A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

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Byron May Clarissa Gillington. A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

A DAY WITH STEVENSON

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Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been permitted to enter its doors – you might account yourself a somewhat favoured person. For the master of the house, "that rickety and cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the nonce – shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing hemorrhage. Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest you left contagion of that cold.

But if fate befriended you, you would chance upon the most remarkable personality, it might be, that you had yet encountered. A lean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic of gesture – pacing up and down the room as he talked – burning with hectic energy – a man of rich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin: mutable, mirthful, brilliant – above all "vital," as he had described himself, "wholly vital with a buoyance of life" which had upborne him hitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.

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The motives which had led him into authorship – or rather forced him, despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances, – were as curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which still drove him hard and incessantly. To fame he was perhaps not wholly indifferent. No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether. Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and beyond the appreciation of the general public. For money, – though it was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year, – for money he did not care, except as a means to an end. "Wealth is only useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly want." Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was true. It was for money only, no doubt, that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of tushery," The Black Arrow, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself ill at ease. But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home."

And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more than justified his choice.

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