Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 2

book form in 1883, and has already become a classic. This
did not, however, bring him either a good income or general fame. His
great reputation dates from the publication of the _Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,_ which appeared in 1886. That work had an
instant and unqualified success, especially in America, and made its
author's name known to the whole English-speaking world. Kidnapped
was published the same year, and another masterpiece, _The Master of

Ballantrae_, in 1889.
After various experiments with different climates, including that of
Switzerland, Stevenson sailed for America in August 1887. The winter
of 1887-88 he spent at Saranac Lake, under the care of Dr. Trudeau,
who became one of his best friends. In 1890 he settled at Samoa in the
Pacific. Here he entered upon a career of intense literary activity, and
yet found time to take an active part in the politics of the island, and to
give valuable assistance in internal improvements.
The end came suddenly, exactly as he would have wished it, and
precisely as he had unconsciously predicted in the last radiant,
triumphant sentences of his great essay, Aes Triplex. He had been at
work on a novel, _St. Ives_, one of his poorer efforts, and whose
composition grew steadily more and more distasteful, until he found
that he was actually writing against the grain. He threw this aside
impatiently, and with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm began a
new story, _Weir of Hermiston_, which would undoubtedly have been
his masterpiece, had he lived to complete it. In luminosity of style, in
nobleness of conception, in the almost infallible choice of words, this
astonishing fragment easily takes first place in Stevenson's productions.
At the end of a day spent in almost feverish dictation, the third of
December 1894, he suddenly fainted, and died without regaining
consciousness. "Death had not been suffered to take so much as an
illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest
point of being, he passed at a bound on to the other side. The noise of
the mallet and chisel was scarcely quenched, the trumpets were hardly
done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shot into the spiritual land."
He was buried at the summit of a mountain, the body being carried on
the shoulders of faithful Samoans, who might have sung Browning's
noble hymn,
"Let us begin and carry up this corpse, Singing together! Leave we the
common crofts, the vulgar thorpes Each in its tether Sleeping safe on
the bosom of the plain... That's the appropriate country; there, man's
thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain... Thither our path lies; wind we
up the heights: Wait ye the warning! Our low life was the level's and

the night's; He's for the morning. Step to a tune, square chests, erect
each head, 'Ware the beholders! This is our master, famous, calm and
dead, Borne on our shoulders...
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot clouds form, Lightnings
are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace
let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying."
II
PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER
Stevenson had a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in his
portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and the
vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune,
with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There
was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny--the mysterious charm that
belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world--the
element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne.
Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas Browne,
are seen with varying degrees of emphasis in his literary temperament.
He was whimsical as an imaginative child; and everyone has noticed
that he never grew old. His buoyant optimism was based on a chronic
experience of physical pain, for pessimists like Schopenhauer are
usually men in comfortable circumstances, and of excellent bodily
health. His courage and cheerfulness under depressing circumstances
are so splendid to contemplate that some critics believe that in time his
Letters may be regarded as his greatest literary work, for they are
priceless in their unconscious revelation of a beautiful soul.
Great as Stevenson was as a writer, he was still greater as a Man. So
many admirable books have been written by men whose character will
not bear examination, that it is refreshing to find one Master-Artist
whose daily life was so full of the fruits of