Twelve or twenty such Essays, some of them purely ethical and expository, put together in a little book with narrow print in each page, antique, vine leaves about, and the following title.
XII (or XX) ESSAYS ON THE
ENJOYMENT OF THE WORLD:
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(a motto in italics)
Publisher
Place and date
Of course the page is here foreshortened but you know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice!37
The attention to peripherals is characteristic, so is the desire to eke out the minimum number of words into a book by expedients such as wide margins and decorations. In ‘My First Book’, published in 1894, Stevenson would write of the ‘veneration’ with which he used to regard the average three-volume novel of the time ‘as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance’.38
Stevenson loved to run ahead and gloat over possible future achievements. The only problem was that having done the gloating, he often found he had exhausted his enthusiasm for a project. His notebooks and letters are full of lists of chapters for books he never so much as planned out or wrote a line of. The lists, the naming, the brave idea of a title page, were often enough in themselves – or enough to convince himself that further work would be wasted. In his Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Swearingen lists 393 items, only twenty-seven of which are published, principal works. Even granted that many of the pieces listed are essays and stories which were gathered up into collections later, there are still scores of unfinished essays, unstarted stories, grand schemes, false starts: enough to have furnished two or three doppelgänger careers. With a little push this way or that, Stevenson might not have been known as the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but as the playwright of The King’s Rubies, or the biographer of Viscount Dundee.
1874 was one of the years rich in these byways. Stevenson had already picked up and set down the ‘Four Great Scotsmen’ book, and in the autumn was thinking of a work of fantasy to be called ‘The Seaboard of Bohemia’. Since he links this to Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, which was the model behind Prince Otto, ‘The Seaboard’ could have been an early intimation of that 1885 novel, which was also about Bohemia and had a character strongly based on Mesdames Garschine and Zassetsky. He was also thinking of putting together a first collection of short stories, utilising some of his 1868–69 ‘Covenanting Story Book’. The contents list he sent Colvin is almost comically upbeat; only three of the twelve titles were ‘all ready’; the rest either ‘want a few pages’ (i.e. only have a few pages?), need ‘copying’, ‘re-organization’ or are blatantly ‘in gremio’.39 ‘In gremio’ is where they stayed. Not one, apart from ‘The Two Falconers of Cairnstane’ – which was probably the original of ‘An Old Song’ – was ever published in the author’s lifetime.
Also not published in his lifetime, but begun in the summer of 1874, was one of Stevenson’s most original and most little-read books, Fables. He had been reviewing Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Fables in Song, which, he felt, lacked ‘the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers’.40 This was exactly what Stevenson transmitted in his own experiments with the form, three of which Colvin dates from this year: ‘The House of Eld’, ‘The Touchstone’ and ‘The Song of the Morrow’. The first of these is a satire on religious practice, clearly derived from Stevenson’s situation vis-à-vis Presbyterian Edinburgh. ‘The Song of the Morrow’ is a surreal, circular story about the longing for special knowledge (which of course the heroine does not achieve); ‘though power is less than weakness, power shall you have; and though the thought is colder than winter, yet shall you think it to an end’.41 Jorge Luis Borges, an ardent admirer of Stevenson, was particularly fond of these tales (of his own Parables he once said, ‘I owe that to Kafka and also to a quite forgotten book, to the fables posthumously published of Robert Louis Stevenson’42), and it is easy to see how the collection as a whole fits in with Borges’s witty expositions of the self-conscious artificiality of fiction. ‘The Touchstone’, a story of two brothers seeking by very different means the hand of the same princess, manages to merge the fantastic or ‘audacious’ with a startling sort of realism about human nature, the very ‘tenderness of rough truths’ that Stevenson had found wanting in Lord Lytton.43 It is fascinating to think that these very early and highly original fictions lay in a drawer for more than twenty years while Stevenson laboured to perfect duds such as Deacon Brodie or Prince Otto.
And on what was Stevenson pinning his ambitions in 1874? Not any sort of fiction, but – bizarrely enough – ecclesiastical pamphleteering. ‘An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland’44 was an extraordinary departure, a response to the abolition in August 1874 of the practice of Crown and other patronage in the Church of Scotland. Patronage was the issue behind the ‘Disruption’ of the 1840s which led to the forming of the Free Kirk; Stevenson’s suggestion after its abolition was that ministers of the established Church should begin to contribute money to the support of returning Free Church ministers to compensate the latter for the years during which they had been cut off from comfortable benefices. His idea was in fact rather ridiculous (and implied that he expected Free Kirk ministers to want to rejoin the established Church in significant numbers), but he was convinced that he would at least ‘have done good service in unveiling a sham and struck another death-blow at the existence of superannuated religion’.45 The writing was terrible – ‘Observe, I speak only of those …’46 ‘And the position, as I say, is one of difficulty’ – and if he hadn’t written so solemnly about this pamphlet in his letters, one would be tempted to think ‘An Appeal’ a joke thought up by Stevenson and Baxter during a wet afternoon at the Spec. But the mischievous RLS who had lived for Jink and jollity was, at this point in his life, almost eclipsed. When his twelve-page pamphlet was published (anonymously) in the spring of 1875, a copy was sent to every member of the Church’s General Assembly. ‘I think I am going to make a figure in Scotch ecclesiastical politics,’ Stevenson wrote absurdly to Frances Sitwell, though Colvin remarked later that the pamphlet received ‘no attention whatever’,47 and a commentator in the 1920s called ‘An Appeal’ ‘somewhat gratuitous, if not impertinent’.48
When the new term began at Edinburgh University in the autumn, Stevenson was condemned to study again. It was his last year as a student, and his least indolent one, spurred on by a huge bribe from his parents. On passing for the Bar, he was to receive from them a thousand pounds – the equivalent of about £50,000 today. Compared with his allowance of £84 a year (newly raised to that sum, and considered by Stevenson ‘very comfortable’49), the prospect was one of real comfort and independence just around the corner. His parents of course expected him to practise the law once he qualified; they probably saw the thousand pounds (an advance on his patrimony) as a necessary amount for Louis to set himself up as an advocate. Louis on the other hand envisaged a future of personal leisure and earnest philanthropy. The only drawback was that he would have to spend much of the coming academic year locked in the ‘barren embraces’ of law books.50