Louis’s enthusiasm for the ‘new science’ of the evolutionists may well have been inspired by Jenkin, a keen follower of current controversies, who had a little-known but highly significant correspondence with Charles Darwin following the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. Jenkin made the point to Darwin that his theory implied not a concentration or winnowing effect in the inheritance of characteristics, but a dilution or blending – quite the opposite of what Darwin was seeking to prove. This anomaly exercised the scientist for decades and was partly answered in later editions of his work. Jenkin had made another of his brilliant coups.
No doubt the unspoken rivalry between Jenkin and Thomas Stevenson (present in Louis’s mind, if nowhere else) worked itself into the contentions between father and son over what was becoming known as the Higher Criticism (though Thomas Stevenson would never have called it that). It is highly unlikely that Thomas Stevenson had read the works of Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer when he attacked evolutionary theory in his stolid little pamphlet, but his son had read them and found Spencer in particular a revelation: ‘no more persuasive rabbi exists’.11 In an incident recalled by Archibald Bisset, Louis held forth once about Spencer’s Theory of Evolution on a walk to Cramond with his father and the tutor:
At length his father said, ‘I think, Louis, you’ve got Evolution on the brain. I wish you would define what the word means.’ ‘Well, here it is verbatim. Evolution is a continuous change from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity of structure and function through successive differentiations and integrations.’ ‘I think,’ said his father, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, ‘your friend Mr Herbert Spencer must be a very skilful writer of polysyllabic nonsense.’12
Louis had plenty of other ‘friends’, including Spinoza, part of whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he had read in a pamphlet picked up at a bookstall.13 These were some of the ‘unsettling works’ which he later said ‘loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities’.14 One of the most unsettling works of all was the New Testament, especially the gospel of Saint Matthew, which demonstrated to the young man that what was called Christianity had little to do with Christ’s teaching. ‘What he taught [ … ] was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth [ … ] What he showed us was an attitude of mind,’ Stevenson wrote in ‘Lay Morals’; the ethics of Christians, he said satirically, were far nearer those of Benjamin Franklin than Christ.
Another ‘gospel’ he was deeply affected by was that of Walt Whitman, whose poetry was treated with either caution or derision by the majority of the reading public in the 1870s. Stevenson had discovered Leaves of Grass soon after its publication in 1867, and kept a copy hidden at the tobacconist’s shop that was his equivalent of a poste restante. While he acknowledged Whitman’s want of ‘literary tact’ – the quality Stevenson himself had spent years trying to perfect – Stevenson admired, even venerated, the poet’s philosophy and hugely ambitious design. He later described Whitman as ‘a teacher who at a crucial moment of his youthful life had helped him to discover the right line of conduct’,15 and echoes of the electric bard can be heard all through the essays of the 1870s and eighties that gained Stevenson his reputation as an ‘aggressive optimist’:
Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage, either living recklessly from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. [ … ] It is the duty of the poet to induce [ … ] moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years.16
Stevenson was looking for a new definition of ‘the spiritual’ as he began to detach himself from the established Church, and he became one of the first members of the Psychological Society of Edinburgh, precursor of the Spiritualist Society, made up mostly of medical men, artists and university students. Bob was also a member (later vice-president), Stevenson himself was secretary briefly, and in 1873 he planned an article on spiritualism, probably to read to the Spec.17 When he told his parents later that he had not come lightly to his views about religion, he hardly did justice to the rigour he had applied during these years to questions of belief and ethics. It turned out to be a lifetime’s preoccupation, and at no point did he warrant his father’s intemperate description of him as merely ‘a careless infidel’.
The atmosphere at Heriot Row struck some observers as rather lax: both Thomas Stevenson and his son were loud, domineering talkers, and Louis shocked one set of visitors by ‘contradicting his father flatly before every one at table’.18 At a dinner party in the early 1870s, Flora Masson, daughter of Jenkin’s friend Professor David Masson, remembered being placed between the father and son and being amazed (and perhaps a little wearied) at how they took exactly opposing views on every subject. Louis’s talk that evening was ‘almost incessant’ (it was clearly one of his hyperactive days): ‘I felt quite dazed at the amount of intellection he expended on each subject, however trivial in itself,’ she wrote. ‘The father’s face at certain times was a study; an indescribable mixture of vexation, fatherly pride and admiration, and sheer bewilderment at his son’s brilliant flippancies and the quick young thrusts of his wit and criticism.’19
Flora was a fellow member of the Jenkins’ theatrical group, but remembered meeting Louis first (in the early 1870s) on a skating expedition with the professor and his family to Duddingston Loch, just to the south of Arthur’s Seat. She noted how the Jenkins always stayed in a couple, while Louis skated alone, ‘a slender, dark figure with a muffler about his neck; [ … ] disappearing and reappearing like a melancholy minnow among the tall reeds that fringe the Loch’.20 Perhaps he was auditioning for Hamlet. At the Jenkins’ theatricals Stevenson never managed to bag a major role. One year he was the prompt, another a bit player in Taming of the Shrew, another time he played the part of the dandy Sir Charles Pomander in Charles Reade and Thomas Taylor’s sentimental comedy Masks and Faces with ‘a gay insolence which made his representation [ … ] most convincing’.21 The highlight of his acting career came in 1875 as Orsino in Twelfth Night, but though the Heriot Row servants were mightily impressed with his appearance, and Margaret Stevenson glowed with maternal pride, the actor himself knew that in the process of being allotted a role of substance ‘one more illusion’ had been lost.22
Even though he wasn’t able to command it through acting ability, Stevenson was always likely to make a bid to arrest attention at the Jenkin plays. One time when he was in charge of the curtain, he mischievously raised it while two members of the cast were larking around on stage just after finishing a particularly intense tragic scene. Though some of the audience laughed, Stevenson didn’t escape a sharp reprimand from Jenkin. Flora, an intelligent young woman who later wrote novels and became the friend of both Browning and Florence Nightingale, seems to have escaped Stevenson’s notice even though she was put in his way so regularly by their mutual friends. But she was watching him, and remarked how he liked to keep his costume on as long as possible after a performance (preferably right through supper). She also remembered once seeing him walk up and down the Jenkins’ drawing room, watching himself in a mirror ‘in a dreamy, detached way’, ‘as if he were acting to himself being an actor’.23
His parents’