Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto and Windus edition by David Price, email [email protected]

MEMORIES AND
PORTRAITS

by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

fine-paper edition

london
CHATTO & WINDUS
1912

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

to
MY MOTHER
in the
name of past joy and present sorrow
I DEDICATE
these memories and portraits

S.S. “Ludgate Hill”
      within sight of Cape Race

NOTE

This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.  A certain thread of meaning binds them.  Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle—taken together, they build up a face that “I have loved long since and lost awhile,” the face of what was once myself.  This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.

My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed.  Of their descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and cannot divide interests.

Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in The Cornhill, Longman’s, Scribner, The English Illustrated, The Magazine of Art, The Contemporary Review; three are here in print for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as a private circulation.

R. L S.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

“This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin’ o’t.”

Two recent books [1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations.  Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch.  It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang.  Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech.  It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael’s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman.  English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition.  You may go all over the States, and—setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese—you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.  Book English has gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality of speech, vocal or verbal.  In like manner, local custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth century—imperia in imperio, foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull.  His is a domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick about the life of others.  In French colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.  But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance.  He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the same disdainful air that led him on to victory.  A passing enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his intimates.  He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any patience.  Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable—a staggering pretension.  So, when the Prince of Wales’s marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare—roast beef and plum pudding, and no tomfoolery.  Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.  We will not eat the food of any foreigner;