第12章 HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED(2)

"Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his relationship, remote though it was, to 'the Wolf of Badenoch,' who burned Elgin Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he thought the Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France...

.Also among Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later Gordons of Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as 'Earl Beardie,' the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink from him'; Lady Jean Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey with the horn,' and latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the last Laird of Edzell [a lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who ended his days as hostler at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad-singer.

"Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity to Robert Fergusson.It is more than probable that there was a distant maternal affinity as well.Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it is probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who previously owned Logie.Fergusson's mother, Elizabeth Forbes, was the daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant tradition is stated to have been of the house of Tolquhon.

It would certainly be interesting if this suggested connection could be proved." (5)

"From his Highland ancestors," says the QUARTERLY REVIEW, "Louis drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of infectious terror."

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry reappear and transform other strains, strangely the more remote often being the strongest and most persistent and wonderful.

"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr Baildon, "that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his person, character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back to the Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy.Stevenson thus drew in Celtic strains from both sides - from the Balfours and the Stevensons alike - and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often far-removed fancies we have the finest and most effective witness of it."

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct contact and contrast in an article he wrote in THE DAILY CHRONICLE

on the appearance of the LETTERS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS.

"These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of those sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, 'heartless and happy, lackeying their god.' The strains of his heredity were very curiously, but very clearly, mingled.It may surprise some readers to find him speaking of 'the family evil, despondency,' but he spoke with knowledge.He inherited from his father not only a stern Scottish intentness on the moral aspect of life ('I would rise from the dead to preach'), but a marked disposition to melancholy and hypochondria.From his mother, on the other hand, he derived, along with his physical frailty, a resolute and cheery stoicism.These two elements in his nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from without -

ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions - were by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul.His spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear.It is clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance of Carlylean gloom.He was twenty-four when he wrote thus, from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:

"'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work.

I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in the evening.It is surprising how it suits me, and how happy I keep.'

"This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of fuliginous elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-

consuming faculty, and an inflexible will to use it.Nine years later he thus admonishes his backsliding parent:

"'MY DEAR MOTHER, - I give my father up.I give him a parable: