thus gallantly he appears in my mind’s eye when i pause in rereading one of his books and summon up a fantasm of the author,—robert louis stevenson, gentleman adventurer in life and letters, his brown eyes shining in a swarthy face, his lean, long-enduring body adorned with a black-velvet jacket.
this garment is no disguise but a symbol. it is short, so as not to impede him with entangling tails. it is unconventional, as a protest against the tyranny of fashion. but it is of velvet, mark you, to match a certain niceness of choice and preference of beauty,—yes, and probably a touch of bravura,—in all its wearer’s vagaries. ’tis like the silver spurs, broad sombrero and gay handkerchief of the thoroughbred cowboy,—not an element of the dandiacal, but a tribute to romance. strange that the most genuine of men usually have a bit of this in their composition; your only incurable poseur being the fellow
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who affects never to pose and betrays himself by his attitude of scorn.
of course, stevenson did not always wear this symbolic garment. in fact the only time i met him in the flesh his clothes had a discouraging resemblance to those of the rest of us at the authors club in new york. and a few months ago, when i traced his “footprints on the sands of time” at waikiki beach, near honolulu, the picture drawn for me by those who knew him when he passed that way, was that of a lank, bare-footed, bright-eyed, sun-browned man who daundered along the shore in white-duck trousers and a shirt wide open at the neck. but the velvet jacket was in his wardrobe, you may be sure, ready for fitting weather and occasion. he wore it, very likely, when he went to beard the honolulu colourman who was trying to “do” his stepson-in-law in the matter of a bill for paints. he put it on when he banqueted with his amiable but bibulous friend, king kalakaua. you can follow it through many, if not most, of the photographs which he had taken from his twentieth to his forty-fourth, and last, year. and in his style
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you can almost always feel it,—the touch of distinction, the ease of a native elegance, the assurance of a well-born wanderer,—in short, the velvet jacket.
robert louis stevenson.
from a photograph, negative of which is owned by charles scribner’s sons.
robert lewis balfour stevenson began the adventure of life in a decent little house in howard place, edinburgh, on november 13, 1850. he completed it on the samoan island of upolu in the south seas, december 3, 1894,—completed it, i think, for though he left his work unfinished he had arrived at the port of honour and the haven of happy rest.
his father, and his father’s father, were engineers connected with the board of northern lights. this sounds like being related to the aurora borealis; and indeed there was something of mystery and magic about stevenson, as if an influence from that strange midnight dawn had entered his blood. but as a matter of fact the family occupation was nothing more uncanny than that of building and maintaining lighthouses and beacons along the scottish coast, a profession in which they won considerable renown and to which the lad himself was originally
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assigned. he made a fair try at it, and even won a silver medal for an essay on improvements in lighthouses. but the calling did not suit him, and he said afterward that he gained little from it except “properties for some possible romance, or words to add to my vocabulary.”
this lanky, queer, delicate, headstrong boy was a dreamer of dreams, and from youth desperately fond of writing. he felt himself a predestinated author, and like a true scot toiled diligently to make his calling and election sure.
but there was one thing for which he cared more than for writing, and that was living. he plunged into it eagerly, with more zest than wisdom, trying all the games that cities offer, and learning some rather disenchanting lessons at a high price. for in truth neither his physical, nor (as he later discovered) his moral, nature was suited to the sowing of wild oats. his constitution was one of the frailest ever exposed to the biting winds and soaking mists of the north british boston. early death seemed to be written in his horoscope. but an indomitable spirit laughs at dismal predictions. robert louis
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stevenson, (as he now called himself, velvet-jacketing his own name,) was not the man to be easily snuffed out by weak lungs or wild weather. mocking at “bloody jack” he held fast to life with grim, cheerful, grotesque courage; his mother, his wife, his trusty friends, heartened him for the combat; and he succeeded in having a wider experience and doing more work than falls to the lot of many men in rudely exuberant health. to do this calls for a singular kind of bravery, not inferior to, nor unlike, that of the good soldier who walks with death undismayed.
undoubtedly stevenson was born with a wanderlust.
“my mistress was the open road
and the bright eyes of danger.”
ill health gave occasion and direction to many voyages and experiments, some of which bettered him, while others made him worse. as a bachelor he roamed mountains afoot and travelled rivers in his own boat, explored the purlieus and sublittorals of paris, london, and edinburgh, lodged “on the seacoast of bohemia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant,
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and made himself vagrantly at home in california where he married the wife “the great artificer made for him.” they passed their honeymoon in a deserted miner’s cabin, and then lived around, in scotland, the engadine, southern france, bournemouth, the adirondacks, and on a schooner among the south sea islands, bringing up at last in the pleasant haven of vailima. on all these distant roads death pursued him, and, till the last ten years, poverty was his companion. yet he looked with keen and joyful eyes upon the changing face of the world and into its shadowy heart without trembling. he kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched even when the lights burned low. he counted life
“just a stuff
to try the soul’s strength on and educe the man.”
he may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, things may have looked black to him; but he never gave up, and in spite of frailties and burdens, he travelled a long way,—upward. through all his travels and tribulations he kept on writing, writing, writing,—the very type of a migratory author. he made his
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first appearance in a canoe. the log of this journey, an inland voyage on french rivers, published in 1878, was a modest, whimsical, charming début in literature. in 1879 he appeared again, and this time with a quaint companion. travels with a donkey in the cevennes is one of the most delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a journey ever written in english. it contains no practical information but plenty of pleasure and profit. i do not envy the reader who can finish it without loving that obstinate little mouse-coloured modestine, and feeling that she is one of the best-drawn female characters, of her race, in fiction.
from this good, quiet beginning his books followed rapidly, and (after treasure island, that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with growing popularity among the judicious, the “gentle readers,” who choose books not because they are recommended by professors or advertised in department stores, but because they are really well written and worth reading.
it is difficult to classify stevenson’s books, perhaps just because they are migrants, borderers.
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yet i think a rough grouping, at least of his significant works, may be made. there are five volumes of travels; six or seven volumes of short stories; nine longer novels or romances; three books of verse; three books of essays; one biography; and one study of south sea politics. this long list lights up two vital points in the man: his industry and his versatility.
“a virtue and a vice,” say you? well, that may be as you choose to take it, reader. but if you say it in a sour or a puritanical spirit, stevenson will gaily contradict you, making light of what you praise and vaunting what you blame.
industry? nonsense! did he not write an apology for idlers? yet unquestionably he was a toiler; his record proves it. fleeing from one land to another to shake off his implacable enemy; camping briefly in strange places; often laid on his back by sickness and sometimes told to “move on” by policeman penury; collecting his books by post and correcting his proofs in bed; he made out to produce twenty-nine volumes in sixteen years,—say 8,000 pages of 300 words, each,—a thing manifestly impossible without a mort of work. but of this he
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thought less than of the fact that he did it, as a rule, cheerfully and with a high heart. herein he came near to his own ideal of success: “to be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation,—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.” of his work i think he would have said that he stuck to it, first, because he needed the money that it brought in, and second, because he enjoyed it exceedingly. with this he would have smiled away the puritan who wished to pat him on the back for industry.
that he was versatile, turned from one subject to another, tried many forms of his art, and succeeded in some better than in others, he would have admitted boldly—even before those critics who speak slightingly of versatility as if it marked some inferiority in a writer, whereas they dislike it chiefly because it gives them extra trouble in putting him into his precise pigeonhole of classification. stevenson
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would have referred these gentlemen to his masters scott and thackeray for a justification. his versatility was not that of a weathercock whirled about by every wind of literary fashion, but that of a well-mounted gun which can be turned towards any mark. he did not think that because he had struck a rich vein of prose story-telling he must follow that lead until he had worked it or himself out. he was a prospector as well as a miner. he wished to roam around, to explore things, books, and men, to see life vividly as it is, and then to write what he thought of it in any form that seemed to him fit,—essay, or story, or verse. and this he did, thank god, without misgiving, and on the whole greatly to our benefit and enjoyment.
i am writing now of the things which make his books companionable. that is why i have begun with a thumb-nail sketch of the man in the velvet jacket who lives in them and in his four volumes of letters,—the best english letters, it seems to me, since lamb and thackeray. that also is why i have not cared to interrupt this simple essay by telling which of his works strike me as comparative
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failures, and giving more or less convincing reasons why certain volumes in my “collective edition” are less worn than others.
’tis of these others that i wish to speak,—the volumes whose bindings are like a comfortable suit of old clothes and on whose pages there are pencil-marks like lovers’ initials cut upon the bark of friendly trees. what charm keeps them alive and fresh, in an age when most books five years old are considered out of date and everything from the unspacious times of queen victoria is cordially damned? what manner of virility is in them to evoke, and to survive, such a flood of “stevensoniana”? what qualities make them still welcome to so wide a range of readers, young and old, simple and learned,—yes, even among that fair and capricious sex whose claim to be courted his earlier writings seem so lightly (or prudently) to neglect?
