by William Sharp.
Originally published in Harper's Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.105 #628 (Sep 1902).
So much has been written of late concerning Robert Louis Stevenson that it may be as well to say at once the present writer has no intention to add to controversy. In a word, this brief paper is not set forth in order to meet depreciation with panegyric, or to supplement idol-wrecking with superfluous brickbats. My credo as to "R.L.S." is brief; that Stevenson was one of the bravest, sweetest, and most winsome of men, an artist in every nerve, and a writer of infinite charm; but that, being human, indeed in his merits and defects poignantly human, he had a more or less distracting swarm of minor inconsistencies and flaws habitually in evidence about the honey of his brilliant mind and his good and sane heart. It is not to be supposed that anything recently written could hurt the good fame of R.L.S. We have his works, his letters, the record of worthy deeds and of a brave and loyal life. He had hardly a friend who did not love the man more than his writings, for all their winsomeness, their art, their power at times, their perpetual atmosphere of youth, of life. If there are people who "call off" because of some hard-hitting, it is not R.L.S. who is the loser. The more he stands revealed in his weakness as well as in his strength, in his failures as in his achievements, in his vices as in his virtues, the more lovable and, in the end, the more admirable does he appear. But in the many writings of all sorts and conditions upon Stevenson there has been little said about "his own country," his own tract of "haunted shore," in relation to himself and his writings. There is the exception of the Pentlands, of course; though that only in part. "Every man is at times his own geographer," he exclaimed once; and he himself had a county after the desire of his heart and the longing of his mind. Stevenson was so many-sided in his sympathies, had so various a wayfaring in his short life, and was perforce so swift in adaptation to his ever-changing circumstances, that the home of his mature years was not by any shore or in any land, but builded like a nest among the myriad leaves of memory. And when he reached that nest it was to see thence once more, as by a miracle, the spires and battlements and smoky heights and hollows of Edinburgh, the green slopes of the Pentlands, or the reach of coast from Gullane and Dirleton and North Berwick to Tantallon and St. Abbs Head. It is to afford a few glimpses of this "haunted shore" that Mr. Charles Wood has made the drawings which now appear. I suppose there is not a yard of sand and shingle, salt bent and furrowed rock along this coast that Stevenson had not traversed.
With Alan Breck he could say, "I should ken this country like the back of my hand."
It had always had and always continued to have a singular fascination for him. Singular, however, only if we contrast the physiognomy and outlook with the physiognomy and outlook of other places he loved, and this without adventuring as far as the Adirondacks or the isles of Samoa. But, in truth, no imaginative young Scot could walk that shore and not find it invested with the tragic beauty of history and romance. What hopes have gone down, what brave adventures ended, beyond these "sorrows o' Lothian," the Wildfire Rocks, and Satan's Bush? The glitter of sword and lance and musket, the drone of the Highland pipes, the hurrying of messengers and flight of broken men—a hundred episodes of national or individual vicissitude would crowd upon his mind. And out yonder, across these troubled gray-green waters, beyond Fidra and the Lamb, out where distant May gathers her precipices from the continual foam, what a coming and going of diverse-fortuned ships there has been, since gallant Sir Andrew, with the two poor sloops that constituted the Scottish navy, swooped like a hawk on the discomfited ships of the Tudor king, till the long later day when an exiled Scottish prince sailed past eager with hopes of a crown rewon, and again sailed past broken with the knowledge of a crown forever lost.
And certainly if the imaginative young Scot in point were of a literary turn, as R.L.S. was by the time he was
"breeched," he would have much to think of in connection with legendary lore and old-time ballads, and above all with the folk touched by the magic wand of Sir Walter Seott. Could he look at the cliff-set ruin of Tantallon, and not remember Marmion's arrival at this then impregnable fortress—
Broad, massive, high, and stretching far,
And held impregnable in war—
On a projecting rock they rose,
And round three sides the ocean flows,
The fourth did battled walls enclose,
And double mound and fosse--
or not note, gliding northward past the low isles of Fidra and the Lamb and Craigleith, the galley of the Abbess of St. Hilda, with "a bevy of the maids of Heaven"; or not see "Clara de Clare, of Gloster's blood," walking by dusk upon the battlements, "musing upon her sorrows there"? Or, further south, is there not Fast Castle, the sea-set Peel of the Logans of old, immortalized now as the Wolf's Crag of the Master of Ravenswood? Or, northward, along the shore, beyond conical North Berwick Law, does not the furrowed or grain-covered slope of Prestonpans recall Prince Charlie's rout of the "Hanoverians"? (and how Stevenson loved to roll that analogue of "King George's men" on his tongue!) and in Prestonpans village or down by the old Doo'-Cote at Dirleton may one not hear the faint rally of Sir John Cope's drums, or the skirl of Highland pipes in reckless pursuit? Near by is the field of Pinkie, where "the English Leopard" harried "the Scots Lion" two hundred years earlier. And is not Carberry Hill near, where Queen Mary's beauty and tragic fate did not save her from betrayal?
And besides all these memories, a rambling youngster like Stevenson, who, as he tells us, "prowled the land like a hungry jackal," must have stared often dreamingly upon the Bass—that precipitous mass rising over four hundred feet above the two miles or so of deep water betwixt it and the mainland, Perhaps none of its many associations could be so poignant as those connected with "The Bride of Lammermoor." How often, in the loneliness and sorrow of his tragic fate, had Edgar Ravenswood not stared across the wintry seas to that wild inhospitable Bass; how often Lucy Ashton had watched the multitude of sea-birds rising like a cloud or settling like a snow-storm over its barren acclivities!
Stevenson was wont to declare that there was no quest along the coast so absorbing to him as the half-fanciful, half-real quest of the Mermaid's Fount (where Lucy Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood pledged troth) and the Kelpie's Flow, that evil quicksand whose counterpart at least may be found at times along that tempest-worn shore.
But Stevenson too had added his magic to this strip of land, to these sombre low islands, to the majestic Bass, so menacing in winter storms or on dark nights, so beautiful at times in the rainbow-shimmer of summer showers. The "imaginative young Seot" rambling here thinks now also of a newer company than the Jacobites and Hanoverians and Cromwellians of history, the Thomas the Rhymer and his kindred of ballad-lore, the men and women of the poet of "Marmion" and of the romancist of "Waverley." In all likelihood, now, the "wandering callant fra' Embro" (among whose company, if there are few Alan Brecks, there are many David Balfours) would, on approaching this part of the coast, think, rather than of Marmion, of how Davie of the Shaws, a prisoner, with his feet tied below the belly of his horse, on the eve of Alan's escape to the French coast in the sloop Thistle, came upon "the three huge towers and broken battlements of Tantallon." Nor has any writer given us a better account of this preceding coast than is to be found in the chapter of Catriona where Alan and David await the sloop's boat, among the windy bent-grass, with its "bustle of down-popping rabbits and up-flying gulls."
As we had first made inland, so our road came in the end to lie very near due north; the old kirk of Aberlady for a landmark on the left; on the right, the top of the Berwick Law; and it was thus we struck the shore again, not far from Dirleton. From North Berwick east to Gullane Ness there runs a string of four small islets—Craigleith, the Lamb, Fidra, and Eyebrough—notable by their diversity of size and shape. Fidra is the most particular, being a strange gray islet of two humps, made the more conspicuous by a piece of ruin; and I mind that (as we drew closer to it) by some door or window of these ruins the sea peeped through like a man's eye. Under the lee of Fidra there is a good anchorage in westerly winds, and there, from a far way off, we could see the Thistle riding. ... The shore in face of these islets is altogether waste. Here is no dwelling of man, and scarce any passage, or at most of vagabond children running at their play. Gullane is a small place on the far side of the Ness, the folk of Dirleton go to their business in the inland fields, and those of North Berwick straight to the sea-fishing from their haven, so that few parts of the coast are lonelier. But I mind, as we crawled upon our bellies into that multiplicity of heights and hollows, keeping a bright eye upon all sides, and our hearts hammering at our ribs, there was such a shining of the sun and the sea, such a stir of the wind in the bent-grass, and such a bustle of down-popping rabbits and up-flying gulls, that the desert seemed to me like a place that is alive.
Along these sands between Gullane and Dirleton the young R.L.S. often wandered, dreaming dreams and weaving fictions. Perhaps it was in youth that he absorbed the color and contours of this coast, afterwards to be so finely limned in The Pavilion of the Links and Catriona. I have heard that it was "with his back to Dirleton" that he wrote the first draft of his fine and eminently characteristic poem beginning,
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river—
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life forever
"Many's the romance I've made—of course superlatively fine, but alas unwritten!—lying on the grass of the old Law [North Berwick Law], or when watching from it's top the solan-geese Bass," he said once to the friend who repeated his words to me. But we have enough to be greateful for in what he did write of "this bit shore hat I keep tucked away in my heart, ready for use when need be, but none the less dear in love." Who can forget the vivid scenes in Catriona wherein we follow the flight of David Balfour and Alan Breck through the then perilous coast lands of East Lothian? And who, knowing not only Catriona and Kidnapped, but other writings bearing the color of desolate places by the Northern sea, and notably The Master of Ballantrae, can fail to realize how it was this often-frequented and well-known sea tract that gave Stevenson the remembered material wherewith to create his scenery. R.A.M. Stevenson told me once he did not think that (as had been stated) the scenery of The Master had anything to do with the Ayrshire coast near the actual Ballantrae, but was the scenery familiar to R.L.S. from his youth, and particularly all about Gullane, Dirleton, and North Berwick. Certainly there is a spot not far from Dirleton where the good Mackellar might well have witnessed that most terrible duel in literature, the duel between James (the Master of Ballantrae) and Henry Durie, his brother, where, on a frosty dusk, one may think to see again that scene described thus by Mackellar:
"I took up the candles and went before them, steps that I would give my hand to recall; but a coward is a slave at the best, and even as I went my teeth smote each other in my mouth. It was as he had said: there was no breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the blackness was a roof over our heads. Never a word was said; there was never a sound but the creaking of our steps along the frozen path. The cold of the night fell about me like a bucket of water; I shook as I went with more than terror; but my companions, bareheaded like myself and fresh from the warm hall, appeared not even conscious of the change.
"'Here is the place,' said the Master; 'set down the candles!' I did as he bade me, and presently the flames went up, as steady as in a chamber, in the midst of the frosted trees, and I beheld these two brothers take their places."
The Bass Rock has now become the tenement of a longer-lived guardian than Black Andie, or than that weird and ghastly figure Tod Lapraik; for Stevenson has made it his own in his masterpiece of Scottish romance, Catriona. The "Bass" chapters of that book I hold to be the finest that Stevenson ever wrote, in the combined use of human interest, supernatural terror, and fitting background of wild and deeply impressive nature. One cannot look now at the Bass, whether given over to the sea roaring about his bases "like thunder and the drums of armies," or to its still calms, with only the solanders in hollows and sheer crevices crying like lost spirits, without thinking of David Balfour's long imprisonment there; of Black Andie, with his thoughts of the godly men who in the reek dungeons had suffered there for Christ's Kirk, and of their hymns, begun by one solitary voice and taken up from one rock dungeon to another, till a storm of holy song frighted the solans and cormorants wheeling overhead; of David's Highland guards, so brave in brute courage, such shaken cowards in that haunted and terrifying place; of the white, fat, heavy figure of Tod Lapraik in his horrible "dwams" or trances; ... and of the frightful discovery of "that awful wanchanecy thing on the brae-side," Tod's warlock, his own evil soul, whom the fishermen saw in a wild place of the Bass, a green hollow held by rocks, saw (though then Tod was at his loom in Castleton, in one of his "dwams," smmiling horribly) "louping an' flinging an' scampering, an' whiles giving a skelloch as it span."
And what a fine, unconventional, how vivid and convincing a description that is of David's first approach in the secrecy of the dawn: "There began to fall a grayness on the face of the sea; little dabs of pink and red, like coals of slow fire, came in the east; and at the same time the geese awakened, and began crying about the top of the Bass. It is just the one crag of rock, as everybody knows, but great enough to carve a city from. The sea was extremely little, but there went a hollow plowter round the base of it. With the growing of the dawn, I could see it clearer and clearer; the straight crags painted with sea-birds' dropping like a morning frost, the sloping top of it green with grass, the clan of white geese that cried about the sides, and the black, broken buildings of the prison sitting close on the sea's edge."
But though for several reasons the scenery of the Lothian coast generally affected Stevenson to tragical emotion, or at least to the sense of romance hard-set by tragic circumstance, he had many days there, and particularly "dreaming over against the Bass," when in sheer elation of life he might have exclaimed as in an early letter written to Mr. Charles Baxter in the spring of 1872, when R.L.S. was two-and-twenty. "I have been walking to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the brawling Allan. My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that I cheered my lonely way with the following, in a triumphant chaunt: 'Thank God for the grass, and the fir trees, and the crows, and the sheep, and the sunshine, and the shadows of the fir-trees!'"
We have in these words, if not all Stevenson, a very great part of the essential Stevenson. It is this quality in him that, like the lamplighter going his rounds of an evening, in his "Plea for Gas-Lamps," enables him so often to be "knocking another luminous hole into the dusk." Well, in our dusk, we could do with a few more luminous holes, with one or two more lamplighters of the Stevensonian kind.