I had to go back to London to investigate this possibility for February 1877, and combine it with a closer look at the issues of the magazine for July and early August 1878.
Return to the Newsroom
So it was that on a pleasant morning in June I crossed the British Library forecourt with RLA (who this time had to look at microfilms of Chatto records of Virginibus Puerisque—this will be the first of our essay volumes to appear, in the first half of next year). I went straight to the Newsroom, picked up the five hefty volumes of London and immediately turned to February 1877 and located the article on George Eliot in the issue of February 10, p. 43. Immediate disappointment: Stevenson could not begin an essay in this way:
The cultus of George Eliot is one of the great social facts of the age. Its adherents include nearly the whole of the reading public. For purposes of generalisation they may be classed under three headings—Conformist, Disciples, and Sceptics.
The article then continues with a humorous paragraph on the reception of Eliot by each of these three classes of reader and a final paragraph collecting some epigrams about her and her novels. Such a preliminary announcement of categories followed by a paragraph apiece is, as far as I remember, not to be found in any of Stevenson’s writings. In addition, the article contains no Stevensonsonian language-play (new meaning created by use, unexpected epithets, calques from French), no intelligently concise formulations, no typical use of semicolons etc. It is true that in the fourth paragraph contains the following:
With very, very few exceptions, he [the Sceptic] knows that all of them [‘the gay young fellows it has pleased her to put forward as men’] have a comb concealed among their back-hair.
This reminds us immediately of Stevenson’s ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, published in August 1876:
Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male creations, take Tito Melema [in George Eliot’s Romola], for instance, and you will find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the back of his head.
But the later passage in London must be Henley (who probably wrote the article) cheekily ‘borrowing’ from his friend’s recent essay. With no more internal evidence than this, we cannot take the article as by Stevenson. Lang letter: red herring.
July—August 1878 again
OK—now for the 1878 volume. Henley, talking about the 13 July number says in a letter to Stevenson:
Don’t tax me with ‘Ce Que Se Dit’. I only brushed it up. In doing so, I’ve made it presentable, but I’ve broken the author’s heart. (Atkinson, 52)
This sounds like Henley not apologising for having changed a poem by Stevenson (the person who might ‘tax’ him about it). Here it is: on the strict Q.T., ‘confidential (quiet)’ (first Advanced Google Books Search hits: 1877; 1877 song by Lydia Thompson; called ‘a crude expression’ in George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1884)); rather! ‘yes! I should think so!’ (OED (1904) calls this ‘vulgar’, the online OED identifies this as ‘Brit. colloq.‘; first OED citation 1836); ripping! ‘great, excellent, stunning’ (first OED citation 1776).
My guess is that this may have been about Fanny Osbourne with the last line a piece of American slang, that Henley changed to British slang (to make it presentable)—absolutely no proof, except that ‘You feel you’re tripping’ doesn’t fit well into the previous two lines and seems inserted to rhyme with ‘ripping’. Well, it’s perhaps not worth losing any sleep about, whatever the story is behind it.
6 July number
This was a week with ‘an article also’ opposite the payment for the ‘Arabian’ episode but a payment that corresponded only to that episode. I looked again, but could find nothing
27 July number
Subtracting the estimated payment for the ‘Arabian’ episode from the total payment, left me looking for a contribution of about half a column. The ‘Whispering Gallery’ section has three items of news from Paris, one in particular about the Jurors of the Exposition (and Stevenson was nominal secretary to one of them, Fleeming Jenkins). It starts ‘The Exposition has developed inventions undreamt of by the carnal mind of the casual observer. For instance, amongst the Jurors hospitality reigns’ (where ‘carnal mind’ could have a Stevensonian epithet). It goes on to mention that dishes with new names have been invented and gives a menu with items like ‘Potage. Emaillé de Printanier’ and ‘Truits. Patinée à Génèvoise’. This could be the Stevenson contribution—nothing earth-shaking, as you can see.
3 August number
Here, again, I was looking for something of half a column or less. And, again in the ‘Whispering Gallery’ section there is a contribution ‘from a letter’ that sounds as if it might be from Stevenson, containing a nonsense rhyme: Here, the French word béquille ‘crutch’ and béquiller ‘walk with crutches’ has clearly touched the poet’s funny nerve (maybe because a homophone béquiller (from bec ‘beak’) is a slang word for ‘eat’) and he creates a calque in English ‘to beckle’ which he repeats and varies in a crazy progression that threatens to extend to infinity.
There is a good chance this is by Stevenson: it is from a letter (the origin of other contributions from Stevenson in this period), it involves play with French, which we often find him doing, the creation through use of a new meaning of ‘fulfilled’ at the end of the third stanza reminds one of Stevenson’s typical word-play, and Stevenson writes similar verse in other letters to Henley in this period (e.g. L2, 259). (This supposition is confirmed in a later post.)
That’s it
With that, I had more-or-less accounted for the four annotations of ‘an article also’ on the 1878 list of payments. That list, of course, only goes up to 10 August and it is possible that Stevenson continued contributing short pieces and poems after that. But this I generously leave to another researcher.
Summary: In this post, John F. Russell argues that the comic song “I’ll sing you a tale of a tropical sea” was not composed by Fanny Stevenson and Lloyd but by Stevenson himself; he explains some of its allusions, and links it to the music for Thomas Moore’s “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms”.
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A storm at sea
The Equator (From MacCallum, Thomson Murray. Adrift in the South Seas. Los Angeles: Wetzel, 1934)
Sometime between the 4th and 11th of November, 1889, the schooner Equator, all sails standing, was becalmed in the South Pacific a few hundred miles south of Butaritari. The Stevensons were asleep in their specially fitted stateroom when a sudden squall tore off the schooner’s fore topmast, ripped the sail, tipped the Equator on its side and threw Louis and Fanny against the wall.
No one was hurt and the ship was soon righted, but RLS was so impressed that he wrote two poems and two letters about the event. On approaching Samoa a couple of weeks later, he rather calmly told his mother:
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The next day and fifty miles farther south he recalled the incident with a little more excitement:
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To further commemorate Mrs. Stevenson’s “bearing up wonderfully,” he wrote the poem To My Wife, where the last stanza recalls the storm: .
Songs of Travel XXXIV
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Finally, he satirized the event in some unpublished lyrics used as an entertainment for his shipboard birthday celebration on November 13th. He had already written ‘Tis Years Since He Was Born for fellow passenger Adolf Rick’s birthday on the 12th.
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Huntington Library, Rare Book 45074
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The complete lyrics read:
I’ll sing you a tale of a tropical sea,
On board of the old Equator.
There never were passengers better than we,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus:
Captain, darling, where has your topmast gone pray?
Captain, darling, where has your topmast gone?
Of chequers the captain did blow and boast,
On board of the old Equator.
The passengers did him as brown as a roast,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
In Santo Pedro was our delight,
On board of the old Equator.
When bobbery struck us along in the night,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
The captain he ran from a fifteen hand,
On board of the old Equator.
I’ll be damned if that old jib-topsail will stand,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
The sail was the rotteness’d ever was bent,
On board of the old Equator.
But blamed if it wasn’t the stick that went,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
The captain he turned to the mate, and he laughed,
On board of the old Equator.
I guess you are learning some sailor craft,
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
There’s one thing you know at the least and the last,
On board of the old Equator.
You know how to lose a fore-topmast
On board of the old Equator.
Chorus
Some of these lyrics may benefit from an attempt at explanation.
There never were passengers better than we
According to the Equator’s 20 year old novice cook Thomson Murray MacCallum (1869-1957), “Quite a few changes were made in the cabin … for the accommodation of the passengers,” including extra bunks and other conveniences. These changes were necessary because the Equator was a copra trading schooner, not a cruise ship. The Stevensons were its first real passengers and therefore there were none better.
In Santo Pedro was our delight,
On board of the old Equator. When bobbery struck us along in the night,
The sense of the stanza is that the storm struck at night while they were near Santo Pedro.
San Pedro (Motane, Moho Tani) is an island which RLS visited on the Casco in August of the previous year. In the Marquesas section of In the South Seas he writes, “I was amazed to behold so deep a view behind, and so high a shoulder of blue sea, crowned by the whale-like island of Motane.”
In his letter to his mother, Stevenson said they left Butaritari Island in the Gilberts on November 4th and that the storm occurred after this and before his and fellow passenger Adolf Rick’s birthdays on the 12th and 13th. The storm must then have occurred within a week’s sailing distance, or around 300 miles from Butaritari.
Since San Pedro Island is in the Marquesas thousands of miles away and the storm occurred in the Gilberts, RLS must have been mistaken about the name. According to the British Hydrographic Office‘s The Pacific Islands (1885) there is no island in the Gilberts called Santo (or San) Pedro. Perhaps because this one Spanish name stood out among so many Polynesian ones, he confused it with Peru Island, 378 miles from Butaritari. This may be where the storm actually occurred.
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The captain he ran from a fifteen hand,
Because it was night, everyone except the watch was probably sleeping when the storm hit. Stevenson says there were 15 men and one woman (Fanny) on the boat. The captain, then, ran from where the men were sleeping to save the ship. If the letter “a” is actually the Scots word for “all,” this may be some small evidence for Stevenson’s authorship.
Celebrating the Storm
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Thomson Murray MacCallum recalled Stevenson’s birthday celebration in his book Adrift in the South Seas (1934):
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Fellow passenger Paul Leonard, also known as Paul Höflich, described the same storm and celebration in Nellie Sanchez’s The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (1920): .
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On the day of the party, Lloyd photographed the participants. Wearing a hat with a band, Fanny sits to the left of Scotch-Irish Captain Edwin Dennis Reid (1865?-1920) in a Tam O’Shanter. RLS stands at the far left.
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MacCallum, T.M. Adrift in the South Seas. Los Angeles: Wetzel, 1934
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Considering that Stevenson had already expressed himself multiple times in poetry and prose regarding the squall, it seems most likely that he also wrote On Board of the Old Equator, especially since he had just written lyrics for Adolf Rick’s birthday. Neither Fanny nor Lloyd ever published any verse.
One particular word in the third stanza of the song reinforces Stevenson’s authorship. In Booth-Mehew letter 2153 from Honolulu around April 2, 1889 to Edward Burlingame, RLS asks him to send 11 novels of Frederick Marryat. Stevenson first mentions Marryat in Booth-Mehew letter 849 (September 1881) and then in letter 1733 (Dec. 23, 1886) where he quotes from Mr. Midshipman Easy. Marryat uses the unusual word “bobbery [hubbub]” in Midshipman Easy and also in two other works Stevenson requested, Peter Simple and Newton Forster.
In a letter to Colvin as recent as the previous January Stevenson wrote:
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He uses the same word again in a letter to Colvin two years later:
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Neither Lloyd nor Fanny appears to use the word in any of their works.
Other Darlings
Both MacCallum and Leonard claimed that On Board of the Old Equator was written by Fanny and Lloyd and at first the words of the chorus appear to favor Fanny.
Captain, darling, where has your topmast gone pray?
Captain, darling, where has your topmast gone?
It seems appropriate only for Fanny to call the captain “darling.” The lyrics never refer to RLS in any way, so she was not addressing him, even though MacCallum and Leonard called it a birthday song.
After Fanny and Louis had been thrown against the wall, Stevenson asked Murray MacCallum to give a message to the Captain.
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MacCallum, T.M. Adrift in the South Seas. Los Angeles: Wetzel, 1934
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If the Captain was on familiar enough terms with Stevenson to give him his “love,” perhaps Stevenson might also call him “darling” for fun in return. RLS stated his affection for Captain Reid in A Footnote to History (1895):
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However, it may be more accurate to treat the term “darling” as a surname rather than an endearment. Throughout the centuries there has been no lack of Captain Darlings, but one in particular could easily have been familiar both to Stevenson and Reid.
Built in Glasgow, the intriguingly named barque Edinburgh Castle was launched in 1863. The last captain of this 175 ft., 627 ton, three-masted, iron-hulled ship was J.B. Darling. The California Digital Newspaper Collection records it’s presence at San Francisco multiple times after 1872. Of course RLS was in that city in 1880 and 1888, and the Equator itself was built for the San Francisco based Wightman Brothers in 1888 with Reid as its first captain. The Edinburgh Castle and Captain Darling may have come to the attention of Reid and Stevenson by the fact that on January 15th, 1888 it was stranded in the harbor at Warnambool, Australia and wrecked there by a storm.
It should also be noted that by 1888 the boys’ adventure novelist Frank H. Converse (1843-1889) had already written two works with the suspiciously familiar titles Island Treasure and In Southern Seas. The last featured a character called Captain John Darling.
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Golden Argosy. New York, Saturday, June 11, 1887
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In another story by Converse, Darling is described as being in the same business as Captain Reid.
Murray MacCallum said On Board of the Old Equator was written to the melody of a popular song and that Lloyd sang it. Paul Leonard said he joined in the singing. However no one ever actually names the tune.
There is no obvious clue to the music in Stevenson’s lyrics, but an examination of the more than 120 manuscript copies of his own compositions, arrangements and favorite tunes provides one match which requires only, as RLS said of Alan’s Air in Catriona, “a little humouring to the notes in question.”
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Princeton University Library, Morris L. Parrish Collection, Box/Series/Folder/Thesis #: Bd MSS 113, 114, Code/Call Number #: C0171 1B
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New lyrics are often supplied to old songs to take advantage of the irony that results from the contrast, and On Board of the Old Equator is no exception. The music among Stevenson’s manuscripts that best fits “I’ll sing you a tale of a tropical sea” is “Believe me”, a transcription of the traditional melody normally associated with Thomas Moore’s very different lyric “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms”.
According to the Historic American Engineering Record of the United States National Park Service, the 78 foot, 72 ton schooner Equator entered the South Pacific copra trade in June 1888 under 23 year old Captain Edwin Dennis Reid, so when Stevenson began his journey from Hawaii on June 24, 1889 the boat had been in the water for only a year and hardly deserved to be called “old.”
Reading the lyrics while keeping Captain Reid, the Equator or RLS in mind, it is an appropriately ironic song for a 39th birthday, a damaged new schooner and a very young captain.
After its six month Pacific cruise with the Stevensons, the Equator went through many metamorphoses. In 1897 it was converted to a steam tender for work in the Alaskan salmon trade, and then became a tugboat for charting underwater hazards in southeastern Alaska in 1915.
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MacCallum, T.M. Adrift in the South Seas. Los Angeles: Wetzel, 1934
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In 1923 it ran aground and sank off the Washington coast but was refloated. It was converted to diesel in 1940, and in 1956 after 68 years of service it was finally abandoned near the mouth of the Snohomish River at Everett, Washington. In 1967 it was hauled out and in 1980 moved to the Port of Everett in Washington State.
The endearing young charms of the old Equator clearly have faded away but must still be dear to our memory of Stevenson.
Summary: In this post, John F. Russell confirms that the music of ‘God Save the Queen’ underlies Stevenson’s 1875 poem ‘Voluntary’, and argues why it is important to identify the poems of Stevenson that were written with reference to existing melodies.
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Voluntary
Because Stevenson rarely indicates which of his poems are also lyrics, it is possible to read through entire volumes of his verse and remain innocent of its dual nature. Without an awareness of the music for which those lyrics were written much of their meaning and emotional context is lost.
In two letters from December of 1887, RLS expressed how he felt about writing for music:
I find this setting words a delightful operose task, which passes time like none other, in a kind of passionate occupied idleness. The difficulty of the job is most entrancing. [Booth-Mehew letter 1962]
All my spare time is spent in trying to set words to music. [Letter 1971]
The conjunction of three major events in July of Stevenson’s 25th year resulted in lyrics which expressed, intentionally or not, the essential meaning of all three.
The first of these was July 4th, 1875, the last celebration before the centennial of American independence in 1876. Stevenson’s attitude toward this can be inferred from his remarks on the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871 and George III in An Inland Voyage (1878),
More important for Francophile Stevenson was July 14. RLS must have thoroughly savored this anniversary of the French Revolution and freedom from monarchy because it was the same day he passed the Scottish Bar exam. From then on he was liberated from the University and within a few months was completely free even from the charade of practicing law.
He celebrated that freedom in these lyrics:
The editor tells us it was written in July at Swanston, and it appears among verses from 1875 in Poems Hitherto Unpublished (1916). More than “a poem of quiet and of peace,” it is a celebration of freedom and independence by a volunteer soldier in a different kind of war. We know this because the editor says in the last sentence of his comments that Stevenson “used the metre of the National Hymn.”
Reading the first stanza of the poem is enough to identify the music as God Save the Queen, the British national anthem, or America, the same tune with different lyrics by Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895). Smith’s lyrics read,
My country tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died! Land of the Pilgrim’s pride! From every mountain side, Let freedom ring!
My native country, thee, Land of the noble free, Thy name I love. I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills; My heart with rapture fills Like that above.
Let music swell the breeze, And ring from all the trees Sweet freedom’s song. Let mortal tongues awake; Let all that breathe partake; Let rocks their silence break, The sound prolong.
Our father’s God to, Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee we sing. Long may our land be bright With freedom’s holy light; Protect us by Thy might, Great God, our King!
Those lyrics share with Voluntary themes of love of nature, music and freedom, but the British National Anthem as it was sung in the 19th century makes no mention of them:
White, Richard Grant. National Hymns. New York: Rudd, 1861
Not only is the text of America more relevant than God Save the Queen to RLS’s poem, but it uses the same syllabification, rhythm and rhyme scheme throughout, while the British version is less consistent.
Voluntary and America both strictly observe the rhyme scheme AABCCCB, and Voluntary follows the same rhythmic pattern as America exactly except for an extra syllable in the word “toward” in the second stanza.
As a noun the word “voluntary” has so many meanings that it is hard to know which was intended. “Free will” is the most appropriate general term. More narrowly, a voluntary is a musical prelude preceding a church service, and the poem itself is a prelude to Stevenson’s life as a professional writer. It might also be understood in an even narrower musical sense as an extemporaneous (but in this case verbal) accompaniment to an already existing piece of music, America. “Volunteer soldier” is similarly an apt interpretation, and the richness of meaning may be the reason RLS chose the title.
Those who are moved to stand whenever they hear a band strike up God Save the Queen or America will be disappointed to hear Stevenson’s peaceful lyrics applied to that stirring melody, since it is difficult to divorce it from its patriotic context. For this reason Stevenson’s simple, personal declaration of independence has additional significance.
Voluntary is the only verse in the two books of Hitherto Unpublished Poems where the editor has actually identified the music to which it was written. Even when Stevenson gives him adequate information to make an identification, as in the case of Home from the Daisied Meadows (to Beethoven), Air de Diabelli and others, he merely notes some relationship to music. The editor identified the tune for Voluntary this one and only time probably because Stevenson actually named the melody in a note on the manuscript.
What would have been lost if “the national hymn” had not been mentioned? Reading just the first two stanzas as if we were ignorant of the music gives some idea.
Here in the quiet eve My thankful eyes receive The quiet light. I see the trees stand fair Against the faded air, And star by star prepare The perfect night.
And in my bosom, lo! Content and quiet grow Toward perfect peace. And now when day is done, Brief day of wind and sun, The pure stars, one by one, Their troop increase.
Without the music, we read too fast. The words no longer receive mostly equal weight, the articles and prepositions are rushed and the leisurely, noble walking pace of the poem is lost. The triple rhymes fall too quickly and heavily on the ear, and the three repetitions of the word “and” seem awkward. It is a poem that is meant to be sung, and when it is, what seem to be artistic errors either pass unnoticed or in fact enhance the music.
Without knowing the melody, we miss Stevenson’s irony in setting a grandiose, bellicose national anthem, normally blared out by a brass band and sung by hundreds or thousands of people, to a poem whose first sentence begins, “Here in the quiet eve.” We miss understanding that his new freedom is so important to him that he magnifies it to a national scale, but leaves out all mention of nationality, King, Queen or God. We miss knowing that his idea of freedom has nothing to do with war or glory or exaltation of leaders. It is instead the freedom simply not to be an engineer or a lawyer, but to be himself.
If it is possible for an editor to assemble entire volumes of poems without making essential references to the music that underlies them, how many among Stevenson’s thousands of verses remain only half understood and their complete significance still unsuspected?
Summary: In this post, John F. Russell shows that ‘Come, Here is Adieu to the City’ (wrongfully titled ‘Schumann’s “Fröhlicher Landmann’ by Lewis) was originally grouped with ‘Spring Song’ (‘The air was full of sun and birds’) and ‘In Lupum’ as a group of three poems with a linked agricultural theme under the general title of ‘Schumann’s “Fröhlicher Landmann’. All three are inspired by melodies (though only ‘In Lupum’ is to the Schumann tune). He also demonstrates that the poems date not from the early 1870s but from 1888.
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In an another draft, ‘Come, Here is Adieu to the City’ is grouped with ‘On Such a Day’ and ‘Sunday’. In both cases, the grouped poems can be seen as a record of Stevenson’s long escape from New York to the South Pacific in 1888, with the first group focussing on the return of spring and the possibility of leaving confinement for the country, and the second grouping adding a sense of release from the imprisoning past.
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1. Happy Farmers
In his edition of the letters, Colvin said of Stevenson, “As always in cities, his health quickly flagged…” According to the poem Come, Here is Adieu to the City, cities were equally bad for his spiritual health, while the country was beneficial for creativity.
A rough manuscript copy can be found at the Beinecke Library,
Yale, GEN MSS 664 Box 27 f. 645
and a fair copy at the Edinburgh Writer’s Museum:
The Writers’ Museum, LSH 137/91.
The 1916 Bibliophile Society edition of poems says it “belongs to the early ‘70’s.” In Collected Poems (2003) Roger C. Lewis titles it Schumann’s Frölicher Landmann and indicates it may have been written in Edinburgh in 1872. He derives the date from a letter RLS wrote to Elizabeth Crosby on December 22, 1872:
Letters 1, 264 (Letter 117).
However, in the letter Stevenson says only that he is promoting the music, not that he has written a poem about it. Toward the end of the sentence he also mentions a Gavotte en Ré but never writes a poem by that title.
The fair copy of Come Here is Adieu to the City is headed Schumann’s Frölicher Landmann. The note by Booth and Mehew under the letter points out, however, that it is a heading for a group of verses, not just Come, Here is Adieu. The rough copy shows no title and has the Roman numeral II, instead of I.
Schumann’s Fröhlicher Landmann
Beginning piano students know Schumann’s music in English as TheHappy Farmer. Though an agricultural theme is shared, Stevenson’s poem has no musical relationship to the piano piece and is not intended as lyrics for that melody.
Fröhlicher Landmann is only one of 43 pieces in a collection by Schumann called Album für die Jugend (Album for the Young). In a letter to Anne Jenkin in April of 1887, Stevenson acknowledged,
Your packet arrived: I have dipped into the Schumann already with great pleasure. (Letters 5, 389 (Letter 1794))
By that time he had been playing the piano for a year and could attempt the easier Schumann piano pieces. Unfortunately he does not mention the title of the music he received. However, the more than 120 manuscript copies of music in Stevenson’s hand include only six Schumann pieces; Erinnerung (Memory), Ländliches Lied (Country Song), Matrosenlied (Sailor’s Song), Langsam (Slow Movement), Stückchen (Little Piece), and Träumerei (Dreams). The first five are all found in AlbumFür die Jugend. The last appears in the collection Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood).
On October 27th, 1887 Stevenson was in Saranac, New York and wrote a letter to Fanny’s nephew Fred Thomas (1870-1962), a young violinist who lived in Danville, Indiana. The letter concerned music RLS offered to send Fred as a Christmas present. A list of books which appears to be this Christmas shopping list has been found on the reverse of a manuscript for the fable The Reader.
British Library, Add MS 39173; thanks to Richard Dury and Bill Gray for this facsimile.
For a detailed analysis of this document, see the Music of Robert Louis Stevenson. The seventh item on the list is marked “Schumann” and refers to a volume comprised of two piano collections, Album für die Jugend and Kinderszenen, together containing all six pieces which Stevenson copied in manuscript.
This must have been the book Anne Jenkin sent Stevenson. RLS had found it useful for himself and now was recommending it to his nephew.
Stevenson’s Fröhlicher Landmann
The fair copy of Come, Here is Adieu has the number 19 at the top of the page. The reverse of the leaf is numbered 20 and contains the conclusion of the poem and a canceled version of Spring Song (“The air was full of sun and birds…”), which also has an agricultural reference but no relation to Schumann’s music:
No text appears under the Roman numeral III at the bottom of the page. Aside from the farming theme, why did Stevenson call this proposed cycle of poems Frölicher Landmann when none of the verse was appropriate as lyrics for the music?
In McKay’s A Stevenson Library Catalogue (1961) entry number 7008 refers to Stevenson’s not quite finished translation of Martial’s In Lupum, about the gift of a tiny farm.
On the right of the Roman numeral “xl” is the number 18. This is the notebook page previous to that which contains Come, Here is Adieu to the City. McKay corrects the Roman numeral to “XI” on p. 2605 of his catalog.
In Lupum is the poem that was written to Schumann’s music. Since it was already contiguous to the other two poems, RLS may have seen no reason to recopy it under the number III.
It seems that Stevenson’s Frölicher Landmann cycle initially consisted of three poems on agricultural themes which he intended as lyrics to three different melodies. Come Here fits well with the melody of Rosin the Bow (also known as The Old Settler’s Song). Spring Song fits with the Carnival of Venice, and In Lupum with Happy Farmer (“Fröhlicher Landmann”).
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2. Across the Plains
Adieu to winter and the city
A complete transcription of the fair copy of Come, Here is Adieu to the City appears below. The second stanza does not appear in the rough copy.
Come, here is adieu to the city
And hurrah for the country again.
The broad road lies before me
Watered with last night’s rain.
O I that have slept all winter
Am wakened again today
And the breeze blows into my spirit
And brushes the cobwebs away
The tumbled country woos me
With many a hill and hough; [ hill ] And again in the shining fallows
The ploughman follows the plough.
The whole year’s sweat and study,
And the whole year’s sowing time,
Comes now to the perfect harvest,
And ripens now into rhyme.
For we that sow in the Autumn,
We reap our grain in the Spring,
And we that go sowing and weeping
Return to reap and sing.
.An inspiration for it may have been a madrigal text by Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656):
Adieu, ye city pris’ning towers,
Better are the country bowers.
Winter is gone, the trees are springing,
Birds on ev’ry hedge sit singing.
Hark, how they chirp, come, love, delay not,
Come, come, sweet love, O, come and stay not.
Stevenson used the surname Tomkins for a character in Ebb-Tide, as well as the full name of the poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a contemporary. RLS owned the complete works of Herrick, so he may also have been familiar with Tomkins, and though they have no relation to Tomkins’s poem, he wrote some verses called Madrigal.
Other indications that RLS was aware of Tomkins’ poem are the use of the imperative “come” in the first line of his poem and in the last line of Tomkins’, and the equating of the city with winter and constriction, and the country with spring, fertility and song.
Neither Stevenson nor Tomkins needed to use the French word “adieu” in the first line. “Farewell” is the English equivalent with the same stress and number of syllables, and there are no other French references in the poems that might justify a French expression. However “adieu” means “goodbye forever” and “farewell” does not. Apparently both poets wanted to emphasize the idea of leaving the city permanently.
The sense of Stevenson’s poem is that his creativity has been in hibernation but is reemerging. While in Saranac, New York RLS wrote to Anne Jenkin in February, 1888,
The climate is certainly repulsive; cruelly cold, bleak, sunless and windy … I should dearly like to cut and run … I go on patching away at work, not of the best. (Letters 6, 118-19 (Letter 2019))
We need only remember the Master of Ballantrae’s frightening emergence from suspended animation and his frozen grave in the “wilderness” of New York to confirm Stevenson’s feelings about Saranac.
Crossing the Plains
He did “cut and run” on Saturday, June 2, 1888, leaving on a six day train journey to San Francisco. Across the Plains (1883) described the sufferings of his first crossing of the United States by rail in 1879, and so he would have arrived this second time, perhaps again “dog-tired” in the “great and gloomy city” of Chicago sometime Monday, immediately having wearily to drag his belongings to another station four blocks away. He must gladly then have bid “adieu to the city, and hurrah for the country again.”
After travelling across Illinois and Iowa, he found himself “at sea” in Nebraska, “a world almost without feature,” yet “the broad road” still lay before him.
The state below Nebraska is Kansas and around the middle of the 19th century, winter wheat from Russia was introduced there. It was planted in September, sprouted and grew a little during the fall, lay dormant during the winter and was finally harvested in June.
For we that sow in the Autumn,
We reap our grain in the Spring,
And we that go sowing and weeping
Return to reap and sing
“To cross such a plain,” he wrote about Nebraska, “is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming.”
The tumbled country woos me
With many a hill and hough;
By Friday he had arrived in the longed for Wyoming, only to be disappointed,
We traveled through these sad mountains … hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments…
After 90 hours of travel, hope rekindled at Ogden, Utah, where he changed from the cramped, now stinking cars of the Union Pacific to those twice as high and airy of the Central Pacific Railroad. Soon he was greeted by a huge pine forested ravine, a foaming river and a fiery sky.
At every turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. For this was indeed our destination; this was ‘the good country’ we had been going to so long.
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3. San Francisco
At the bottom of the leaf containing the rough copy of Come Here is Adieu is a short, unpublished poem.
On such a day as this day is,
So morning fresh and clear,
The titan on the bald hill top
Sat piping far and near [watching] They saw him from the plains below–
A castle on a hill!
At first the meaning is obscure, however the last paragraph of Across the Plains sheds unexpected light.
Stevenson has only slightly misquoted Spenser’s description of morning in the Faerie Queen.
Now when the rosy-fingered morning fair,
Weary of aged Tithon’s saffron bed,
Had spread her purple robes through dewy air, And the high hills Titan discovered.
RLS’s poem ends with an exclamation point because what he saw on the “bald hill top” was not there the first time he came to San Francisco in 1879.
The titan on the bald hill top
Sat piping far and near
They saw him from the plains below–
A castle on a hill!
In 1883 Frederick O. Layman built a wooden castle on Telegraph Hill as a cable car terminus for a proposed observatory (“piping far and near”) and restaurant. Known as “Layman’s Folly,” it was destroyed by fire in 1903. This is what “they” (RLS, Fannie, Lloyd, Margaret and Valentine) saw from the plains below, “a castle on a hill!”
Stevenson returned to England from his first trip to the U.S. in 1880, three years before the castle was built. The poem On Such a Day could only have been written in 1888, when he returned to San Francisco on his second trip. Since Come, Here is Adieu to the City and On Such a Day are written on the same page, in the same casual handwriting and are consecutively marked II and III, they must have been written around the same time, and so Come here is Adieu to the City must also have been written in 1888.
To see a castle on Telegraph Hill when there wasn’t one there before must have startled Stevenson all the more because it reminded him of others from his past he was so impressed with that he had taken the trouble to draw them.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. A mountain town in France. New York: Lane, 1896. Chateau Neuf.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. A mountain town in France. New York: Lane, 1896. Chateau Beaufort
In Kidnapped (1886) Stevenson used the phrase “castle on the hill” to refer to the now destroyed Costorphine Castle to the west of Edinburgh and “castle on a hill” to refer to Stirling Castle, which had often been used as a prison. What may have startled him even more was the reawakened memory of the castle with which he was most familiar and would never see again.
In this description of “the tall, black city” which was so harmful to his health, two adjoining sentences use a word and a phrase which appear on the same page as the two poems just discussed. “Tumbled” is used in line 9 of Come, Here is Adieu and “On such a day” is part of the first line of the following poem. It is as if the sudden sight of the castle on Telegraph Hill reawakened the memory of his description of Edinburgh and echoed through these verses ten years later.
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4. The South Pacific
On Thursday, June 28, 1888 the Casco was docked at North Beach near Telegraph Hill and at 5 a.m. was towed to the Golden Gate to begin its Pacific cruise.
On the reverse of the leaf containing Come, Here is Adieu to the City and On Such a Day is an unpublished and unfinished poem. It lacks a Roman numeral designation, but the number 4 appears in the upper right corner.
Sunday. And I, good Calvinist,
Drop anchor for the day of rest,
And with all trouble, all dismissed
Out of my tranquil breast,
I smoke my weed about the deck, …………….5
Or on the tafrail, lean my head
To watch, far on the smiling sea, some speck
In the clear morning air, the chimes
That flutter up around me seem,
Peals loosened from the city of old times ….10
That long in dream,
And I, good Calvinist
Have all my mariners dismissed
Far on the smiling backward sea I trace
The wake of my past life. ………………………..15
I bring the gully too, and smoke,
I idly patrol the deck and smoke
An idle eye far from fancy’s puppet folk,
Canceled lines and words have not been transcribed and the last line is uncertain. Capitalization and misspellings have been corrected. Lines 12-18 are apparently another attempt at the poem. A gully is a knife.
In this verse Stevenson is recording an experience on the yacht Casco in the Pacific. Because it is Sunday, he orders the anchor to be dropped and sends everyone ashore. With his heart at peace, he wanders the deck and smokes. He follows something far off in the distance, his past life, and hears a church bell, which reminds him of “the city of old times.”
In the poem he says, “I … dropped anchor,” and had “all my mariners dismissed.” If he were writing about his lighthouse steamship voyage of 1872, where he was only a passenger, he couldn’t have made these claims, and they certainly wouldn’t apply to his canoe trip in the Arethusa in 1878. Though he was not the captain, only on the Casco and no other boat was he in a position to order the anchor dropped and to send the crew and his family, “all my mariners”, ashore.
The poem must therefore have been written about any Sunday from July 22, 1888, when the Casco docked at Nukahiva, to December 30, 1888, just before the voyage finished in Hawaii.
There may be corroboration for this in his mother’s entry for September 12, 1888 at the Paumotus Islands in From Saranac to the Marquesas (p. 148-150) where she records,
Our house stands beside the little church, but the priest is away just now and there is only a native catechist left in charge. I would fain go to the service, but twenty minutes to six A.M. (when the bell rings) is rather much of a good thing in the way of early rising for me … As soon as we cast anchor on Sunday, a M. Donat came on board to welcome us.
Some additional evidence can be assumed from the word “tafrail” (line 6) which Stevenson only used in Master of Ballantrae (begun in 1887), The Wrecker (1891), St. Ives (1893), and Ebb Tide (1893).
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Come, Here is Adieu to the City, On Such a Day and Sunday do indeed form a cycle of poems. They are on the same leaf of manuscript, they are in the same casual handwriting, they are consecutive, and they all were written within the same year. However they are not from the 1870’s, and they are not linked by an agricultural theme as Stevenson had once planned, but instead are a record of his long escape from New York to the South Pacific in 1888 and share the themes of freedom and release from the imprisoning past.
The significance of Sunday is that, although he is not yet the captain of his ship, Stevenson is now the captain of his soul, and he finally bids adieu to the city forever.
Summary: In this post, John F. Russell shows that Stevenson’s poem ‘Home, no more home to me’ (Songs of Travel XVII) with its subtitle ‘To the Tune of Wandering Willie’ was not written to the tune generally known by that name and used by Burns for ‘Here awa’, there’s awa’, Wandering Willie’ (the words of which clearly inspired Stevenson for his poem).
Stevenson used a different tune given the title of ‘Wandering Willie’ in a music book he possessed—the tune of ‘The Cooper O’ Dundee’, used by Burns for his song ‘Bonie Dundee’.
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Common Ground
“To write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with our subject,” Stevenson writes at the very beginning of “Some Aspects of Robert Burns” (1879). This common ground is revealed throughout the essay and is first evident in a description of Burns’ appearance as a young man:
Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, and his plaid, which was of a particular color, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders. Ten years later … we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with a fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.
In The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson (2004), John Cairney quotes a fellow-student of RLS as saying,
His whole appearance was a shock to a puritan neighbourhood. His chestnut hair fell in limp strands over his shoulder. He did not hesitate to dress as a Bohemian; he wore a velveteen jacket like a workman and a grey, flannel shirt to hide his thin arms. And to warm his thin body, he swathed himself like his claimed ancestor, Rob Roy Macgregor, in a dramatic mantle with flowing folds.
According to Rosaline Masson in I Can remember Robert Louis Stevenson (1922), he delighted in dressing up for the Jenkin theatricals:
I play Orsino every day, in all the pomp of Solomon— splendid Francis-the-First clothes, heavy with gold and stage jewellery. I play it ill enough, I believe ; but me and the clothes, and the wedding wherewith the clothes and me are reconciled, produce every night a thrill of admiration. Our cook told my mother (there’s a servants’ night, you know) that she and the housemaid were “just prood to be able to say it was oor young gentleman.” To sup afterwards with these clothes on, and a wonderful lot of gaiety and Shakespearean jokes about the table, is something to live for.
Burns and Stevenson declared their individuality and altered their identities with their clothes, and this is also reflected in their name changes. At the age of eighteen Stevenson went from Lewis to Louis, and he says of Burns,
His father wrote the family name Burnes; Robert early adopted the orthography Burness from his cousin … and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to Burns.
Both had unconventional views on religion and both died young, Burns at 37 and Stevenson at 44.
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Fellow-Feeling
RLS was a whistling vagabond, not a fiddling philanderer, but Burns and he were both tone poets and it is their songs that demonstrate their fellow-feeling. Those who are familiar only with Stevenson’s original lyrics to Over the Sea to Skye or To the Tune of Wandering Willie should know that he also wrote verse to at least 25 other tunes, even supplying original words to Auld Lang Syne. This is nowhere near Burns’ 361 lyrics, but he wrote over a twenty year period, while Stevenson only began in earnest to put words to music at the age of 37.
Burns always associated music with his songs and never wrote a lyric until he could sing the melody. Stevenson was a modern poet, so not all his songs were meant to be sung, and he made it a challenge to find the ones that were by generally not identifying the music at all.
Although Burns was competent on the violin, an instrument that requires an excellent sense of intonation and relative pitch, biographer James Currie said the poet’s voice was “untunable, and that it was long before he learned to distinguish one tune from another,” while Evelyn Blantyre Simpson in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days (1898) makes a similar comment about Stevenson:
Many of the artists were musical, but Louis Stevenson took no part in their impromptu concerts. He liked their songs and rattling refrains, but he was no singer, nor had he much of an ear for music.
In Songs of Robert Burns (1903) James C. Dick says,
His songs are the epitome of Scottish music, still known and still admired. Considering this it is the more remarkable that Burn’s biographers should with one accord have ignored or omitted a description of his musical perception and his treatment of music.
If Stevenson’s biographers mention his music at all it is limited, as Simpson’s remarks indicate, to a sentence or two about supposed poor musicianship. Stevenson wrote more than 120 short pieces, almost 1/3 of which were original. His compositions consisted of songs, dances, instrumental works, counterpoint exercises and at least ten pieces that used piano. He wrote in 19 different keys, including five modes. Using six different meters he wrote at least 65 solo pieces, 27 duets, 14 trios and two quartets for various combinations of flute, flageolet, clarinet, violin, piano, guitar, mandolin and voice. He frequently transposed pieces and knew how to modulate from one key to another. He played piano, Boehm flageolet and penny whistle. Never having studied music or any musical instrument as a child, and never having studied music formally in any way as an adult, he accomplished all this in about six years. This is not a description of someone who, as Graham Balfour wrote in his biography, “failed to master the rudiments” and whose “knowledge of music was not very profound.”
Although RLS did all that, his music was completely ignored until Robert Murrill Stevenson’s essay “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Musical Interests” (PMLA, 72.iv (1957), 700-04) nothing has appeared in print since.
Dick says Burns “never heard a symphony or a string quartette” and his musical education began in his youth during church music rehearsals. For Stevenson, “wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette,” and as a young man he went to concerts at the Edinburgh Choral Society and heard music in friends’ homes but only studied theory and harmony when he was 36. Burns destroyed the music for the single song he composed at 23 because it displeased him so much, but a third of Stevenson’s works are original and accessible.
Both their lyrics were written to fit the music, but Burns only used popular airs. Stevenson’s verses in this genre include:
1. Come Here is Adieu to the City (Rosin the Bow)
2. Early in the Morning (Early One Morning)
3. Fine Pacific Islands (British Grenadiers)
4. Madrigal (The Harp that Once)
5. Nous n’ron plus au bois (children’s song)
6. Over the Sea to Skye (Scottish folksong)
7. Over the Water wi’ Charlie (Scottish folksong)
8. She Rested by the Broken Brook (Drink to Me)
9. Song of the Road (Over the Hills and Far Away)
10. Stormy evening (Oldfield)
11. Student Song (Auld Lang Syne)
12. Topical Song (Poor Old Joe)
13. Wandering Willie (Scottish folksong)
More broadly educated than Burns, Stevenson also wrote to European art music:
1. Air de Diabelli (Diabelli Sonatina)
2. Come My Little Children (anonymous gavotte, 1700)
6. Home from the Daisied Meadows (Beethoven piano variations)
7. I Will Make you Brooches (Schumann, Ländliches Lied)
8. In Lupum (Schumann, Happy Farmer)
9. Tempest Tossed (Beethoven piano variations)
10. To You Let Snow and Roses (Mozart, Clemenza di Tito)
11. Vagabond (Schubert)
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Wandering Willie
Since Stevenson rarely indicated what music inspired his verses, the fact that he occasionally did must mean something special. Number XVII in Songs of Travel has the subtitle To the Tune of Wandering Willie in parentheses, so there should be no doubt about what music inspired it. The standard lyrics to the tune, more properly known as Here awa’ there awa’, are by Burns, so in boldly naming the song, Stevenson implies that he is not afraid to be compared.
To the Tune of Wandering Willie was written in 1888 at Tautira, Tahiti, where Stevenson suffered a long illness. He sent the poem to Charles Baxter in a letter that explains his motivation:
That he is familiar with the music called Wandering Willie is assumed from his references to it in his writings throughout his life. He first mentions it in a letter to his mother in 1874 while staying at Mentone.
Booth, Bradford A. and Ernest Mehew. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Letter 236, 5 February, 1874.
Willie reappears in the essay “A Night in France” (1875):
It is sung in Deacon Brodie (1888):
Finally it appears in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), where Stevenson quotes his own lyrics.
With so many references to Wandering Willie in his works, we must believe that RLS had no doubt he was referring to the version made famous by Burns, especially since he challenges him outright in his letter to Baxter.
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The Real Willie
Every major source of Scots songs, Wandering Willie shows some variation of the tune found in James C. Dick’s Songs of Robert Burns. An arrangement by Haydn can be heard by clicking here, and a portion of a recording from the Linn edition of complete songs by clicking here.
Probably as a reference for his own poem, RLS wrote out what he assumed was the music. Click here to listen to a recording.
New York Public Library, Robert Louis Stevenson collection of papers, [1873]-[1944] bulk (1881-1917), Berg Coll MSS Stevenson
A comparison of the first four bars of both tunes shows they are not the same. The difference is clear when both melodies are in the same key.
Burns’ song is in waltz time, while Stevenson’s has a two beat measure. The pitches and the shapes of the melodies are different. Even though he mentions the song many times throughout his life and seems to be thoroughly familiar with it, Stevenson is obviously not using the same tune as Burns.
RLS wrote Wandering Willie while recovering from a severe illness. It is easy to believe he was not always in his right mind. The simplicity of the melody he notated indicates he may have written it from memory and this could also have led to mistakes, but the inconsistencies in the two songs are greater than what would be caused by illness or bad memory.
This is not the first time RLS has mistaken a piece of music. In Hammerton’s Stevensoniana (1903) J. Cuthbert Hadden quotes Stevenson as remarking,
He never could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him.
Proof of this assertion is found in a letter he wrote to his mother in 1872:
Booth, Bradford A. and Ernest Mehew. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995: Letter 105, August 1, 1872.
Unfortunately Lang, lang ist’s her is not the German version of Auld Lang Syne but of Long, Long Ago.
Deutsche Weisen
In Stevenson’s defense it should be noted that in German, English and Scots the words “lang” and “long” sound alike and the association could easily have misled his hand in a hurried letter.
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Beauties of Caledonia and the Caledonian Companion
However, it is not because of illness, a faulty memory, or a confused hand that Stevenson worked from the wrong melody.
Probably in June of 1888 when he was in San Francisco preparing for his journey across the Pacific on the yacht Casco, he bought a music book called Beauties of Caledonia, first published in Boston by Oliver Ditson in 1845. Stevenson’s Library Database identifies it as part of his personal library and says that,
According to the Journal of the Robert Louis Stevenson Club (London), no.15, (Feb 1954), pp.9-10, this has the stamp of Gray’s Music Store, 623 & 625 Clay Street, San Francisco, and is one of the nine books previously in RLS’s library at Vailima that were returned to Samoa in celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Beauties of Caledonia contains all but one of the tunes Stevenson said he knew and loved in his letter to his mother in 1874; Auld Lang Syne, My Boy Tammie, Jock O’ Hazeldean, and Scots wha’ hae. Wandering Willie was listed in the table of contents both as Here awa’ there awa’ and under the title:
The note in small print reads,
The beautiful air of ‘Here awa’, there awa,’ is preserved in Oswald’s collection of Scots tunes. Burns, who was fond of the melody, wrote the following fine verse to it.
The collection referred to is James Oswald’s Caledonian Companion, and the tune appears as the first piece in volume eight.
One glance at the melody called Wandering Willie in Beauties of Caledonia shows they are different. The tune in Caledonian Companion is the same one referenced in every major source of Burns songs, but the one in Beauties of Caledonia does not appear in any source as Wandering Willie.
Below is a comparison between the melody Stevenson used, the melody from Beauties of Caledonia (BOC), and the tune Burns used from the Caledonian Companion (CC).
Stevenson’s rhythmically simplified melody is the same as that in Beauties of Caledonia. Burns’ tune from Caledonian Companion is completely different not only in rhythm but in melody.
As previously mentioned, the note under the title of Wandering Willie in Beauties of Caledonia reads, “The beautiful air of ‘Here awa’, there awa,’ is preserved in Oswald’s collection of Scots tunes. Burns, who was fond of the melody, wrote the following fine verse to it.” Although it is the inappropriate melody for Here awa’, there awa, it is in Oswald (CC), it is still a beautiful air, and in fact Burns was fond of it because he wrote lyrics to it called Bonie Dundee (first version, 1792), which appears in volume one of Scots Musical Museum:
O whar did ye get that hauver-meal bannock? [oatmeal cake]
O Silly blind body, O dinna ye see?
I gat it frae a brisk sodger laddie,
Between Saint Johnstone and Bonie Dundee.
O, gin I saw the laddie that gae me’t!
Aft has he doudl’d me on o’ his knee.
May Heaven protect my bonie Scots laddie,
And send him safe hame to his babie & me.
Because the lyrics hint at illegitimacy, the Boston music publisher Oliver Ditson may have found them offensive and so substituted the words of Here awa’ there awa, or he may have known the music from another version called The Cooper O’ Dundee in the Burns collection Merry Muses of Caledonia, shown below in a transcription by MacColl in Folk Songs and Ballads of Scotland (1965). A few moments spent reading the lyrics will explain why Ditson would never have used them.
Why Ditson did not use the appropriate tune for Wandering Willie remains a mystery, but it must have been unthinkable in 1845 to include the scurrilous text from The Cooper o’ Dundee. Perhaps he felt that even though the lyrics were changed, the tune would remind people of the The Cooper o’ Dundee and he decided to disguise the melody too. He did this by changing the meter from 6/4 to 2/4, altering some pitches, and imposing characteristic Scotch rhythms.
The result was that in Beauties of Caledonia Ditson fitted Burns’ text from Wandering Willie to a highly altered version of the melody of Bonie Dundee. For mistakenly writing his poem from a memory of this corrupted music while recovering from a severe illness, Stevenson deserves understanding.
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The Texts
Although written to a different melody, RLS’s poem is still related to Burns’.
[roof-tree=ridgepole, highest horizontal timber in a roof]
The similarities between the two lyrics include:
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The principle technical differences between the works are the rhythm and language. Burns’ poem is in Scots and a four beat triplet rhythm (dactylic tetrameter) that gives it a feeling of warmth and the effect of Nannie rocking Willie in her arms or of a boat swaying on the water.
Stevenson’s work is in an eight beat, duplet rhythm (trochaic octameter) and in English. The lines are twice as long as Burns’, many begin with monosyllables, and there are pauses at the middle and end of each, resulting in a hesitant, plodding feeling and an appropriate sense of wandering, weariness and desolation.
RLS never mentions Willie in his poem, but Burns repeats the name six times. Stevenson’s wanderer narrates while the loved ones are absent; Burns’ lover narrates and the wanderer is absent.
By their titles the two lyrics indicate some association with Sir Walter Scott’s poem Wandering Willie (1806) or Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet (1824). In the story the blind fiddler Wandering Willie recounts the inability of tenant Steenie Steenson to prove that he has paid his rent until he is given the receipt and is guided to the money by the ghost of his former landlord Sir Robert Redgauntlet. Stevenson knew Redgauntlet, and though not a ghost story, his poem has its own eeriness and a theme of loss.
Scott’s poem is essentially a longer version of Burns’ with similar themes and description. A woman’s heroic lover goes to sea to do battle, but her natural doubts about his faithfulness are resolved when he returns. The similarities of Scott’s and Burns’ poems emphasize the difference with Stevenson’s. His bleak, unnamed wanderer never leaves land, never performs any heroics, never unites with his loved ones, and is finally left hopelessly alone amongst the desolation of his house.
Both poets read themselves into their verse. Burns is Willie, and Bonie Dundee, Here awa’ there awa’ and The Cooper o’ Dundee are all about unfaithfulness, the particular Burns trait of “professsional Don Juan” that Stevenson objected to most in his essay.
Stevenson is the wanderer in his poem, although in real life illness and hunger for adventure drove him from home. The poem was written in “the most beautiful spot,” warm, luxuriant Tautira, yet he repeatedly longs for the hills, heather and moorland of Scotland. In Scott’s story Steenson is threatened with the loss of his home, while Stevenson is in fact homeless, ill and stranded in Tahiti, pitifully regretting the loss of his former friends. The prophetic last line defies any hope of a return,
But I go for ever and come again no more.
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Though their poems were written to different music and different stories, Stevenson and Burns shared common ground in their conspicuous clothing, individualism, conversational ability and writing. They shared fellow feeling as amateur musicians, collectors of melody, and in their devotion to molding words to the music they loved.
Their lives were entangled in their texts, but while Burns was consistently the Wandering Willie, Stevenson not only changed his tune but altered his identity from that of an unfaithful, absent lover to a lonely, pining, remorseful adventurer.
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.
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This must have been the book Anne Jenkin sent Stevenson. RLS had found it useful for himself and now was recommending it to his nephew.
On the right of the Roman numeral “xl” is the number 18. This is the notebook page previous to that which contains Come, Here is Adieu to the City. McKay corrects the Roman numeral to “XI” on p. 2605 of his catalog.
Stevenson has only slightly misquoted Spenser’s description of morning in the Faerie Queen.
Finally it appears in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), where Stevenson quotes his own lyrics.
![New York Public Library, Robert Louis Stevenson collection of papers, [1873]-[1944] bulk (1881-1917), Berg Coll MSS Stevenson](https://edrls.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/image-06-wandering-willie.png)
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EdRLS 