Memories and Portraits

by Robert Louis Stevenson
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
I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
III. OLD MORALITY

IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER

VI. PASTORAL
VII. THE MANSE

VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
IX. THOMAS STEVENSON

X. TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
XI. TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER

XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"

XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE

XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE
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 livelycontact 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 vassal 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; nor, when we have the

chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself. The same spirit
inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands

of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openlyprofessed their
ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam
is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.

For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and
nothing more. He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let

him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to
the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten

Wyoming? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used
over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee

States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the
bucket. And we find in his book a vast virginignorance of the

life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not
raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to

a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not
American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in

reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to
their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the

silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where
to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my

countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the
case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyoming

is, after all, more readilyaccessible to Mr. White than Boston to
the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better

justified than the Britannic.
It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most

ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the
States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his

opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own
door. There is one country, for instance - its frontier not so far

from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all
essentials with the English - of which I will go bail he knows

nothing. His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described;
it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once travelled with a

man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a University man,
as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in

life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were