Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 2

not really make it
vulgar.
Now Stevenson's life was really what we call picturesque; partly
because he saw everything in pictures; and partly because a chapter of
accidents did really attach him to very picturesque places. He was born
on the high terraces of the noblest of northern cities: in the family
mansion in Edinburgh in 1850; he was the son of a house of highly
respected architects of lighthouses; and nothing could be more really
romantic than such a legend of men laboriously lifting the star-crowned
towers of the sea. He failed to follow the family tradition, however, for
various reasons; he was blighted with ill-health and a taste for art; the
latter sent him to pick up picturesque tricks and poses in the art colony
of Barbizon; the former very soon sent him southward into warmer and
warmer climates; and it so happens as he himself remarked, that the
countries to which we are sent when health deserts us have a magical

and rather mocking beauty. At one time he had paid a sort of vagabond
visit to America, crossing the ugly plains that lead to the abrupt beauty
of California, that promised land. He described it in the studies called
Across the Plain: a work vaguely unsatisfying both to writer and reader.
I think it records the subconscious blank and sense of bewilderment felt
by every true European on first seeing the very light and landscape of
America. The shock of negation was in his case truly unnatural. He
almost wrote a dull book. But there is another reason for noting this
exception here.
This book makes no pretence of being even an outline of the life of
Stevenson. In his particular case I deliberately omit such an outline,
because I find that it has cut across and confused the very sharp and
lucid outline of his art. But indeed in any case it would be very difficult
to tell the tale with truth without telling it in detail, and in rather
bewildering detail. The first thing that strikes us, on a rapid survey of
his life and letters, is his innumerable changes of domicile, especially
in his early days. If his friends followed the example he professes to set,
in the matter of Mr. Michael Finsbury, and refused to learn more than
one address for one friend, he must have left his correspondence very
far behind indeed. His wanderings in Western Europe would appear on
the map as much wilder as well as wider than the "probable course of
David Balfour's wanderings" in Western Scotland. If we started out to
tell his story thus, we should have to note how he went first to Mentone
and then back again to Edinburgh and then to Fontainebleau and then to
the Highlands and then to Fontainebleau again and then to Davos in the
mountains, and so on; a zigzag pilgrimage impossible to compress
except in a larger biography. But all or most of it is covered by one
generalisation. This navigation chart was really a hospital chart. Its
jagged mountains represented temperatures; or at least climates. The
whole story of Stevenson is conditioned by a certain complexity, which
a tenderness for the English language will restrain us from calling a
complex. It was a sort of paradox, by which he was at once more and
less protected than other men; like somebody travelling the wildest
roads of the world in a covered waggon. He went where he did partly
because he was an adventurer and partly because he was an invalid. By
that sort of limping agility, he may be said to have seen at once too

little and too much. He was perhaps a natural traveller; but he was not a
normal traveller. Nobody ever did treat him as quite normal; which is
the truth hidden in the falsehood of those who sneer at his childishness
as that of a spoilt child. He was courageous; and yet he had to be
shielded against two things at once, his weakness and his courage. But
his picture of himself as a vagabond with blue fingers on the winter
road is avowedly an ideal picture; it was exactly that sort of freedom
that he could never have. He could only be carried from sight to sight;
or even from adventure to adventure. Indeed there is here a curious
aptness in the quaint simplicity of his childish rhyme that ran, "My bed
is like a little boat." Through all his varied experiences his bed was a
boat and his boat was a bed. Panoramas of tropic palm and Californian
orange-grove passed over that moving couch like the long nightmare of
the nursery walls. But his real courage was not so much turned
outwards to the drama of the boat as inwards to the