Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson: Introduction

Introduction

LIFE OF STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson[1] was born at Edinburgh on the 13 November
1850. His father, Thomas, and his grandfather, Robert, were both
distinguished light-house engineers; and the maternal grandfather,
Balfour, was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, who lived to be ninety
years old. There was, therefore, a combination of _Lux et Veritas_ in
the blood of young Louis Stevenson, which in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
took the form of a luminous portrayal of a great moral idea.

In the language of Pope, Stevenson's life was a long disease. Even as
a child, his weak lungs caused great anxiety to all the family except
himself; but although Death loves a shining mark, it took over forty
years of continuous practice for the grim archer to send the black
arrow home. It is perhaps fortunate for English literature that his
health was no better; for the boy craved an active life, and would
doubtless have become an engineer. He made a brave attempt to pursue
this calling, but it was soon evident that his constitution made it
impossible. After desultory schooling, and an immense amount of
general reading, he entered the University of Edinburgh, and then
tried the study of law. Although the thought of this profession became
more and more repugnant, and finally intolerable, he passed his final
examinations satisfactorily. This was in 1875.

He had already begun a series of excursions to the south of France and
other places, in search of a climate more favorable to his incipient
malady; and every return to Edinburgh proved more and more
conclusively that he could not live in Scotch mists. He had made the
acquaintance of a number of literary men, and he was consumed with a
burning ambition to become a writer. Like Ibsen's _Master-Builder_,
there was a troll in his blood, which drew him away to the continent
on inland voyages with a canoe and lonely tramps with a donkey; these
gave him material for books full of brilliant pictures, shrewd
observations, and irrepressible humour. He contributed various
articles to magazines, which were immediately recognised by critics
like Leslie Stephen as bearing the unmistakable mark of literary
genius; but they attracted almost no attention from the general
reading public, and their author had only the consciousness of good
work for his reward. In 1880 he was married.

Stevenson's first successful work was _Treasure Island_, which was
published in book form in 1883, and has already become a classic. This
did not, however, bring him either a good income or general fame. His
great reputation dates from the publication of the _Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,_ which appeared in 1886. That work had an
instant and unqualified success, especially in America, and made its
author's name known to the whole English-speaking world. _Kidnapped_
was published the same year, and another masterpiece, _The Master of
Ballantrae_, in 1889.

After various experiments with different climates, including that of
Switzerland, Stevenson sailed for America in August 1887. The winter
of 1887-88 he spent at Saranac Lake, under the care of Dr. Trudeau,
who became one of his best friends. In 1890 he settled at Samoa in the
Pacific. Here he entered upon a career of intense literary activity,
and yet found time to take an active part in the politics of the
island, and to give valuable assistance in internal improvements.

The end came suddenly, exactly as he would have wished it, and
precisely as he had unconsciously predicted in the last radiant,
triumphant sentences of his great essay, _Aes Triplex_. He had been at
work on a novel, _St. Ives_, one of his poorer efforts, and whose
composition grew steadily more and more distasteful, until he found
that he was actually writing against the grain. He threw this aside
impatiently, and with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm began a new
story, _Weir of Hermiston_, which would undoubtedly have been his
masterpiece, had he lived to complete it. In luminosity of style, in
nobleness of conception, in the almost infallible choice of words,
this astonishing fragment easily takes first place in Stevenson's
productions. At the end of a day spent in almost feverish dictation,
the third of December 1894, he suddenly fainted, and died without
regaining consciousness. "Death had not been suffered to take so much
as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
highest point of being, he passed at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel was scarcely quenched, the trumpets
were hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory,
this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shot into the spiritual land."

He was buried at the summit of a mountain, the body being carried on
the shoulders of faithful Samoans, who might have sung Browning's
noble hymn,

"Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together!
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain...
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain...
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning!
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
'Ware the beholders!
This is our master, famous, calm and dead,
Borne on our shoulders...

Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

Stevenson had a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in
his portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and
the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of
fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one
side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny--the mysterious
charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal
world--the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of
Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas
Browne, are seen with varying degrees of emphasis in his literary
temperament. He was whimsical as an imaginative child; and everyone
has noticed that he never grew old. His buoyant optimism was based on
a chronic experience of physical pain, for pessimists like
Schopenhauer are usually men in comfortable circumstances, and of
excellent bodily health. His courage and cheerfulness under depressing
circumstances are so splendid to contemplate that some critics believe
that in time his _Letters_ may be regarded as his greatest literary
work, for they are priceless in their unconscious revelation of a
beautiful soul.

Great as Stevenson was as a writer, he was still greater as a Man. So
many admirable books have been written by men whose character will not
bear examination, that it is refreshing to find one Master-Artist
whose daily life was so full of the fruits of the spirit. As his
romances have brought pleasure to thousands of readers, so the
spectacle of his cheerful march through the Valley of the Shadow of
Death is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. One feels
ashamed of cowardice and petty irritation after witnessing the steady
courage of this man. His philosophy of life is totally different from
that of Stoicism; for the Stoic says, "Grin and bear it," and usually
succeeds in doing neither. Stevenson seems to say, "Laugh and forget
it," and he showed us how to do both.

Stevenson had the rather unusual combination of the Artist and the
Moralist, both elements being marked in his writings to a very high
degree. The famous and oft-quoted sonnet by his friend, the late Mr.
Henley, gives a vivid picture:


  "Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
  Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face--
  Lean, large-honed, curved of beak, and touched with race,
  Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
  The brown eyes radiant with vivacity--
  There shown a brilliant and romantic grace,
  A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
  Of passion, impudence, and energy.
  Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
  Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
  Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist;
  A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
  And something of the Shorter Catechist."

He was not primarily a moral teacher, like Socrates or Thomas Carlyle;
nor did he feel within him the voice of a prophetic mission. The
virtue of his writings consists in their wholesome ethical quality, in
their solid health. Fresh air is often better for the soul than the
swinging of the priest's censer. At a time when the school of Zola was
at its climax, Stevenson opened the windows and let in the pleasant
breeze. For the morbid and unhealthy period of adolescence, his books
are more healthful than many serious moral works. He purges the mind
of uncleanness, just as he purged contemporary fiction.

As Stevenson's correspondence with his friends like Sidney Colvin and
William Archer reveals the social side of his nature, so his
correspondence with the Unseen Power in which he believed shows that
his character was essentially religious. A man's letters are often a
truer picture of his mind than a photograph; and when these epistles
are directed not to men and women, but to the Supreme Intelligence,
they form a real revelation of their writer's heart. Nothing betrays
the personality of a man more clearly than his prayers, and the
following petition that Stevenson composed for the use of his
household at Vailima, bears the stamp of its author.


  "At Morning. The day returns and brings us the petty round of
  irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to
  perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound
  with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,
  bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,
  and grant us in the end the gift of sleep."

III

STEVENSON'S VERSATILITY

Stevenson was a poet, a dramatist, an essayist, and a novelist,
besides writing many political, geographical, and biographical
sketches. As a poet, his fame is steadily waning. The tendency at
first was to rank him too high, owing to the undeniable charm of many
of the poems in the _Child's Garden of Verses_. The child's view of
the world, as set forth in these songs, is often originally and
gracefully expressed; but there is little in Stevenson's poetry that
is of permanent value, and it is probable that most of it will be
forgotten. This fact is in a way a tribute to his genius; for his
greatness as a prose writer has simply eclipsed his reputation as a
poet.

His plays were failures. They illustrate the familiar truth that a man
may have positive genius as a dramatic writer, and yet fail as a
dramatist. There are laws that govern the stage which must be obeyed;
play-writing is a great art in itself, entirely distinct from literary
composition. Even Browning, the most intensely dramatic poet of the
nineteenth century, was not nearly so successful in his dramas as in
his dramatic lyrics and romances.

His essays attracted at first very little attention; they were too
fine and too subtle to awaken popular enthusiasm. It was the success
of his novels that drew readers back to the essays, just as it was the
vogue of Sudermann's plays that made his earlier novels popular. One
has only to read such essays, however, as those printed in this volume
to realise not only their spirit and charm, but to feel instinctively
that one is reading English Literature. They are exquisite works of
art, written in an almost impeccable style. By many judicious readers,
they are placed above his works of fiction. They certainly constitute
the most original portion of his entire literary output. It is
astonishing that this young Scotchman should have been able to make so
many actually new observations on a game so old as Life. There is a
shrewd insight into the motives of human conduct that makes some of
these graceful sketches belong to the literature of philosophy, using
the word philosophy in its deepest and broadest sense. The essays are
filled with whimsical paradoxes, keen and witty as those of Bernard
Shaw, without having any of the latter's cynicism, iconoclasm, and
sinister attitude toward morality. For the real foundation of even the
lightest of Stevenson's works is invariably ethical.

His fame as a writer of prose romances grows brighter every year. His
supreme achievement was to show that a book might be crammed with the
most wildly exciting incidents, and yet reveal profound and acute
analysis of character, and be written with consummate art. His tales
have all the fertility of invention and breathless suspense of Scott
and Cooper, while in literary style they immeasurably surpass the
finest work of these two great masters.

His best complete story, is, I think, _Treasure Island_. There is a
peculiar brightness about this book which even the most notable of the
later works failed to equal. Nor was it a trifling feat to make a
blind man and a one-legged man so formidable that even the reader is
afraid of them. Those who complain that this is merely a pirate story
forget that in art the subject is of comparatively little importance,
whereas the treatment is everything. To say, as some do, that there is
no difference between _Treasure Island_ and a cheap tale of blood and
thunder, is equivalent to saying that there is no difference between
the Sistine Madonna and a chromo Virgin.

THE PERSONAL ESSAY

The Personal Essay is a peculiar form of literature, entirely
different from critical essays like those of Matthew Arnold and from
purely reflective essays, like those of Bacon. It is a species of
writing somewhat akin to autobiography or firelight conversation;
where the writer takes the reader entirely into his confidence, and
chats pleasantly with him on topics that may be as widely apart as the
immortality of the soul and the proper colour of a necktie. The first
and supreme master of this manner of writing was Montaigne, who
belongs in the front rank of the world's greatest writers of prose.
Montaigne talks endlessly on the most trivial subjects without ever
becoming trivial. To those who really love reading and have some
sympathy with humanity, Montaigne's _Essays_ are a "perpetual refuge
and delight," and it is interesting to reflect how far in literary
fame this man, who talked about his meals, his horse, and his cat,
outshines thousands of scholarly and talented writers, who discussed
only the most serious themes in politics and religion. The great
English prose writers in the field of the personal essay during the
seventeenth century were Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham
Cowley, though Walton's _Compleat Angler_ is a kindred work. Browne's
_Religio Medici_, and his delightful _Garden of Cyrus_, old Tom
Fuller's quaint _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_ and Cowley's charming
_Essays_ are admirable examples of this school of composition.
Burton's wonderful _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is a colossal personal
essay. Some of the papers of Steele and Addison in the _Tatler_,
_Guardian,_ and the _Spectator_ are of course notable; but it was not
until the appearance of Charles Lamb that the personal essay reached
its climax in English literature. Over the pages of the _Essays of
Elia_ hovers an immortal charm--the charm of a nature inexhaustible in
its humour and kindly sympathy for humanity. Thackeray was another
great master of the literary easy-chair, and is to some readers more
attractive in this attitude than as a novelist. In America we have had
a few writers who have reached eminence in this form, beginning with
Washington Irving, and including Donald G. Mitchell, whose _Reveries
of a Bachelor_ has been read by thousands of people for over fifty
years.

As a personal essayist Stevenson seems already to belong to the first
rank. He is both eclectic and individual. He brought to his pen the
reminiscences of varied reading, and a wholly original touch of
fantasy. He was literally steeped in the gorgeous Gothic diction of
the seventeenth century, but he realised that such a prose style as
illumines the pages of William Drummond's _Cypress Grove_ and Browne's
_Urn Burial_ was a lost art. He attempted to imitate such writing only
in his youthful exercises, for his own genius was forced to express
itself in an original way. All of his personal essays have that air of
distinction which attracts and holds one's attention as powerfully in
a book as it does in social intercourse. Everything that he has to say
seems immediately worth saying, and worth hearing, for he was one of
those rare men who had an interesting mind. There are some literary
artists who have style and nothing else, just as there are some great
singers who have nothing but a voice. The true test of a book, like
that of an individual, is whether or not it improves upon
acquaintance. Stevenson's essays reflect a personality that becomes
brighter as we draw nearer. This fact makes his essays not merely
entertaining reading, but worthy of serious and prolonged study.

[Note 1: His name was originally Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. He
later dropped the "Balfour" and changed the spelling of "Lewis" to
"Louis," but the name was always pronounced "Lewis."]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following information is taken from Col. Prideaux's admirable
_Bibliography_ of Stevenson, London, 1903. I have given the titles and
dates of only the more important publications in book form; and of the
critical works on Stevenson, I have included only a few of those that
seem especially useful to the student and general reader. The detailed
facts about the separate publications of each essay included in the
present volume are fully given in my notes.

WORKS

1878. An Inland Voyage.
1879. Travels with a Donkey.
1881. Virginibus Puerisque.
1882. Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
1882. New Arabian Nights.
1883. Treasure Island.
1885. Prince Otto.
1885. A Child's Garden of Verses.
1885. More New Arabian Nights. The Dynamiter.
1886. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
1886. Kidnapped.
1887. The Merry Men.
1887. Memories and Portraits.
1888. The Black Arrow.
1889. The Master of Ballantrae. (A few copies privately printed in
1888.)
1889. The Wrong Box.
1890. Father Damien.
1892. Across the Plains.
1892. The Wrecker.
1893. Island Nights' Entertainments.
1893. Catriona.
1894. The Ebb Tide.
1895. Vailima Letters.
1896. Weir of Hermiston.
1898. St. Ives.
1899. Letters, Two Volumes.

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