Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records. Robert Louis Stevenson
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his own steps on that petty but extremely complicated political scene were judicious is more than can be said; but impartial witnesses agree that he had a considerable moderating influence with the natives, and that his efforts were all in the direction of peace and concord.
His literary industry during these years was more strenuous than ever. His habit was to begin work at six in the morning or earlier, continue without interruption until the midday meal, and often to resume again until four or five in the afternoon. In addition to his literary labours he kept up an active correspondence both with old friends and new acquaintances, especially with writers of the younger generation in England, who had been drawn to him either by admiration for his work or by his ever ready and generous recognition of their own. He had suffered for some time from scrivener's cramp, and in the last three years of his life was much helped by the affectionate services as amanuensis of his stepdaughter, Mrs. Strong, who had become a member of the household since 1889. In 1894 the plan devised by his business adviser and lifelong friend, Mr. Charles Baxter, of a limited édition de luxe of his collected works, under the title of the ‘Edinburgh Edition,’ afforded him much pleasure, together with a prospect of considerable gain. This experiment, without precedent during the lifetime of an author, proved a great success, but Stevenson did not live long enough to enjoy the opportunity of rest which its results were calculated to bring him.
Of his writings during the Samoan period, ‘The Wrecker’ was finished in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne in the winter 1890–1. Throughout 1891 he had a heavy task with the promised letters relating his Pacific voyages. Work undertaken to order seldom prospered with him, and these ‘Letters,’ having cost him more labour than anything he ever wrote, have less of his characteristic charm, despite the interest and strangeness of the matters of which they tell. They were published periodically in the New York ‘Sun’ and in ‘Black and White,’ and have been in part reprinted in the ‘Edinburgh Edition.’ A far more effective result of his South Sea experiences is the tale of the ‘Beach of Falesà,’ written in the same year and first published under the title ‘Uma’ in the ‘Illustrated London News’ (reprinted in ‘Island Nights' Entertainments’). In 1892 he was much occupied with a task from which he could expect neither fame nor profit, but to which he was urged by a sense of duty and the hope of influencing the treaty powers in favour of what he thought a wiser policy in Samoa. This was the ‘Footnote to History,’ an account, composed with an intentional plainness of style, of the intricate local politics of the preceding years, including a description of the famous hurricane of 1888. The same spring (1892) he took up again, after six years, the unfinished history of David Balfour at the point where ill-health had compelled him to break it off in ‘Kidnapped.’ This sequel (published first in ‘Atalanta’ under the title ‘David Balfour,’ and then in book form as ‘Catriona’) contains some of the author's best work, especially in the closing scenes at Leyden and Dunkerque. The comedy of boy and girl passion has been hardly anywhere more glowingly or more delicately expressed. In the same year (1892) was published ‘Across the Plains,’ a volume of collected essays, to which was prefixed the account of his emigrant journey from New York to San Francisco, much revised and compressed from the original draft of 1879; and in the spring of 1893 ‘Island Nights' Entertainments,’ containing with ‘The Beach of Falesà,’ and ‘The Bottle Imp,’ a new tale of magic, ‘The Isle of Voices,’ first published in the ‘National Observer.’
In the same year (1892) Stevenson made beginnings on a great variety of new work, some of it inspired by his Pacific experiences, and some by the memories and associations of Scotland, the power of which on his mind seemed only to be intensified by exile. To the former class belonged ‘Sophia Scarlet,’ a sentimental novel of planters' life in the South Seas, and ‘The Ebb-Tide,’ a darker story of South Sea crime and adventure, planned some time before under the title of the ‘Pearl-Fisher’ in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Of the latter class were ‘Heathercat,’ a tale of covenanting times and of the Darien adventure; ‘The Young Chevalier,’ an historical romance partly founded on facts supplied to him by Mr. Andrew Lang; ‘Weir of Hermiston,’ a tragic story of the Scottish border, in which the chief character was founded on that of the famous judge Lord Braxfield; and ‘A Family of Engineers,’ being an account of the lives and work of his grandfather, uncles, and father. Some progress had been made with all of these when a fit of influenza in January 1893 diverted him to a lighter task, that of dictating (partly, when forbidden to speak, in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet) a tale of manners and the road called ‘St. Ives,’ dealing with the escape from Edinburgh Castle and subsequent adventures of a French prisoner of war in 1814. Of these various writings, the ‘Ebb-Tide’ was alone completed; it was published in ‘To-day,’ November 1893 to January 1894, and in book form in September 1894. The family history was carried as far as the construction of the Bell Rock lighthouse. ‘Sophia Scarlet,’ ‘Heathercat,’ and the ‘Young Chevalier’ never got beyond a chapter or two each. ‘St. Ives’ had been brought to within a little of completion when the author, feeling himself getting out of vein with it, turned again to ‘Weir of Hermiston.’ This, so far as it goes, is his strongest work. The few chapters which he lived to complete, taken as separate blocks of narrative and character presentment, are of the highest imaginative and emotional power.
Despite the habitual gaiety which Stevenson had continued to show before his family and friends, and his expressed confidence in his own improved health, there had not been wanting in his later correspondence from Vailima signs of inward despondency and distress. At moments, even, it is evident that he himself had presentiments that the end was near. It came in such a manner as he would himself have wished. On the afternoon of 3 Dec. 1894, he was talking gaily with his wife, when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him at her feet, and within two hours all was over. The next day he was buried on a romantic site of his own selection, whither it took the zealous toil of sixty natives to cut a path and carry him, on a peak of the forest-clad Mount Vaea.
The romance of Stevenson's life and the attraction of his character procured for him a degree of fame and affection disproportionate to the numerical circulation of his works. In this point he was much outstripped by several of his contemporaries. But few writers have during their lifetime commanded so much admiration and regard from their fellow-craftsmen. To attain the mastery of an elastic and harmonious English prose, in which trite and inanimate elements should have no place, and which should be supple to all uses and alive in all its joints and members, was an aim which he pursued with ungrudging, even with heroic, toil. Not always, especially not at the beginning, but in by far the greater part of his mature work, the effect of labour and fastidious selection is lost in the felicity of the result. Energy of vision goes hand in hand with magic of presentment, and both words and things acquire new meaning and a new vitality under his touch. Next to finish and brilliancy of execution, the most remarkable quality of his work is its variety. Without being the inventor of any new form or mode of literary art (unless, indeed, the verses of the ‘Child's Garden’ are to be accounted such), he handled with success and freshness nearly all the old forms—the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure, drama, memoir, lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish. To some of these forms he gave quite new life: through all alike he expressed vividly his own extremely personal way of seeing and being, his peculiar sense of nature and of romance.
In personal appearance Stevenson was of good stature (about 5 ft. 10 in.) and activity, but very slender, his leanness of body and limb (not of face) having been throughout life abnormal. The head was small; the eyes dark hazel, very wide-set, intent, and beaming; the face of a long oval shape; the expression rich and animated. He had a free and picturesque play of gesture and a voice of full and manly fibre, in which his pulmonary weakness was not at all betrayed. The features are familiar from many photographs and cuts. Of two small full-length portraits by Mr. John S. Sargent one belongs to the family, the other to Mr. Fairchild of Newport, U.S.A.; an oil sketch, done in one sitting, by Sir W. B. Richmond, in the National Portrait Gallery; a drawing from life, by an American artist, Mr. Alexander; a large medallion portrait in bronze, in some respects excellent, by A. St. Gaudens of New York; and a portrait painted in 1893 at Samoa