HIS STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND HIS BRILLIANT ESSAYS--"TREASURE
ISLAND" AND "DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE" HIS MOST POPULAR BOOKS.
It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as
it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For
with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm
disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for
warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and
the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end
of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and
with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are
real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with
consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not
the greatest, of creative artists.
In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all
the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used
to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of
Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his
resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With
Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the
simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way.
Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he
dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before
the ink was dry on the sheets.
Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller.
With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his
short tales such as _Markheim_, or _A Lodging for the Night_, or _The
Sire de Maletroit's Door_, the story itself merely serves as a thread
upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul.
He has the distinction of having written in _Treasure Island_ the best
piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the
high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work
worthy to rank with _Robinson Crusoe_. As it is, he created two
villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, who are absolutely unique
in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature
that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders
with a smile. In _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ Stevenson has aroused that
sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the
domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.
Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was
the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father
gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest
engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself
would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born
with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood
was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an
eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and
poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.
His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and
_Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_.
Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys,
and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of
a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a
long succession of stories, not one of which can be called a
masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as
he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power
invariably made him cut short his novels or end them in a way that
exasperates the reader.
[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON--THE AUTHOR'S INTIMATE
ASSOCIATES PRONOUNCE THIS PHOTOGRAPH A PERFECT PRESENTATION OF HIS
MOST TYPICAL EXPRESSION]
Some months Stevenson spent in California, but this State, with its
romantic history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have
little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color
the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a
South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive
conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical
life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the
palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors
which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious
obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and
on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of _Weir of Hermiston_,
a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the
elements of his best work.
It is idle to deny that Stevenson appeals only to a limited audience.
Despite his keen interest in all kinds of people, he lacked that
sympathetic touch which brings large sales and wide circulation. About
the time of his death his admirers declared he would supersede Scott
or Dickens; but the seventeen years since his death have seen many
changes in literary reputations. Stevenson has held his own remarkably
well. As a man the interest in him is still keen, but of his works
only a few are widely read.
Among these the first place must be given to _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde_, partly because of the profound impression made upon the public
mind by the dramatization of this tale, and partly because it appeals
strongly to the sense of the mystery of conflicting personality. Next
to this is _Treasure Island_, one of the best romances of adventure
ever written. Readers who cannot feel a thrill of genuine terror when
the blind pirate Pew comes tapping with his cane have missed a great
pleasure. One-legged John Silver, in his cheerful lack of all the
ordinary virtues, is a character that puts the fear of death upon the
reader. The opening chapter of this story is one of the finest things
in all the literature of adventure.
Of Stevenson's other work the two Scotch stories, _Kidnaped_ and
_David Balfour_, always seemed to me to be among his best. The
chapter on the flight of David and Allan across the moor, the contest
in playing the pipes and the adventures of David and Catriona in
Holland--these are things to read many times and enjoy the more at
every reading. Stevenson, like Jack London, is a writer for men; he
could not draw women well, When he brings one in there is usually an
end of stirring adventure, just as London spoiled _The Sea Wolf_ with
his literary heroine.
[Illustration: STEVENSON'S HOME AT VALIMA, SAMOA, LOOKING TOWARD
VAEA]
Of Stevenson's short stories the finest are _The Pavilion on the
Links_, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of
haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; _Markheim_,
a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict
of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; _The Sire de Maletroit's
Door_, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a
great French noble of the fifteenth century, and _A Lodging for the
Night_, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon.
Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you
like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to those which
strike your fancy.
The vogue of Stevenson's essays will last as long as that of his
romances; for he excelled in this literary art of putting his
personality into familiar talks with his reader. He ranks with Lamb
and Thackeray, Washington Irving and Donald G. Mitchell. Read those
fine short sermons, _Pulvis et Umbra_ and _Aes Triplex_, the latter
with its eloquent picture of sudden death in the fulness of power
which was realized in Stevenson's own fate. Read _Books Which Have
Influenced Me_, _A Gossip on Romance_ and _Talk and Talkers_. They are
unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.
But above everything looms the man himself--a chronic invalid, who
might well have pleaded his weakness and constant pains as an excuse
for idleness and railings against fate. Stoic courage in the strong is
a virtue, but how much greater the cheerful courage that laughs at
sickness and pain! Stevenson writing in a sickbed stories and essays
that help one to endure the blows of fate is a spectacle such as this
world has few to offer. So the man's life and work have come to be a
constant inspiration to those who are faint-hearted, a call to arms of
all one's courage and devotion.