The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 9

Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial. “The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,” he had written in the beginning of his mother’s illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him he seemed to be half in love with death. “Grief is no duty,” he wrote to Miss Bell; “it was all too beautiful for grief,” he said to me, but the emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the Captain’s trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely the same man.

These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope. The singular invention to which he gave the name of “Telpherage” had of late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength, and overheated his imagination. The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to me – “I am simply Alnaschar” – were not only descriptive of his state of mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since, whatever fortune may await his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit. Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. “I am becoming a fossil,” he had written five years before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. “Take care! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection.” There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first; weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now made for his family, the elders dead, the sons going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two years of service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on “a real honeymoon tour.” He had not been alone with his wife “to speak of,” he added, since the birth of his children. But now he was to enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that she was his “Heaven on earth.” Now he was to revisit Italy, and see all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set forth upon this re-enacted honeymoon.

The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life; and he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the 12th, 1885, in the fifty-third year of his age. He passed; but something in his gallant vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss, and instinctively looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are progressively forgotten: two years have passed since Fleeming was laid to rest beside his father, his mother, and his uncle John; and the thought and the look of our friend still haunts us.

END OF VOL. IX

1

1881.

2

The previous pages, from the opening of this essay down to “provocations,” are reprinted from the original edition of 1881; in the reprints of which they still stand. In the Edinburgh Edition they were omitted, and the essay began with “A Scotsman.” – Ed.

3

For the “Book” of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, 1886.

4

Professor Tait’s laboratory assistant.

5

Charles Edward Appleton, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, founder and first editor of the Academy: born 1841, died 1879.

6

In Dr. Murray’s admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw sub voce Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be defined as “a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted.”

7

William Swan, LL. D., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of St. Andrews, 1859-80: born 1818, died 1894.

8

Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900).

9

W. E. Henley (1849-1903).

10

Fleeming Jenkin (1833-85).

11

Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, Bart. (1843-98).

12

John Addington Symonds (1840-93).

13

Mr. Edmund Gosse.

14

This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in The Spectator.

15

Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his aim, and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now lies among the treasures of the nation at the British Museum.

16

Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of Charles Kingsley.

17

Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat with my own hands in “Kidnapped.” Some day, perhaps, I may try a rattle at the shutters.

18

1882.

19

This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last. – R. L. S.

20

1884.

21

Now no longer so, thank Heaven!

22

Afterwards Lord Kelvin. – Ed.

23

The note by Lord Kelvin, appended in 1887 to the original edition of this Memoir, is not included in the present edition. – Ed.

24

“Reminiscences of My Later Life,” by Mary Howitt, Good Words, May 1886.

25

Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899). – Ed.

26

William Young Sellar (1825-1890). – Ed.

27

Not reprinted in this edition. – Ed.