CARLYLE was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar letters were the best medium to reveal a man.The letters must have been written with no idea of being used for this end, however - free, artless, the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart.
Now, these letters of R.L.Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in this way - they reveal the man -
reveal him in his strength and his weakness - his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them.When he was ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this account of his daily routine:
"Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, maybe observed leaving No.608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step.The gentleman is R.L.Stevenson; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays.He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less....He seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good.A while ago, and R.L.Stevenson used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment.For this rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling.
"Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the same slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire.
He does this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers.The reason is this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows of the same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty into hell.Thenceforth, for from three hours, he is engaged darkly with an ink-bottle.Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre, and wear the natural hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush.The youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.' Can it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that honourable craft."
Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly all written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by Emerson, and now a most popular holiday resort in the United States, and were originally published in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE...
"It should be said that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone West in search of health among the bleak hill summits - 'on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the LUDGATE HILL, the sort of craft which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.
Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the "strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr Henry James:
"Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack;
and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the port at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed.
Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the LUDGATE HILL.She arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water, curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we regret her."
He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable to life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea in company with a cargo of cattle.
