THE LIBRARY OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELESTHE BEST THING IN EDINBURGHTHE BEST THING IN EDINBURGH
AN ADDRESS
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON TO THE SPECULATIVE SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH <׳ IN MARCH 1873
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KATHARINE D. OSBOURNE
SAN FRANCISCO
JOHN HOWELL 1923Copyright, 1923, by John Howell, San Francisco Printed in the United States of America Imperial and International copyright secured All rights reserved in all countriesTHERE is in Scotland a literary club known as the Speculative Society, or, by its members, "The Spec” Its rooms are housed in the buildings of the University of Edinburgh, though the Society has no official connection with that institution.
The Speculative Society was long in existence before the days of Robert Louis Stevenson. Indeed, on its roll of membership are the names of Scott, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, and Robert Emmet. It was on the 16th of February, 1869, that Stevenson was elected one of its thirty ordinary, or active, members. It was a great event in its annals though naturally unperceived at the time. In spite of all the great names on its roll that ofStevenson has carried the Society’s name the farthest and given it moStfame.
One who is familiar with the broken fragments ofautobiography will recall Stevenson’s description of the Spec rooms, the men he met there and also pictures of himself within its walls.
Stevenson was very unpopular at firSt; a generous, flighty, variable youth, given to conversable temper, and rather too radical and opinionated, so the other members thought. His firSt appearance was a humiliation to him. But he steadily grew in favor.
In 1872 he was elected one ofthe five presidents, though he received the smallest number of votes of those chosen. But the followingyear when re-eleCted his choice was without contest.
Five years later he had contemplated resigning entirely from the Spec, but being once more elected to office his valediction was changed to an address ofacceptance and yet it remained somewhat in the spirit of withdrawal.
fHow his spoken words on that occasion were preserved I do not know, unless in the minutes of the meeting. A copy ofsome record was preserved by Stevenson’s mother and after her death it was found among her personal papers.
In the "Life”of R. L. S. some quotations are given from it, the whole being too lengthy for the purposes of the biographer. Yet lovers ofStevenson who wait on every added report of the scintillating, fascinating character will without doubt welcome the complete text of Stevenson’s lafi address to the Speculative Society which he thought "the belt thing in Edinburgh.” *The address published in this little volume is taken from the transcript kept by Stevenson’s mother.
Katharine D. OsbourneTHE BEST THING IN EDINBURGH
AN ADDRESS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON TO THE SPECULATIVE SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH MARCH 1873
GENTLEMEN: In a finely speculative sense, I am a person of venerable age and I am beginning to feel myself in the way. It does not do for a member to hang too long about our Society. The presence of those who have acquired by long habit
a dapper volubility that sounds almost profane in the ears of younger members, is apt to exercise a damping influence upon the rest of the meeting. And the constant and often doubtful appeal to past custom is bad in every way for the right order of our proceedings. It tends to prevent that continual readjustment of the pra&ice to the written law, which is only rendered possible by the removal of those who have
become hardened in loose customs.
It is a rule of life, gentlemen, that the old must make way
for the young; and I had quite made up my mind that it was time for me to give up my totem and spear to some younger chieftain, and be left behind in the snow, warming my hands at the embers your charity had left for me to die over, while the rest of the tribe swept forward and out of sight. Such, however, was not your intention, gentlemen. More civilized than Red Indians, you gave me a year’s respite and sele&ed me President; all of which was very kind, but it has, unhappily, spoiled my proje&ed valedidory.
I had intended, gentlemen, to leave the Society for good at the end of this session and to have read you a very affed-
3ing address upon the strength of my determination. Yet, as I think over all the good times that I have had within these four walls, I am not sorry that you have postponed my exit and aborted all my unspoken eloquence. Looking back, as I do now, upon the speculative past, I feel somewhat in the vein of the man Wordsworth talks about,—
"Who when his house is built,
A frame, locked up in wood and Stone,
Doth Still, as impotent fancy prompts,
By his fireside, rebuild it to his liking. ”
Not that I would rebuild it all; only there are some few weak parts in the design—sundry foolish notions, illegal rulings, unrepressed loquacities—that, if I could, I own, I should be very glad to cancel. As a whole, however, I look back upon these good times with much regret. I think you too will find it comes strangely to you—left-handedly, so to speak—when you have to leave this room for the last time and to shut the door behind you upon three years of happy life.
Your retrospect, at least, you will take away with you, at your departure. And who can tell how interesting these trivial reminiscences may become hereafter?
Jeffrey,you remember, chronicles Scott sitting at that table with a great woolen nightcap drawn snugly over his ears, and apologizing in quaint terms for the strange figure that he presented to the worshipful Society. It must have seemed a very slight matter at the time to Jeffrey, and for long after. But as it came out this Secretary, with the "ponderous machine” (as Jeffrey called it) drawn over his ears, proved
4one of Scotland’s greatest men. Scott’s fame cast an interest over this little occurrence, just as it has cast an interest over the ill-written, ill-spelled minutes that we keep preserved in the next room.
And who knows, gentlemen, with what Scotts and Jeffreys we may not be sharing this meeting-hall: about what great men we shall not have curious anecdotes to tell over dining tables and to write to their biographers in a fine, shaky, octogenarian hand? Nor to us alone shall such apotheosized remembrances be dearest.
We shall have many stories, too, of fellow members who did not come to the surface in after life, or of some who went straightway to the bottom.
Many "vivas” to those who have failed, to those whose "war-vessels sank in the sea” if you will let me quote Walt Whitman. We someday shall know how these unsuccessful men contributed to our success. And we shall be able to apply the same course of reasoning to ourselves as to the men who have yet been more successful. Yes—if there be some budding Scott or new Shakespeare incubating his fine parts, we, gentlemen, shall all have had a hand in the finished article. Some thoughts of ours, some way of thinking will have taken hold upon his mind, some seasonable repartee, some happy word will have fallen on the "good soil” of his genius which afterwards brought forth a hundred fold. We shall all have had a hand, I repeat, at making that Shakespeare or that Scott.
"Speculative” evenings form pretty salient mile-stones on our intellectual journey. Looking back along mine, I see a
5good deal of distance got over. Whether well or ill—I am not here to judge.
It is about five years since I made my first appearance and my first speech in this hall. At the time the hall seemed gloomy and my fellow members struck me as aged, formal and impressive. I felt uneasy at their familiarity with each other and at the curious natural aggregation which kept drawing them together into various little groups and coteries, and which always left me excluded and alone.
When anyone spoke to me it was more like alms-giving than conversation. I felt all the loneliness of a boy’s first day at school. When the "Interval” was over I made a speech in a nervous exaltation that no language we have is adequate to describe. A thick white vapour seemed to fill the room up to the level of my eyes, submerging the secretary, the librarian and the ruck of other members. I could see only the president towering above on his raised platform, gloomy and awful.
After the meeting the same aggregative principle that had drawn the members into groups, settled my fellow members into similar groups for the walk homeward and as before left me out. I had no common interests with the others: no old stories to retail. Any remark of mine was a hazardous experiment, and it ended my night by my walking home alone, and in the blackness of despondency. How I should have laughed anyone to scorn who had stopped me then on the Bridge and told me that I should spend in this Society some of the happiest hours of my life and make friends among those who were then so forbiddingly polite.
I am now approaching my second "Speculative” childhood
6—when I shall come up here to find other members arisen that know not Joseph—to find at the "Interval” drawing into new coteries as exclusive of me as on the night of my first appearance, find them busy with new, interests, discussing the misdeed of a new secretary, waited on (who knows) by a new servitor, when I shall be a mere phantom, a sorry anachronism—an historical allusion.
No, gentlemen, I shall be no Rip Van Winkle nor an Extraordinary to trouble with my forgotten humors the tenor of future sessions. I shall rather steal in here at early morning, or on Saturday, when I shall be able to moralize, alone and to my fill, over the tombstone in the lobby, smoke a pipe-full of old memories up and down the library matting and sing to the empty walls:
Ring,Pondion; he is dead—
All my friends are lapped in lead.
But I am keeping you too long. I know that our annual burlesque is near an end and I see all the charaders gathered already upon the stage against the final tableau.
On the right hand the Secretary and Mr. Maitland Thompson are burying the hatchet of dissension, while on the left a member has been dining with Mr. Barclay and is now going through an elaborate and beautiful series of equilibrations. A little farther back can be seen the hospitable Mr. Barclay himself engaged in advertising for a companion to travel with him to Timbudoo. Mr. Stevenson is engaged in explaining to the other members that he is the cleverest person of his age and weight between here and CaliforniaThe Librarian is preparing his well known feat of borrowing more than six volumes at a time from the library. Mr. Macrae is writing a continuation of the Society’s History and Messrs. Robertson and MacArthur a&ively moving the previous question.
But hark! The gentlemanly condu&or taps attention with his baton on the music stand in front of him. With a little chime on the triangle the Orchestra flows out into a brilliant dance motif, in time to which the members bestir their limbs, all in time, yet each with a special character of his own. For example, the Secretary and Mr. Maitland Thompson in a concerted figure represent mutual forgiveness. The gentleman who has been dining with Mr. Barclay is in a pas seul expressive of not being sober.
Some one sets a light to the red earth on the side-wing. There is a great glare. The dance ceases. The Fairy Holiday rises through a trap doors and proceeds to make unusual transformations. Mr. Ormond is changed into a candelabra, Mr. Stevenson into a remitted fine, and Professor Wilson into a cocked hat. And then, amidst the deafening applause of the whole audience and the last cymbal-clash of orchestration the curtain falls upon the hundred and.... session of the Speculative Society.
Valete Fratres
Robert Louis Stevenson
8Of this book 250 copies have been printed on hand-made paper and 15 copies on Japanese vellum for John Howell. "Typography designed by Edwin E. Grabhorn. Printed by The Kennedy-tenBosch Company, San Francisco, under direction of Haywood H. Hunt.
This is copy No. 3 0^ of the hand-made paper edition.