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Robert Louis Stevenson

Novelist, poet and travel writer: ‘Even when he brooded over the physical and metaphysical nightmares ... the vagaries of his inspirations were kept in check by exquisite taste and sound literary judgment’

18 December 1894

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, and was the son of Thomas Stevenson, Secretary to the Commissioners of Northern Lights, and the greatest practical authority on lighthouses of his generation. It was he who built the lighthouse at Skerryvore. Louis Stevenson, as he was familiarly called, was educated at private schools and the University of Edinburgh, and had been brought up for the law. We believe he served his apprenticeship to a Writer to the Signet and he was subsequently called to the Bar. But he never cared to tread the salle des pas perdus in the old Scottish Parliament House, and he wrote feelingly in his ‘Picturesque Edinburgh’ of that dreary purgatory of the gossiping unbriefed. The roving spirit and an hereditary tendency to literature were too strong for him. Nor can we conceive Mr. Stevenson submitting himself to the drudgery of legal routine, and bending his neck to the yoke of exacting Scottish observances. For he was always unconventional – in his costume, in the very cut of his hair, and, above all, in the brilliancy of his conversation and in his unrivalled talent as a raconteur.

For example, the friends whom he fascinated have often heard him tell the story of the Bottle of Rousillon, which appears as a chapter in The Wrecker, and he never told it exactly in the same way, but always with new and more piquant embellishments. He went abroad for his health and it was borne in upon him to narrate his experiences. Whether he wrote of California or the Cevennes, the charm of the polished narrative was irresistible. Yet he never realised his veritable vocation, till he floated into fame, in 1883, after the cruise to his Treasure Island.

His first books had rather a succès d’estime, although they had commended themselves to the appreciation of the most capable critics. It is very much to say of him that he subsequently made himself popular, without degenerating from that refined literary standard. It was no longer a question of settling to the practice of law in Edinburgh. He exchanged Scotland for the French Bohemia and became for a time a denizen of the Quartier Latin, while he was always the bienvenu in the artist colony at Barbizon. It seems strange, by the way, but the only reminiscences of those pleasant Fontainebleau visits are to be found in one of his latest novels, The Wrecker.

We need not catalogue his works in chronological order. His health had always been feeble. He gratefully dedicated the Child’s Garden of Verses to the good old lady who had lovingly nursed him into boyhood. Too soon again his strength showed signs of failing and it was delicacy of the chest which first sent him abroad. But he had always sufficient command of money, and latterly, at least, his malady and anxieties were alleviated by an ample and increasing income. English editors and publishers treated him handsomely; as for the Americans, their passion for him made them forget their usual sharp practice with unfortunate English authors; and their flattery took the agreeable form of substantial cheques. The descendant of sea-faring Norsemen was free to indulge his love for the sea, and when living on shore he could choose his places of residence at such sunny marine resorts as Bournemouth or Torquay.

As for his native Edinburgh, much as he admired it, he wisely avoided what he has denounced as the vilest climate in the world. Finally, the man who paints himself in the New Arabian Nights as the misanthrope of the Fiji Sandhills, had sought a home in the South Seas where he was destined to die. But to the last he never lost touch with his countrymen, nor interest in that new world where he was naturalised; and the magician of the realms of romance was still the hardheaded Scotchman, as has been proved by his exhaustive communications to us on the troubled politics of Samoa.

The death leaves a melancholy blank in the literary world. We regret Mr. Stevenson selfishly as well as sincerely, because in the crowd of successful and rising writers there is no one left who can even approximately fill his place. He had the instincts and susceptibilities of a born man of letters, and it is noteworthy that his earliest productions were not the least finished of his works. His most marked characteristics were distinctly his own, which is only another way of saying that he had rare and special genius. Though he had innumerable admirers in his own craft animated by laudable ambition, and stimulated by no dishonourable envy, no one has rivalled, or even approached, him in his special lines.

To begin with, he had the charming and exquisitely graceful style which seems to have come naturally to him, and within certain wide though well-defined limits his versatility was as remarkable as his brilliancy. His tact and self-knowledge assured him against attempting anything where he was likely to fail. Yet no one could be less monotonous in the manner of his workmanship or the selection of his subjects. Few would have predicted that the vivacious author of the uneventful Inland Voyage and the Travels with a Donkey, would have cast irresistible spells on the devourers of sensational fiction as the author of Treasure Island or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Yet there is evidence of the same dramatic power in all these books; although in the former the dramatic element is toned down to the sober key in which the thoughtful travels are narrated.

But whether Stevenson indulged in fond and picturesque recollections of the scenes and circumstances of his childhood and youth; whether he threw off his spirited, or pathetic verses or wrote fairy tales to please childish fancies; whether he gave free rein to a wonderfully vivid imagination in his wild romances of the Scottish Highlands and the South Seas or in almost grotesque extravaganzas of superstition and crime; even when he brooded over the physical and metaphysical nightmares which shaped themselves under the master’s touch into terribly impressive possibilities, the vagaries of his inspirations were invariably kept in check by exquisite taste and sound literary judgment.

That his genius had a morbid tinge there is no denying, and, indeed, it is to that we are indebted for his most marvellous tours d’esprit. We fancy we can trace through the varied series of his writings the sad story of failing health, of broken nights, and the sowing of the seeds of pulmonary disease. He had his moods of inspired depression and pessimism, even while the vigorous intellectual powers were still unimpaired. The Suicide Club, with its forbidding title, The Dynamiter, and the Dr. Jekyll may suffice to show that. But even in his middle life when memory revived early recollections, what can be fresher or more healthy?

Even as a youth he had learned to shudder at the fogs and winds and gray skies of his birthplace. Yet ‘the romantic town’ of ‘Marmion’ was a ‘meet nurse’ for such a poetic child. He revelled in the beauties of the scene and the wild romance of the associations, from the castle on its hill, down the High-street and gloomy Canongate to the Palace of Holyrood; from the Heart of Midlothian to the Queensferry of The Antiquary.

In fact he was sitting at the feet of Scott, whom he worshipped. Like Scott he was the best of companions and the soul of good fellowship, as is shown in the dedication to one of his novelettes, when he fondly recalls the debates in the Speculative Society and the subsequent adjournments to some favourite convivial haunt. But there is far more of Sterne than Scott in the narratives of his early wanderings. He models himself on the author of The Sentimental Journey, though in more masculine vein. The Inland Voyage was the travel of a romancist who consciously made mountains of molehills and who succeeded in extending the hallucination to his readers. Always original, he struck sympathetically into a vein the riches of which had for long been left unworked; and we can almost fancy that the title of With a Donkey in the Cevennes was ironically meant as an aggressive challenge to critical innocence. But the reviewers took the writer pleasantly and seriously, and he might well have been proud of the eulogies of hyper-critical connoisseurs.

The stories of his philosophical wanderings and ponderings, his poetry, his essays, and his ‘familiar studies’ might each have entitled him to a high place in literature, but it is as the popular novelist that he will be most widely remembered. Dramatic imagination comes to the aid of a realism which vividly reflects the scenes as his fancy paints them. We are haunted with the Highland outlaws and join in the revels of the pirates. Incident succeeds swiftly to incident, and each striking situation has its direct relation to the steady development of the ingenious plot. The interest never flags, and the curiosity is perpetually being stimulated. In the incidents there is almost invariably characteristic originality, and the situations, although often unexpected, are never unnatural.

Most sensational writers devote themselves to developing the stage action and are either indifferent to the interpretation of character or incapable of it. Mr. Stevenson, on the contrary, is always suggesting studies in strange individualities, or human problems which excite the curiosity of the reader. He analyzes those individualities with subtle skill, or leaves them to analyze themselves in their conduct. Not unfrequently conflicting appreciations have left a difficult problem unsolved. For example, the most competent critics differ widely in their estimates of the meaning and artistic merit of the Master of Ballantrae. Are the inconsistencies in that commanding personality conceivable? Are the redeeming touches true to nature?

We fancy that Mr. Stevenson has idealised a veritable personage, with his habitual tendency towards exaggeration and eccentricity of colour. So it is with that other most impressive personage, John Silver, the smooth-spoken tavern-keeper and cook of ‘Treasure Island,’ who for cold-blooded truculence and diabolical astuteness might have been the favourite élève of Satan himself. The greatest immortals in fiction, such as Scott or George Eliot, were in the habit of painting from people they had known, though they combined the results of their studies and observations. Stevenson, although always on his guard against absurdities, seems to carry romancing into his most powerful delineations. The practice is the more effective, from the sensational point of view, that elsewhere sobriety of drawing and colouring is more closely observed.

Nor are the Scotch stories less graphic. Kidnapped is as full of sensation as Treasure Island, with greater variety of more probable incident. When Alan is run down in the Western Seas, when he is fighting for dear life in the deck-house, when the fugitives, exhausted by thirst, heat, and hunger, are being hunted through mountains and moorland by the soldiers, and when David is cast away on the reefs off Mull, there is as much of poetry as of prose in the epic.

It was in The Black Arrow that Stevenson came nearest to the limits of the ground on which he prudently hesitated to venture. For necessarily even his bright imagination almost ceased to be realistic in conjuring up the dim days of the ‘Wars of the Roses,’ and consequently he has failed in vividly presenting what he but faintly saw himself. The simple repetition of the expression ‘shrew’ shows how much he was at a loss in mediæval language.

One of his charms is that he is never prolix, and his tales in the Arabian Nights are marvels of sensational condensation. Take, for example, The Pavilion on the Links, in which the absconding banker is tracked to his doom by the gentlemanly carbonari he has been foolish enough to swindle. Scarcely less thrilling is A Lodging for the Night, of which that most disreputable of all the Bohemian poets, Villon, is the hero.

The handling of the horrible and grotesque culminated in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the possible discoveries of the practical chemist are pressed into the service of the supernatural. We have spoken of the little volume as the expression of a nightmare, and indeed we happen to know that it was born of a dream. It has all the effect of having been dashed off in a prolonged trance of unhealthy inspiration, and for the touches which heighten the terrors of the unholy transformation we are indebted to a not very enviable phase of genius.

Very different is the impression left on us by Mr. Stevenson’s poems. It is delightful to see in the Garden of Verses how happily the man can identify himself with the child; how he rises in estimation and reputation when he seems to stoop. The secret is that there is nothing of effort in the little book; that the many-sided man of the world could be a child when it pleased him, and that fancy lives freshly again in the past as it followed memory back to the nursery. It is enough merely to name Mr. Stevenson’s latest books, which are fresh in the public memory. By far the most remarkable is the volume which, after appearing in Atalanta under the title of David Balfour, was published in volume form, in 1892, with the name Catriona. It has the double charm of continuing the fascinating history of David and of Alan Breck, and of being Mr. Stevenson’s only love story. Later came The Ebb-Tide, a story of Tahiti, written, like The Wrecker, in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, the author’s stepson. Stevenson had met in America, some ten or twelve years ago, Mrs. Osbourne, a widow with two children, and had married her; and it was with her help that he wrote The Dynamiter. Lastly, we may mention the elaborate and beautiful Edinburgh edition of Mr. Stevenson’s collected works, which is now being issued under the superintendence of his intimate friend Mr. Sidney Colvin. By a sad coincidence the second volume of this edition appeared on the very day of the announcement of the author’s death.

Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Valima, the house he had built himself on the Samoan island of Upolo, on 3 December 1894. He was 44. As this obituary emphasises, he was a restless and chronically sick man who found physical relief, satisfaction and inspiration in travel. The obituary does not mention his most taxing, but ultimately rewarding, journey. In France in 1876 he fell in love with a married American woman, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne. When she returned to California, Stevenson resolved to follow her, travelling steerage to New York on board the Devonian and then taking the transcontinental railroad. At Monterey he collapsed and was nursed back to health by ranchers. He finally reached San Francisco in December 1879 and married the by-then divorced Fanny in May 1880. She was ten years his senior, and was to prove both a vivid companion and a devoted nurse.