Having on the 14th of July 1875 passed with credit his examination for
the Bar at Edinburgh, Stevenson thenceforth enjoyed whatever status and
consideration attaches to the title of Advocate. But he made no serious
attempt to practise, and by the 25th of the same month had started with
Sir Walter Simpson for France. Here he lived and tramped for several
weeks among the artist haunts of Fontainebleau and the neighbourhood,
occupying himself chiefly with studies of the French poets and poetry of
the fifteenth century, which afterwards bore fruit in his papers on
Charles of Orleans and Francois Villon. Thence he travelled to join his
parents at Wiesbaden and Homburg. Returning in the autumn to Scotland,
he made, to please them, an effort to live the ordinary life of an
Edinburgh advocate--attending trials and spending his mornings in wig
and gown at the Parliament House. But this attempt was before long
abandoned as tending to waste of time and being incompatible with his
real occupation of literature. Through the next winter and spring he
remained in Edinburgh, except for a short winter walking tour in
Ayrshire and Galloway, and a month spent among his friends in London. In
the late summer of 1876, after a visit to the West Highlands, he made
the canoe trip with Sir Walter Simpson which furnished the subject of
the _Inland Voyage_, followed by a prolonged autumn stay at Grez and
Barbizon. The life, atmosphere, and scenery of these forest haunts had
charmed and soothed him, as we have seen, since he was first introduced
to them by his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, in the spring of 1875. An
unfettered, unconventional, open-air existence, passed face to face with
nature and in the company of congenial people engaged, like himself, in
grappling with the problems and difficulties of an art, had been what he
had longed for most consistently through all the agitations of his
youth. And now he had found just such an existence, and with it, as he
thought, peace of mind, health, and the spirit of unimpeded work.
But peace of mind was not to be his for long. What indeed awaited him in
the forest was something different and more momentous: it was his fate:
the romance which decided his life, and the companion whom he resolved
to make his own at all hazards. But of this hereafter. To continue
briefly the annals of the time: the year 1877 was again spent between
Edinburgh, London, the Fontainebleau region, and several different
temporary abodes in the artists' and other quarters of Paris; with an
excursion in the company of his parents to the Land's End in August. In
1878 a similar general mode of life was varied by a visit with his
parents in March to Burford Bridge, where he made warm friends with a
senior to whom he had long looked up from a distance, Mr. George
Meredith; by a spell of secretarial work under Professor Fleeming
Jenkin, who was serving as a juror on the Paris Exhibition; and lastly,
by the autumn tramp through the Cevennes, afterwards recounted with so
much charm in _Travels with a Donkey_. The first half of 1879 was again
spent between London, Scotland, and France.
During these four years, it should be added, Stevenson's health was very
passable. It often, indeed, threatened to give way after any prolonged
residence in Edinburgh, but was generally soon restored by open-air
excursions (during which he was capable of fairly vigorous and sustained
daily exercise), or by a spell of life among the woods of Fontainebleau.
They were also the years in which he settled for good into his chosen
profession of letters. He worked rather desultorily for the first twelve
months after his call to the Bar, but afterwards with ever-growing
industry and success, winning from the critical a full measure of
recognition, though relatively little, so far, from the general public.
In 1875 and 1876 he contributed as a journalist, though not frequently,
to the Academy and Vanity Fair, and in 1877 more abundantly to London, a
weekly review founded by Mr. Glasgow Brown, an acquaintance of Edinburgh
Speculative days, and carried on, after the failure of that gentleman's
health, by Mr. Henley. But he had no great gift or liking for
journalism, or for any work not calling for the best literary form and
finish he could give. Where he found special scope for such work was in
the Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Leslie Stephen. Here
he continued his critical papers on men and books, already begun in 1874
with _Victor Hugo_, and began in 1876 the series of papers afterwards
collected in _Virginibus Puerisque_. They were continued in 1877, and in
greater number throughout 1878. His first published stories appeared as
follows:--_A Lodging for the Night_, Temple Bar, October 1877; _The Sire
de Maletroit's Door_, Temple Bar, January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_,
Cornhill Magazine, January 1878. In May 1878 followed his first travel
book, _The Inland Voyage_, containing the account of his canoe trip from
Antwerp to Grez. This was to Stevenson a year of great and various
productiveness. Besides six or eight characteristic essays of the
_Virginibus Puerisque_ series, there appeared in London the set of
fantastic modern tales called the _New Arabian Nights_, conceived and
written in an entirely different key from any of his previous work, as
well as the kindly, sentimental comedy of French artist life,
_Providence and the Guitar_; and in the Portfolio the _Picturesque Notes
on Edinburgh_, republished at the end of the year in book form. During
the autumn and winter of this year he wrote _Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes_, and was much and eagerly engaged in the planning of plays
in collaboration with Mr. Henley; of which one, _Deacon Brodie_, was
finished in the spring of 1879. In the same spring he drafted in
Edinburgh, but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics, a study of
which he once spoke as being always his "veiled mistress," under the
name of _Lay Morals_.
But abounding in good work as this period was, and momentous as it was
in regard to Stevenson's future life, it is a period which figures but
meagrely in his correspondence, and in this book must fill
disproportionately little space. Without the least breach of friendship,
or even of intimate confidence on occasion, Stevenson had begun, as was
natural and necessary, to wean himself from his entire dependence on his
friend and counsellor of the last two years; to take his life more into
his own hands; and to intermit the regularity of his correspondence with
her. A few new correspondents appear; but to none of us in these days
did he write more than scantily. Partly his growing absorption by the
complications of his life and the interests of his work left him little
time or inclination for letter-writing; partly his greater freedom of
movement made it unnecessary. On his way backwards and forwards between
Scotland and France, his friends in London had the chance of seeing him
much more frequently than of yore. He avoided formal and dress-coated
society; but in the company of congenial friends, whether men or women,
and in places like the Savile Club (his favourite haunt), he was as
brilliant and stimulating as ever, and however acute his inward
preoccupations, his visits were always a delight.