Robert Louis Stevenson

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS

'These are thy works, O father, these thy crown,Whether on high the air be pure they shineAlong the yellowing sunset, and all nightAmong the unnumbered stars of God they shine.Or whether fogs arise, and far and wideThe low sea-level drown—each finds a tongue,And all night long the tolling bell resounds.So shine so toll till night be overpast,Till the stars vanish, till the sun return,And in the haven rides the fleet at last.'—R. L. Stevenson.

In no country in the world is heredity more respected than in Scotland, and her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the successes of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of life their ancestors waged from generation to generation. We of the present are 'the heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no small degree the clay from the potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the natures, physical and mental, of those who have gone before us, and whose lives and circumstances have made us what we are.

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson—for so the writer whom the world knows as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised—valued greatly this doctrine of heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his ancestry and antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and character. He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his forefathers, which made him desire to be, in his own widely differing life-work, as good a man as they.

... 'And I—can I be base?'—he says;'I must arise, O father, and to portSome lost complaining seaman pilot home.'

He had reason to think highly of the honourable name which he received from his father's family. Britain and the whole world has much for which to thank the Stevensons; not only all along our rough north coasts, but in every part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their beacon's blaze have the firm, who are consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those lights of which Rudyard Kipling in his 'Songs of the English,' sings—

'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees;Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas;From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe,The coastguard lights of England watch the ships of England go.'

Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of the sister kingdoms, but from their dreariest points the lights that have been kindled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and his descendants flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of Stevenson a word of blessing to the storm-tossed sailor.

The author was third in descent from that Robert Stevenson, who, by skill and heroism, planted the lighthouse on the wave-swept Bell Rock—only uncovered for the possibility of work for a short time at low tides—and made safety on the North Sea, where before there had been death and danger, from the cruel cliffs that guard that iron coast.

What child has not thrilled and shivered over the ballad of 'Ralph the Rover,' who, hoping doubtless that the wrecked ships might fall into his own piratical hands, cut the bell which the good monks of Aberbrothock had placed on the fatal rock, and who, by merited justice, was for lack of the bell himself, on his return voyage, lost on that very spot! What boy has not loved the story of one of the greatest engineering feats that patience and skill has ever accomplished!

If other young folk so loved it what a depth of interest must not that noble story have had for the grandson of the hero, whose childish soul was full of chivalry and romance, and whose boyish eyes saw visions of the future and pictures of the past as no ordinary child could see them, for his was the gift of genius, and even the commonplace things of life were glorified to him.

Alan Stevenson, who was the father of Robert, died of fever when in the island of St Christopher on a visit to his brother, who managed the foreign business of the Glasgow West India house with which they were connected....