Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish writer of international fame, known mainly for Treasure Island and The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Novelist, poet, travel writer, Stevenson experimented with many genres: adventure, horror, travel…He was acclaimed in his time and is still acclaimed in ours, but was strangely dismissed as a second class author over many decades of the twentieth century, a strange time of cultural self-denial when moral intentions seemed to matter more than creativity. Stevenson was also an intensive traveller. He went to France numerous times, crossed the Atlantic, crossed the American continent, sailed to the South Pacific, and died in the South Seas aged forty-four.
Short biography
Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on November 13th, 1850. His father was a successful lighthouse engineer. He did visit the western shores of Scotland in his young age, accompanying his father, found more interest in the sceneries which had already inspired Walter Scott than in civil engineering, and it is from the exposure to Celtic verbal culture over these travels that he drew his art of story-telling. Three things had a profound influence on Stevenson’s early life, therefore influencing his future as a writer: his weak health, explaining why he would eventually die supposedly of tuberculosis (although people now think it was a different disease), and why Scottish winters were terrible, dark ordeals for him; his Presbyterian family, of which he did not share the religious views; and Edinburgh, that he chose to escape all his life, even though it had a profound influence on his aesthetic view of the world, its dark, dreary side, its physical contrast between good and evil… He attended Edinburgh University, chose not pursue engineering as a career, and studied law. He became increasingly bohemian, let his hair grow, belonged to the LJR club (Liberty, Justice, Reverence), something which his father eventually discovered much to his discomfort: “Disregard everything our parents have taught us”, so goes the preamble of the LJR constitution.
Stevenson then took part in literary circles. He met Leslie Stephen from the Cornhill magazine, who liked Stevenson’s work, and then introduced him to William Ernest Henley, a man with a wooden leg who would then become a close friend and also the model for Long John Silver of Treasure Island. It is because of health reasons that Stevenson started travelling, first to Menton in 1873; then back in Scotland, he finished his studies but never practised law. And he travelled again, mainly in France, Grez-sur-Loing, Fontainebleau and Paris, where he also spent time within the local Bohemian circles. He made a canoe voyage with Walter Simpson between Belgium and France, true story which would become the basis for his first book, An Inland voyage. At the end of the canoe voyage, he also met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. He would later fall for her and become her lover. He travelled to the Cévennes, which would inspire another book, Travels with a donkey in the Cévennes. He then decided to join Fanny and embarked for America. He arrived in New York and travelled to California by train, eventually reaching Monterey. He was once again fighting against his poor health, and had to wait before making the trip to San Francisco, where he finally found Fanny. He married her in 1880, they spent time in the Napa Valley, and together travelled back to Britain.
Between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson continued to struggle with his health, and regularly changed residence, living in Scotland and England, but mainly Bournemouth, Poole, Dorset, and France in the winter. This is during this period that he wrote his most famous works: The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The black arrow.
In 1888, he chose to leave Britain and travel to the South Seas. This is where he would spend the rest of his life and die. His first port of call was San Francisco, then Hawaï, then Tahiti, New Zealand and finally Samoa. He wrote “In the South seas” as an account of his South Pacific trips. He settled in Valima, a village situated in the Samoan island of Upola, where he managed to be in very friendly terms with the locals whilst managing the colonial authorities. He asked many of his friends from Britain to come and visit him, but none of them ever did. After being very concerned he was losing his creative streak, he produced interesting work in the last few years: “Catriona” (or David Balfour), and also “Weir of Hermiston”, which he never finished but that he considered to be his best. He then died aged forty-four of a cerebral haemorrhage. Tusitala (or “story-teller”, his Samoan name) was buried on Mount Vaea.
Stevenson’s heritage
At the end of the Nineteenth century, along with Kipling, Stevenson was one of the most popular writers. The diversity of Stevenson’s work, adventure, travel writing, “gothic” tales, meant later literary authorities struggled to put him in a category, explaining why both in France and in England he came to be considered as a second class writer, or a children’s writer (witness the proliferation of shortened versions and adaptations of Treasure Island). In France, the “high brow-ness” of the Structuralist phase, with its theoretical, uncompromising approach to writing, its emphasis on style over content, its willingness to break with the past at any cost, its disdain of minor genres, its rejection of narrative, all this meant Stevenson was forgotten. Fortunately, he has come back in recent years, and more and more people now appreciate him for what he is: a prolific, extraordinary story-teller and writer.
©2016-Les Editions de Londres
Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.—Victor Hugo on Quentin Durward.
Victor Hugo’s romances occupy an important position in the history of literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is only in the last romance of all, Quatre Vingt Treize, that this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors, goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an author’s books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them—of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by Quatre Vingt Treize for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo’s romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of literary tendency.
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in the art—I mean Henry Fielding—we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first moment, to state the difference that there is between these two. Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices; what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man’s mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man’s life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of view—equally able, if he looks at it from another point of view—to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men’s lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board—all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them. The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively human interest. As for landscape, he was content to underline stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into his hero’s way. It is most really important, however, to remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott’s instinct, the instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manœuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other’s shoulders. Fielding’s characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man’s personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution of things.
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Published by Les Éditions de Londres
©2016 – Les Éditions de Londres
ISBN: 978-1-910628-82-9