The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez [english novels for students txt] 📗

removed to Samoa, there to lie beside her beloved on the lonely mountain top.

To her own family the sense of loss was overwhelming, and I cannot perhaps express it better than in the words of her grandson, Austin Strong: "To say that I miss her means nothing. Why, it is as if an Era had passed into oblivion. She was so much the Chief of us all, the Ruling Power. God rest her soul!"

* * * * *

When Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson passed from this earth the news of her death carried a pang of grief to many a heart in far distant lands. One who knew her well, her husband's cousin, Graham Balfour, writes his estimate of her character in these words:

"Although I had met Fanny Stevenson twice in England, I first came to know her on my arrival at Vailima in August, 1892, when within a single day we established a firm friendship that only grew closer until her death. The three stanzas by Louis so completely expressed her that it seems useless for a man to add anything or to refine upon it:

'Steel-true and blade-straight
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Honor, anger, valor, fire,
A love that life could never tire,
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life.'

"These were all the essentials, and if we add her devotion to her children and her loyalty to her friends, we have the fabric of which her life was woven. Her integrity and her directness were such that one could, and frequently did, differ from her and express the difference in the strongest terms without leaving a trace of bitterness.

"I remember in particular a scheme which she wished to set on foot for releasing Mataafa and other Samoan chiefs from their exile in the German island of Jaluit and carrying them off to Australia. The project was a wild one and would only have led to their return and disgrace, and in these terms and much stronger expressions we discussed it, without ever abating one jot from our personal friendship.

"And in the long years that followed absence made no difference. Every letter, when it came, was as full of affection and of confidence as its predecessors--full of loyalty and tenderness.

"To her enemies, of course, she showed another side. Opposition she did not mind, but dishonesty and deceit were unforgivable.

"The news of her death reached me in St. Helena, as the announcement of Louis's death found me on another far-off island in the Carolinas; and both times the world became a colder, greyer, more monotonous place."

These pages have been written in vain if I have not made clear what the world owes this rare woman, not only for the sedulous care which kept the invalid genius alive long after the time allotted to him in the book of fate, but for the intellectual sympathy and keen discernment with which she stood beside him and

"Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,
Held still the target higher, chary of praise
And prodigal of counsel."

In speaking of literature's great debt to her, Lord Guthrie says:

"Without her Louis's best work neither could nor would have existed. In studying the life and works of Thomas Carlyle I often had occasion to contrast his wife and Louis's. With all Mrs. Carlyle's great and attractive qualities and her undoubted influence on her husband, she made his work difficult by her want of perspective, magnifying molehills into mountains. It could not be said that any of his great writings owed their existence to her."

An article appearing in the Literary Digest shortly after her death touches upon this point:

"Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson was content to remain in the background and let her husband reap all the glory for his literary achievements, and the result was that her part in his career had probably been minimized in the public mind. She was a great deal more than a mere domestic help meet."

From her old and attached friend, Mr. S. S. McClure, comes this sincere tribute:

"The more I saw of the Stevensons the more I became convinced that Mrs. Stevenson was the unique woman in the world to be Stevenson's wife.... When he met her her exotic beauty was at its height, and with this beauty she had a wealth of experience, a reach of imagination, a sense of humor, which he had never found in any other woman. Mrs. Stevenson had many of the fine qualities that we usually attribute to men rather than to women; a fair-mindedness, a large judgment, a robust, inconsequential philosophy of life, without which she could not have borne, much less shared with a relish equal to his own, his wandering, unsettled life, his vagaries, his gipsy passion for freedom. She had a really creative imagination, which she expressed in living. She always lived with great intensity, had come more into contact with the real world than Stevenson had done at the time when they met, had tried more kinds of life, known more kinds of people. When he married her, he married a woman rich in knowledge of life and the world.

"She had the kind of pluck that Stevenson particularly admired. He was best when he was at sea, and although Mrs. Stevenson was a poor sailor and often suffered greatly from seasickness, she accompanied him on all his wanderings in the South Seas and on rougher waters, with the greatest spirit. A woman who was rigid in small matters of domestic economy, who insisted on a planned and ordered life, would have worried Stevenson terribly.

"A sick man of letters never married into a family so well fitted to help him make the most of his powers. Mrs. Stevenson and both of her children were gifted; the whole family could write. When Stevenson was ill, one of them could always lend a hand and help him out. Without such an amanuensis as Mrs. Strong,[76] Mrs. Stevenson's daughter, he could not have got through anything like the amount of work he turned off. Whenever he had a new idea for a story, it met, at his own fireside, with the immediate recognition, appreciation, and enthusiasm so necessary to an artist, and which he so seldom finds among his own blood or in his own family.

[Footnote 76: Now Mrs. Salisbury Field.]

"After Stevenson disappeared in the South Seas, many of us had a new feeling about that part of the world. I remember that on my next trip to California I looked at the Pacific with new eyes; there was a glamour of romance over it. I always intended to go to Samoa to visit him; it was one of those splendid adventures that one might have had and did not.

"One afternoon in August, 1896, I went with Sidney Colvin and Mrs. Sitwell (now Lady Colvin) to Paddington Station to meet Mrs. Stevenson, when, after Stevenson's death she at last returned to Europe after her world-wide wanderings--after nine years of exile. When she alighted from the boat train I felt Stevenson's death as if it had happened only the day before, and I have no doubt that she did. As she came up the platform in black, with so much that was strange and wonderful behind her, his companion of so many years, through uncharted seas and distant lands, I could only say to myself: 'Hector's Andromache!'"[77]

[Footnote 77: Quoted from McClure's Magazine .]

She had one of those unusual personalities that attract other women as well as men, and one of them, Lady Balfour, writes of her from the point of view of her own sex:

"When Mrs. Stevenson heard of my engagement to Graham Balfour she wrote me the kindest and tenderest of letters, telling me not to have any fears in the new path that lay before me. She added: 'I who tell you so have trodden it from end to end.' This sympathy meant much to me, for it could only have come from such a generous heart as hers. She had hoped that Palema[78] would continue to make his home with them, and she had great confidence in and love for him. He would have been a link between her and the old associations of the Vailima life, and his engagement to an English girl proved to her that this would no longer be possible. Yet where a less fine nature would have contented itself with the mere formal congratulations as all that could be possible under the circumstances, she gave generous sympathy to a stranger, who caused her fresh loss, from her generous 'steel-true' heart.

[Footnote 78: Sir Graham Balfour's Samoan name.]

"I had been married about two years when Mrs. Stevenson came to England in 1898, and we were living at Oxford. I was naturally a little nervous as to my first introduction to her. My husband wanted to take me up to London to see her, but I asked to go alone, feeling somehow that it would be easier. To this day I remember the trepidation with which I followed the parlor maid upstairs in Oxford Terrace, and was ushered into the room where a lady of infinite dignity was lying on a sofa. It seems to me now that after one steady look from those searching 'eyes of gold and bramble dew' (which had rather the effect of a sort of spiritual X-ray), I lost my feeling of being on approval, and in ten minutes I was sitting on the floor beside the sofa, pouring out my own past history in remarkable detail, and feeling as if I had known Tamaitai for years.

"In the following summer, 1899, she came to stay with us at Oxford, to give Palema all the help she could about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson he had just undertaken at her urgent request. Incidentally, she was to be introduced to her godson, our eldest boy Gilbert, who was then about six months old. She gave him a christening present of a silver bowl for his bread and milk, upon a silver saucer which could be reversed and used also as a cover. On the covering side were the words from the Child's Garden:

'It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.'

"When the cover was taken off and used as a saucer it had on its concave side:

'A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table,
At least as far as he is able.'

"Tamaitai had had a