The following year Thomas Stevenson took out a lease on a house right in the heart of Covenanting country, the hamlet of Swanston on the edge of the Pentlands, only a few miles outside Edinburgh. The ‘cottage’ they rented there (in fact a spacious villa, almost as big as Colinton Manse) became their holiday home for the next thirteen years and a winter retreat for Lewis when he was a student. The battlefield of Rullion Green was within walking distance, as was the picturesque ruin of Glencorse Church, and Lewis, now old enough to be left to his own devices, spent days at a time walking the hills, writing and reading – especially adventure stories, caches of which the shepherd John Tod’s son later recalled having found in the whin bushes above the cottage.5 He was a keen, hardy walker and was able to make a long foot-study of the Pentlands in the years during which Swanston was the family’s second home. This was to become his favourite persona over the next decade or more, the romantic solitary walker, free from responsibility and respectability, watching, listening, picking acquaintance with strangers On the road, falling in with whatever adventures presented themselves.
To true Pentlanders, Lewis Stevenson would have appeared little more than a rich townie weekending on Allermuir, an English-speaking Unionist among terse mutterers of Lallans. No doubt some choice phrases of that dialect were shouted in his direction on the occasion, early in the Stevensons’ tenancy, when the boy barged through a field of sheep and lambs with his Skye terrier Coolin, infuriating the shepherd.6 Times had changed so rapidly in Scotland that in his late teens Stevenson knew no one of his own generation (certainly not of his class) whose primary language was Scots. ‘Real’ Scotsmen, like Robert Young, the gardener at Swanston, or John Tod the shepherd, or his late Grandfather Balfour, were distant, older figures who presented the paradox of being at once admirable and impossible to emulate. And with the language many temperamental traits and ‘accents of the mind’ were disappearing too, or seemed tantalisingly out of reach, as Stevenson’s loving description of shepherd Tod in his 1887 essay ‘Pastoral’ indicates:
That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face [ … ] He spoke in the richest dialect of Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, ‘beard on shoulder’, the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best of talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.7
The ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotsness haunted Stevenson all his life; he never tired of it. But the fact that his own culture could be romantic and curious to him he knew to be an unfortunate state of affairs. His writing about Scotland is therefore strongly melancholic and valedictory, quite unlike the language-revival movements of the following century which sought to resuscitate the culture by creating synthetic Scots. Within 150 years, the literary language waxed, waned and then reappeared again in the form of a sort of composite ghost of itself in the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the mid-twentieth century (pioneered by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid). But in the 1860s and ’70s, the language seemed beyond revival, and what Burns had used both naturally and daringly, Stevenson could only lament and pastiche, writing of his later attempts at Scots vernacular verse, ‘if it be not pure, what matters it?’8
Nevertheless, what Stevenson says of John Tod’s quintessentially Scots trait of ‘adorning’ his talk and making it startlingly vivid is egregiously true of Stevenson himself; ‘when he narrated, the scene was before you’. The irony is, of course, that Stevenson became known as a superlative English stylist because he was so alert to the power of his unknown native tongue. And as for the ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotland, Stevenson’s version of it in novels such as Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston did almost as much to promote and perpetuate the Scottish myth in the twentieth century as his great forerunner Walter Scott had done in the nineteenth.
In the autumn of 1867, the bullet had to be bitten and an engineering degree begun. The contrast between Lewis’s technical education at Edinburgh and Bob’s ‘semi-scenic life’ in Cambridge, with its gentlemanly atmosphere of ancient quadrangles and cultured conversation, could hardly have been stronger. As the bell rang them in to lectures from the city streets or pubs, all classes of raw Scots youth shuffled together on the ‘greasy benches’, as Stevenson recalled vividly in ‘The Foreigner at Home’:
The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.9
No proctors, privileges or grand ceremonials here. When the classes broke up, many of the students had to hurry home to get back to work in the fields in order to earn their next winter’s college fees. It must have been an eye-opener to Lewis, whose school life (such as it was) had been spent wholly among middle-class children, and though he approved of the ‘healthy democratic atmosphere’ of the university, and admired those of the staff who strove to put the parish boys at ease, he made no close friends among his fellow engineering students, indeed felt increasingly isolated and lonely.
Around this time (1868–69) Stevenson changed his name from Lewis to the Frenchified ‘Louis’. It is said that the impetus behind the change was Thomas Stevenson’s sudden and overpowering dislike of an Edinburgh radical and dissenter called David Lewis, who embodied, in the engineer’s view, ‘everything dangerous in Church and State’.10 But as the pronunciation remained identical, Lewis – or Louis as we must now call him – may have intended it more as a joke than as a gesture of political solidarity, and it took a while to stick.* 1868 was also the year in which Thomas Stevenson published an essay in the Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missionary Record (later produced as a pamphlet by Blackwood’s) on ‘The Immutable Laws of Nature in Relation to God’s Providence’. This short work is notable for several reasons: for its slightly simple-minded grappling with the evolutionary controversies of the day and for its ardent struggle to develop a response to them consistent with Church doctrine. The author argues, for example, that a falling stone falls from two causes, ‘first, proximately, in virtue of the law of gravitation; but second, primarily, by the supreme will of God, who has called the law of gravitation into existence’ (one can catch the author’s pleasure in coining that ‘second, primarily’). And if man ‘has been raised from the gorilla, as is hinted at by the new school of naturalists, how comes it to pass that the dog, although resembling man so little physically, should be so much more than the gorilla akin to him in all his nobler feelings and affections?’ The style of argument gives one an idea of what Louis was up against when he and his father began to discourse ardently at the dinner table on matters of religion and science, for the youth had been reading Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, whose works his father would never countenance. But there is another passage in Thomas’s booklet of even greater relevance, one which may well have come to haunt his son:
Men of literature and science may therefore well pause ere they lift their pen to write a word