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
Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now, whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in Samson Agonistes; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman’s volume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I should always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman’s matter and the spirit it represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the “barbaric yawp” of Whitman?
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was a theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman’s work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse, and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls “Feudal Literature” could have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he calls the “Literature of Wo,” meaning the whole tribe of Werther and Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be true enough; and as this seems to be Whitman’s view, they were true enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favourite phrases, to “the average man.” To the formation of some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making the poets.
His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order, the materials of their existence. He is “The Answerer;” he is to find some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man’s enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream. Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all, we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily disown after two hours’ serious reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in the middle of God’s beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows to a sense of their own and other people’s principles in life.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull’s-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a man’s experience in an hour. The speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put it into words for the words are all coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them in man’s speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication, not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman’s scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes.
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Published by Les Éditions de Londres
©2016 – Les Éditions de Londres
ISBN: 978-1-910628-83-6