JOHN HENRY NASH <\REL> M. DEWlTT BOOKSKI.I.ER fUtO FOUUTEEN'TH ST. DAKL.ANX>. CA University of California Berkeley ^ I , A-/ "PL )/1, fix WESTERN CLASSICS NSONE u 01 THE SEA FOGS 1 U n nr THESEAFOGSJ A sheeted speftre white and tall, The cold mist climbs the castle wall And lays its hand upon thy cheek. LONGFELLOW. Albcrtine 5 2 THE SEA FOGS PI ' Id By Robert Louis Stevenson with an Introdu6lion by Thomas Rutherford Bacon The Photogravure Frontispiece after a Painting by Albertine Randall Wheelan Paul Elder and Company San Francisco and New York Copyright, 1907 PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY PI ID [1| INTRODUCTION ffl PI ID 'Robert Louis Stevenson first came to California in l8jq for the purpose of getting married. The things that delayed his marriage are sufficiently set forth in his "Letters" (edited by Sidney Col- vm) and in his "Life" (written by Graham Ealfour). It is here necessary to refer only to the last of the obstacles, the breaking down of his health. It is in connexion with the evil thing that came to him at this time that he jirst makes mention of "the sea fogs" that beset a large part of the California coast. He speaks of ni in PI =na INTRODUCTION^ them as poisonous ; and poisonous they are to any one who is affliSled with pulmonary weakness, but bracing and glorious to others. They give the charm of climate to dwellers around the great bay. How he took this jirst very serious attack of the terrible malady is indicated in the letter to ILdmund Gosse, dated April 16, 1880. His attitude toward death is shown here, and is further shown in his little paper ^Es Triplex, in which he successfully vindicates his generation from the charge of cowardice in the face of death. Eh ID PI ==3D [|| INTRODUCTION^ ni in Stevenson's two distinguishing characteristics were his courage and his determination to be happy as the right way of making other people happy. His courage ', far more than change of scene and climate, gave him fourteen more years in which to contribute to the sweetness and light of the world. These years were made fruitful to others by his determined happiness y a happiness in which the main fator y outside of his own determination , came from the companionship which his marriage brought to him. The great prin- n in PI ZZZ3D fll INTRODUCTION |[] Pi iD ciples by which he lived influenced those who did not know him per- sonally, through his gift of writ- ing. He always maintained that it was not a gift but an achieve- ment, and that any one could write as well as he by taking as much pains. We may well doubt the soundness of this theory, but we cannot doubt the spiritual attitude from which it came. It came from no mock humility, but from a feeling that nothing was credita- ble to him except what he did. He asked no credit for the talents committed to his charge. He asked CM iv ni no [1| INTRODUCTION^ PI iD credit only for the use be made of the talents. Stevenson was married May ig, 1880. His health, which had delayed the marriage, determined the character of the honeymoon. He must get away from the coast and its fogs. His honeymoon ex- periences are recorded in one of the most delightful of his minor writings y "T&e Silverado Squat- ters." He went, with his wife 9 bis stepson and a dog, to squat on the eastern shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, a noble mountain which closes and dominates the PI ID ai in HI INTRODUCTION |[| m n Napa Valley, a wonderful and fertile valley, running northward from the bay of San Francisco. Silverado was a deserted mining- camp. Stevenson has intimated that there are more ruined cities in California than in the land of Eashan, and in one of these he took up his residence for about two months, "camping" in the deserted quarters of the extinEi mining company. Had he gone a little beyond the toll-house, just over the shoulder of the mountain, he would probably never have seen the glory of "the sea fogs" It Pi ID PI Id fll INTRODUCTION^ PI in would have been better for his health but worse for English literature. My first knowledge of that glory came to me twenty years ago. I had come to California to care for one dearly beloved by me, who was fighting the same fight that Ste- venson fought, and against the same enemy, and who was fighting it just as bravely. I took him to the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains in the hope that we might escape the fogs. As I watched on the porch of the little cottage where he lay, I saw night PI ID vii ni in INTRODUCTION^ PI ID after night what I believe to be the most beautiful of all natural phenomena, the sea fog of the Pacific, seen from above. Under the full moon, or under the early sun which slowly withers it away, the great silver sea with its dark islands of redwood seemed to me the most wonderful of things. With my wonder and delight, perhaps making them more poig- nant, was the fear lest the glory should mount too high, and lay its attractive hand on my beloved. The fog has been dear to me ever since. I have often grumbled at PI in viii m in [|| INTRODUCTION^ u // 'when I was in it or under it, but when I have seen it from above, that first thrill of won- der and delight has come back to me always. Whether on the Berkeley hills I see its irresistible columns moving through the Gol- den Gate across the bay to take possession of the land, or whether I stand on the height of Tamal- pais and look at the white y tangled flood below , " My be art leaps up when I behold" It remains to me " A vision, a delight and a desire " x n in H| INTRODUCTION^ PI ID When the beauty of the fog first got hold of me, I wondered whether any one had given literary expres- sion to its supreme charm. I searched the works of some of the better-known California poets 9 not quite without result. I was familiar with what seem to me the best of the serious verses of BretHarte, the lines on San Fran- cisco , wherein the city is pic- tured as a penitent Magdalen, cowled in the grey of the Fran- ciscans, the soft pale grey of the sea fog. The literary value of the figure is hardly injured by ni in n n [II INTRODUCTION |[] Dl ID that the penitence of this particular Magdalen has never been of an enduring quality. It is to be noted that what Harte speaks of is not the beauty of the fog 9 but its sobriety and dignity. Sill, with his susceptibility to the infinite variety of nature and with the spark of the divine fire which burned in him, refers often to some of the effects of the fog, such as the wonderful sunset colors on the Berkeley hills in summer. But I find only one dire 51 allusion to the beauty of the fog itself: PI HZ3D zi n\ ID Hi INTRODUCTION^ U\ Z3D *"Tbere lies a little city in the bills ; White are its roofs, dim is each dwelling s door. And peace with perfeft rest its bosom Jills. "There the pure mist, the pity of the sea, Comes as a white, soft hand, and reaches o'er And touches its still face most tenderly." In 1887 I had not read " The Silverado Squatters" Part of it had been published in Scribner's Magazine. // was only in the following year that I got hold of *Tbis exquisite little poem is unaccountably omitted from the Household (and persumably complete) Edition of Stirs poems issued by Hough ton, Mifflin & Co., igo6. It is found in the little volume, " Poems,' * by Edward Rowland Sill, published by the same firm at an earlier date. Mountain View Cemetery is no longer a ' * little city. * * PI ID xii m in []| INTRODUCTION the book and found an almost ade- quate expression of my own feel- ing about the sea fogs. Stevenson did not know all their beauty, for he was not here long enough, but he could tell what he saw. In other words, he had a gift which is denied to most of us. Silverado is now a quite impossi- ble place for squatting. When I first tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak and rat- tlesnakes that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know at that time that I was quite immune from the poi- Di ZIZID ziii n in H| INTRODUCTION^ son of the oak and that the Cali- fornia rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal as yohn Muir has since assured us that be is. The last time that I passed Silverado 9 it was acces- sible only by the aid of a gang of wood-choppers. Curiously, the last great fog effect that I have seen was almost the same which Stevenson has de- scribed. Last summer we had been staying for a month with our friends who have a summer home about three miles beyond Steven- son's "toll-house" It is, I believe, zzi xiv n INTRODUCTION //20J-/ beautiful country-seat on this round earth, and its free and gentle hospitality cannot be sur- passed. We left this delightful place of sojourning between three and four o clock in the morning to catch the early train from Calis- toga. Our steep climb up to the toll-house was under the broad smile of the moon, which gradually gave way to the brilliant dawn. When we passed the toll-house, the whole Napa Valley should have been revealed to us, but it was not. The fog had surged through it and had hidden it. xv ai ID [1| INTRODUCTION^ m in What we saw was better than the beautiful Napa Valley. I should like to tell what we saw, but I cannot 9 "For what can the man do who cometh after the king?" xvi D THE SEA FOGS II in HI THE SEA FOGS D' A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk and sepa- rated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with ft THE SEA FOGS |5 m in sunlight in a wonderful com- pound of gold and rose and green ; and this too would kin- dle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier light. One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had been THE SEA FOGS " PI ID very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed, not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform. m "THE SEA FOGS iff PI ID The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed. Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and THE SEA FOGS PI ID had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen these in- undations from below; at Cal- istoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the in- valid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the sub- mergence of the valley, was strangely different and even de- Dl ID ll THE SEA FOGS lightful to the eyes. Faraway were hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the Heb- rides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly in- creased the effed:, that breath- less, crystal stillness over all. Pi ID THE SEA FOGS Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morn- ing tremble with a sound. As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general sur- face, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the PI ID gi no THE SEA FOGS |(] horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea ; and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promon- tory of the hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reap- peared in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and m in THE SEA FOGS only to be swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing after another ; although sometimes there was none of this forerun- ning haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of moun- ni ID I THE SEA FOGS PI ID tain at a gulp. It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains. And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome. The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or some other very great bird of the moun- tain, came wheeling over the D ID 10 THE SEA FOGS PI g nearer pinetops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad on that un- wonted desolation, spying, per- haps with terror, for the eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again toward Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make PI ID 1 1 ll THE SEA FOGS Pi ID their reappearance into day- light. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah's flood ; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire. I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enor- mously since last I saw it ; and a few hundred feet below me, Pi ID 12 ll THE SEA FOGS || in the deep gap where the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long, stri- dent sighing mounted to me where I stood. Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite side of the gap, 13 Hi THE SEA FOGS ni m though a shoulder of the moun- tain still warded it out of our canyon. Napa Valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pour- ing over into Lake County in a huge, ragged cataradt, tossing treetops appearing and disap- pearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea-salt. Had it not been for two Dl in 4 THE SEA FOGS in things the sheltering spur which answered as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed whatever mounted our own little platform in the canyon must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poi- sonous air. As it was, the in- terest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down ni Elba '5 "THE SEA FOGS iff into the other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a strange, im- petuous, silent, shifting exhibi- tion of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from moment to mo- ment like figures in a dream. The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed the deluge,! should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have been simi- lar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in de- Dl ID 16 " THE SEA FOGS PI =3D lighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play. As I ascended the mountainside, I came once more to overlook the upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appear- ance from what I had beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high over- head, and its surface shone and PI ID 17 Si THE SEA FOGS HI undulated like a great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And, next, the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hun- dred feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all the broken country be- low me still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with So- noma on the west. On the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsub- merged; and through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue zzba if THE SEA FOGS PI clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, follow- ing the watershed; and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern sky. Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side, the deluge was im- mense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it, ris- ing and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its course was like a mountain Pi '9 i THE SEA FOGS 10 PI in torrent. Here and there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drown- ing man. But still the imagi- nation was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more. Had this indeed been water ( as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowel- ling mountains and deracinating pines! And yet water it was, DC 20 THE SEA FOGS PI =UD and sea-water at that true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops. I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado, and ad- mire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher ; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow over 21 THE SEA FOGS " ni in and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little plat- form, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, how- ever, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, Pi 22 THE SEA FOGS " PI =3D all that world of sea fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air. This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were 23 THE SEA FOGS not again assailed, nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado. pi ID 24 en in HERE ENDS N.9 ONE THE WESTERN CLASSICS BEING THE SEA FOGS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS RUTHERFORD BACON fif A PHOTO- GRAVURE FRONTISPIECE AFTER A PAINTING BY ALBERTINE RANDALL WHEELAN OF THIS FIRST EDITION ONE THOUSAND COPIES HAVE BEEN ISSUED PRINTED UPON FABRIANO HANDMADE PAPER THE TYPOG- RAPHY DESIGNED BY J. H. NASH PUBLISHED BY PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY & DONE INTO A BOOK FOR THEM AT THE TOMOYE PRESS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK MCMVII PI ID