Biography 7
A biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) by who knew him personally. From Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
British essayist, novelist and poet, the only child of Thomas Stevenson,
civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. He was born at 8
Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th of November 1850. He suffered from infancy
from great fragility of health, and nearly died in 1858 of gastric fever, which
left much constitutional weakness behind it. From the age of six he showed a
disposition to write. He went to school, mainly in Edinburgh, from 1858 to
1867, but his ill-health prevented his learning much, and his teachers, as his
mother afterwards said, "liked talking to him better than teaching
him." He often accompanied his father on his official visits to the
lighthouses of the Scottish coast and on longer journeys, thus early
accustoming himself to travel. As his health improved it was hoped that he
would be able to adopt the family profession of civil engineering, and in 1868
he went to Anstruther and then to Wick as a pupil engineer. In 1871 he had so
far advanced as to receive the silver medal of the Edinburgh Society of Arts
for a paper suggesting improvements in lighthouse apparatus. But long before
this he had started as an author. His earliest publication, the anonymous
pamphlet of The Pentland Rising, had appeared in 1866, and The
Charity Bazaar, a trifle in which his future manner is happily displayed,
in 1868. From about the age of eighteen he dropped his baptismal names of Lewis
Balfour and called himself Robert Louis, but was mostly known to his relatives
and intimate friends as "Louis." Although he greatly enjoyed the
outdoor business of the engineer's life it strained his physical endurance too
much, and in 1871 was reluctantly exchanged for study at the Edinburgh bar, to
which he was called in 1875. In 1873 he first met Mr. Sidney
Colvin, who was to prove the closest of his friends and at last the loyal
and admirable editor of his works and his correspondence; and to this time are
attributed several of the most valuable friendships of Stevenson's life.
He was now laboring, with extreme assiduity, to ground himself in the forms
and habits of literary style. In 1875 appeared, anonymously, his Appeal to
the Clergy of the Church of Scotland, and in that year he made the first of
many visits to the forest of Fontainebleau.
Meanwhile at Mentone in the winter of 1873-74 he had grown in mind under the
shadow of extreme physical weakness, and in the following spring began to
contribute essays of high originality to one or two periodicals, of which the Cornhill,
then edited by Sir Leslie Stephen, was at first the most important. Stevenson
made no attempt to practice at the bar, and the next years were spent in
wanderings in France, Germany and Scotland. Records of these journeys, and of
the innocent adventures which they encouraged, were given to the world as An
Inland Voyage in 1878, and as Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes in 1879. During these four years Stevenson's health, which was
always bettered by life out of doors, gave him little trouble. It was now
recognized that he was to be an author, and he contributed many essays, tales
and fantasies to various journals and magazines. At Fontainebleau in 1876
Stevenson had met Mrs. Osbourne, the lady who afterwards became his wife; she
returned to her home in California in 1878, and in August of the following
year, alarmed at news of her health, Stevenson hurriedly crossed the Atlantic.
He travelled, from lack of means, as a steerage passenger and then as an
emigrant, and in December, after hardships which seriously affected his health,
he arrived in San Francisco. In May 1880 he married, and moved to the desolate
mining camp which he has described in The Silverado Squatters. As Mr.
Colvin has well said, these months in the west of America were spent
"under a heavy combined strain of personal anxiety and literary
effort." Some of his most poignant and most enchanting letters were
written during this romantic period of his life. In the autumn of 1880 he
returned to Scotland, with his wife and stepson, who were received at once into
the Edinburgh household of his parents. But the condition of his health
continued to be very alarming, and they went almost immediately to Davos, where
he remained until the spring of 1881. In this year was published Virginibus Puerisque, the earliest
collection of Stevenson's essays. He spent the summer months in Scotland,
writing articles, poems, and above all his first romance, The Sea-Cook,
afterwards known as Treasure Island; but he was driven back to
Davos in October. In 1882 appeared Familiar Studies of Men and Books
and New Arabian Nights. His two winters at
Davos had done him some good, but his summers in Scotland invariably undid the
benefit. He therefore determined to reside wholly in the south of Europe, and
in the autumn of 1882 he settled near Marseilles. This did not suit him, but
from March 1883 to July 1884 he was at home at a charming house called La
Solitude, above Hyères; this was in many ways to be the happiest station in the
painful and hurrying pilgrimage of Stevenson's life. The Silverado Squatters
was published in 1883, and also the more important Treasure Island,
which made Stevenson for the first time a popular writer. He planned a vast
amount of work, but his schemes were all frustrated in January 1884 by the most
serious illness from which he had yet suffered. He was just pulled through, but
the attack was followed by long prostration and incapacity for work, and by
continued relapses. In July he was brought back to England, and from this time
until August 1887 Stevenson's home was at Bournemouth. In 1885 he published,
after long indecision, his volume of poems, A Child's Garden of Verses, an
inferior story, The Body Snatcher, and that admirable
romance, Prince Otto, in which the peculiar quality of
Stevenson's style was displayed at its highest. He also collaborated with W. E.
Henley in some plays, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea and Robert
Macaire. Early in 1886 he struck the public taste with precision in his
wild symbolic tale of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the summer of the same year he published Kidnapped,
which had been written at Bournemouth.
This, however, was a period of great physical prostration, so that 1886 and
1887 were perforce among the least productive years of Stevenson's life. In the
early months of 1887 Stevenson was particularly ill, and be was further
prostrated by being summoned in May to the deathbed of his father, who had just
returned to Edinburgh from the south. He printed privately as a pamphlet, in
June 1887, a brief and touching sketch of his father. In July he published his
volume of lyrical poems called Underwoods.
The ties which bound him to England were now severed, and his health was broken
to such a discouraging degree that he determined to remove to another hemisphere.
Accordingly, having disposed of Skerryvore, his house at Bournemouth, he sailed
from London, with his wife, mother and stepson, for New York on the 17th of
August 1887. He never set foot in Europe again. His memoir of his friend
Professor Fleeming Jenkin was published soon after his departure. After resting
at Newport, he went for the winter to be under the care of a physician at Saranac
Lake in the Adirondacks for the winter. Here he was very quiet, and
steadily active with his pen, writing both the greater part of the Master of Ballantrae and many of his
finest later essays. He had undertaken, for a regular payment greatly in excess
of anything which he had hitherto received, to contribute a monthly essay to
Scribner's Magazine, and these essays, twelve in number, were published
continuously throughout the year 1888. Early in that year was begun The
Wrong Box, a farcical romance in which Mr. Lloyd Osbourne participated;
Stevenson also began a romance about the Indian Mutiny, which he abandoned. His
attitude about this time to life and experience is reflected in Pulvis
et Umbra, one of the noblest of all his essays. In April 1888 he was at
the coast of New Jersey for some weeks, and in June started for San Francisco,
where he had ordered a schooner, the "Casco", to be ready to receive
him. On the 28th of the month, he started, as Mr. Colvin has said, "on
what was only intended to be a pleasure excursion... but turned into a
voluntary exile prolonged until the hour of his death"; he never again
left the waters of the Pacific. The "Casco" proceeded first to the
Marquesas, and south and east to Tahiti, passing before Christmas northwards to
Honolulu, where Stevenson spent six months and finished The Master of
Ballantrae and The Wrong Box. It was during this time that he paid
his famous visit to the leper settlement at Molokai. In
1889, "on a certain bright June day", the Stevensons sailed for the
Gilbert Islands, and after six months cruising found themselves at Samoa, where
he landed for the first time about Christmas Day 1889. On this occasion,
however, though strongly drawn to the beautiful island, he stayed not longer
than six weeks, and proceeded to Sydney, where, early in 1890, he published, in
a blaze of righteous anger, his Father
Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, in vindication
of the memory of Father Damien and his work among the lepers of the Pacific. At
Sydney he was very ill again: it was now obvious that his only chance of health
lay within the tropics. For nearly the whole of the year 1890 the Stevensons
were cruising through unfamiliar archipelagos onboard a little trading steamer,
the "Janet Nicholl." Meanwhile his volume of Ballads was published in
London.
The last four years of his unquiet life were spent at Samoa, in
circumstances of such health and vigor as he had never previously enjoyed, and
in surroundings singularly picturesque. It was in November 1890 that he made
his abode at Vailima, where he took a small barrack of a wooden box 500 feet
above sea level, and began to build himself a large house close by. The natives
gave him the name of Tusitala. His character developed unanticipated strength
on the practical side; he became a vigorous employer of labor, an active
planter, above all a powerful and benignant island chieftain. He gathered by
degrees around him "a kind of feudal clan or servants and retainers",
and he plunged, with more generous ardor than coolness of judgment, into the
troubled politics of the country. He took up the cause of the deposed king
Mataafa with extreme ardor, and he wrote a book, A Footnote to
History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), in the endeavor to win
over British sympathy to his native friends. In the autumn of this year he
received a visit at Vailima from the countess of Jersey, in company with whom
and some others he wrote the burlesque extravagance in prose and verse, called An
Object of Pity, privately printed in 1893 at Sydney. Whenever the
cultivation of his estate and the vigorous championship of his Samoan retainers
gave him the leisure, Stevenson was during these years almost wholly occupied
in writing romances of Scottish life. The
Wrecker, an adventurous tale of American life, which mainly belonged to
an earlier time, was written in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne and
finally published in 1892; and towards the close of that very eventful and busy
year he began The Justice Clerk, afterwards Weir of Hermiston. A portion of the old
record of emigrant experiences in 1879, long suppressed for private reasons,
also appeared in book form in 1892 (Across the Plains). In 1893 Stevenson
published the important Scottish romance of Catriona,
written as a sequel to Kidnapped, and the three tales illustrative of
Pacific Ocean character, Island Nights' Entertainments.
But in 1893 the uniform good fortune which had attended the Stevensons since
their settlement in Samoa began to be disturbed. The whole family at Vailima
became ill, and the final subjugation of his protégé Mataafa, and the
destruction of his party in Samoan politics, deeply distressed and discouraged
Stevenson. In a series of letters to The Times he exposed the policy of
the chief justice, Mr. Cedercrantz, and the president of the council, Baron
Senfft. He so influenced public opinion that both were removed from office. In
the autumn of that year he went for a change of scene to the Sandwich Islands,
but was taken ill there, and was only too glad to return to Samoa. In 1894 he
was greatly cheered by the plan, suggested by friends in England and carried
out by them with the greatest energy, of the noble collection of his works in
twenty-eight volumes, since known as the Edinburgh editions. In September 1894
was published The Ebb Tide, the latest of his books which he
saw through the press. Of Stevenson's daily avocations, and of the temper of his
mind through these years of romantic exile, a clear idea may be obtained by the
posthumous Vailima Letters, edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin
in 1895. Through 1894 he was engaged in composing two romances, neither of
which he lived to complete. He was dictating Weir of Hermiston,
apparently in his usual health, on the day he died. This was the 3rd of
December 1894; he was gaily talking on the verandah of his house at Vailima when
he had a stroke of apoplexy, from which he never recovered consciousness, and
passed away painlessly in the course of the evening. His body was carried next
day by sixty sturdy Samoans, who acknowledged Stevenson as their chief, to the
summit of the precipitous peak of Vaea, where he had wished to be buried, and
where they left him to rest for ever with the Pacific Ocean at his feet.
The charm of the personal character of Stevenson and the romantic
vicissitudes of his life are so predominant in the minds of all who knew him,
or lived within earshot of his legend, that they made the ultimate position
which he will take in the history of English literature somewhat difficult to
decide. That he was the most attractive figure of a man of letters in his generation
is admitted; and the acknowledged fascination of his character was deepened,
and was extended over an extremely wide circle of readers, by the publication
in 1899 of his Letters, which have subdued even those who were rebellious to
the entertainment of his books. It is therefore from the point of view of its
"charm" that the genius of Stevenson must be approached, and in this
respect there was between himself and his books, his manners and his style, his
practice and his theory, a very unusual harmony. Very few authors of so high a
class have been so consistent, or have made their conduct so close a reflection
of their philosophy. This unity of the man in his work makes it difficult to be
sure that one rightly gauges the purely literary significance of the latter. It
may be said that the mingling of distinct and original vision with a singularly
conscientious handling of the English language, in the sincere and wholesome
self-consciousness of the strenuous artist, seems to be the central feature of
Stevenson as a writer by profession. He was always assiduously graceful, always
desiring to present his idea, his image, his rhapsody, in as persuasive a light
as possible, and, particularly, with as much harmony as possible. He had
mastered his manner and, as one may say, learned his trade, in the exercise of
criticism and the reflective parts of literature, before he surrendered himself
to that powerful creative impulse which had long been tempting him, so that
when, in mature life, he essayed the portraiture of invented character he came
to it unhampered by any imperfection of language. This distinguished mastery of
style, and love of it for its own sake within the bounds of good sense and
literary decorum, gave him a preeminence among the storytellers of his time. No
doubt it is still by his romances that Stevenson keeps the wider circle of his
readers. But many hold that his letters and essays are finer contributions to
pure literature, and that on these exquisite mixtures of wisdom, pathos, melody
and humor his fame is likely to be ultimately based. In verse he had a touch
far less sure than in prose. Here we find less evidence of sedulous
workmanship, yet not infrequently a piercing sweetness, a depth of emotion, a
sincere and spontaneous lovableness, which are irresistibly touching and
inspiring.
The personal appearance of Stevenson has often been described: he was tall,
extremely thin, dark haired, restless, compelling attention with the lustre of
his wonderful brown eyes. In the existing portraits of him those who never saw
him are apt to discover a strangeness which seems to them sinister or even
affected. This is a consequence of the false stability of portraiture since in
life the unceasing movement of light in the eyes, the mobility of the mouth,
and the sympathy and sweetness which radiated from all the features, precluded
the faintest notion of want of sincerity. Whatever may be the ultimate order of
reputation among his various books, or whatever posterity may ultimately see
fit to ordain as regards the popularity of any of them, it is difficult to
believe that the time will ever come in which Stevenson will not be remembered
as the most beloved of the writers of that age which he did so much to cheer
and stimulate by his example.
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