Thoughtful Moments

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 57, 16 March 1945, Page 2

Thoughtful Moments

(Supplied by the Whakatf*

ROBERT LOUNS STEVENSON

HIS MESSAGE FOR TODAY

By Lett ice Milne Rae

Fifty years have passed since December 1894, when the news was 3 ' flashed across the sea from his island home in Jar-oil' Samoa to the old grey city of his birth that he had loved so passionately—Robert Louis. Stevenson was dead.

Even those who had never actually known R. L. S. felt that they had lost a friend with whom

through his writings, they had formed an intimate acquaintance. Did not Sir James Barrie once say that R. L. S. were the best-loved initials in the English language? It was the same fellow countryman and craftsman* who defined genius as "the power to be a boy again at will." Such was the genius of Robert Louis Stevenson. The charm of his "Child's Garden of Verses" has perhaps more than any other of his works given token of this genius and established him in the hearts of those who reading them 5 live over again the dear dead days of their own childhood. So many and so vivid are the experiences. one has shared with him— watching the lighting of "the lamp before the door" in darkening city streets; the hours spent in the "pleasant land of Counterpane"; the strange sensations of "getting up by candlelight" on winter mornings and in the long northern twilights of Scottish summers of "going to bed by clay."

Stevenson's popularity has long been established throughout the Eng-lish-speaking workl, nor has it diminished in the half century since his death. Many reasons may be. assigned for this. Perhaps the deepest of these is the need that men and women have felt, and feel more than ever today when pain and sorrow and terror stalk the land for

the message he proclaimed—the great task of cheerfulness in the grim warfare of life.

"There is no duty we underrate so much as the duty of being happy. . . . A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a live pounfd note. . . .If your moral<s are dreary, depend upon it tlicy are wrong." These are some of his say. ings ta'ken at random from various

sources. Surprising as it may seem this doctrine had its foundation for him in the nowadaj ? s much maligned Shorter Catechism of the Scottish Church that he had learned as a

at Ministers' Association}.

OUR SUNDAY MESSAGE

eli i Id. The child was the lather of the man. The son of a lather ol' stern, somewhat narrow Calvinistic outlook and on his mother's a grandson of the Manse R. L .S. has. described himself as an "eminently religious child." "You can never be good unless you pray/' was a pronouncement of his fourth year, tenderly recorded by his. mother. When a.v.ked how he knew, he replied : "Because I've tried it," But it was to "Cummie " his beloved and de. voted nurse whose name is known wherever Stevenson is read that he owed even more than to his parents what he lias called his, "covenanting childhood." Alison Cuningham taught her lit-, tie charge his Bible and Shorter Catechism and steeped his impressionable mind in all the doctrines of her faith. His opinions, on Church matters were also derived from her.

Long after he. had passed from nursery days and Cummic's loving domination, he retained much that he had learned from hei\ and never ? eveji in the turbulent period of his youthful revolt against the bondage of the smug respectabilities and conventions ol' society, did he lose his reverence for "holy things." For him to the end of his as llossetti has "To hear them mocked brought pain: They were my childhood."

In the listt of books compiled by himself as having influenced him he says "I must name the Progress ' a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion." It was the book lie knew best perhaps in all English literature and the one to which he most often alluded. It had figured prominently in his childhood—a Bagster edition with 'the quaint, realistic woodcuts that have fascinated more, than one generation of Scottish children.

Earliest liveth last. In his Samoan days ? when his wanderings in "l'ar countries" were over and the rebel-t lions of his youth were que!led ? -he reverted again to the principles of his "covenanting childhood." "I feel every day as if religion had a greater interest for me," lie writes in one of his letters. The prayers he wrote towards the end of his life for the family worship at Vailima are masterpieces' in the literature of devotion. He went to the Pacific with a deep hostility towards missions and missionaries but before long he 9 became an enthusiast both for the men and the work they did. Abridged from "The British Weekly."