Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 3

drama of the bed.
Nobody knew better than he did that nothing is more terrible than a bed;
since it is always waiting to be a deathbed.
Broadly speaking, therefore, his biography would consist of journeys
hither and thither, with a donkey in the Cevennes, with a baronet on the
French canals; on a sledge in Switzerland or in a bathchair at
Bournemouth. But they were all, in one way or another, related to the
problem of his health as well as to the cheerfulness of his curiosity.
Now of all human things the search for health is the most unhealthy.
And it is truly a great glory to Stevenson that he, almost alone among
men, could go on pursuing his bodily health without once losing his
mental health. As soon as he came to any place, he lost no time in
finding a new and better reason for having come there. It might be a
child or a sonnet, a flirtation or the plan of a story; but he made that the
real reason; and not the unhealthy reason of health. Nevertheless, there
generally had been, somewhere in the background, some suggestion of
the reason of health; as there was in that last great journey to his final
home in the South Seas.
The one real break, I suspect, in this curious double process of
protection and risk, was his break-away to America, which arose partly
at least in connection with the matter of his marriage. It seemed to his

friends and family, not so much like the conduct of an invalid who had
done a bolt from the hospital, as the conduct of a lunatic unaccountably
loose from the asylum. In truth, the voyage struck them as less mad
than the marriage. As this is not a biographical study, I need not go
deeply into the delicate disputes about that business; but it was
admittedly at least unconventional. All that matters to the argument
here is that, while there was much in it that was even noble, it was not
normal. It was not love as it should come to youth: it is no disrespect to
either to say that in both, psychologically speaking, there was an
element of patching up as well as of binding together. Stevenson had
met, first in Paris and later in America, an American lady married to a
seemingly somewhat unsatisfactory American gentleman, against
whom she took proceedings for divorce. Stevenson at the same time
precipitately crossed the seas and in some sense pursued her to
California; I suppose with some vague idea of being in at the death; and
indeed he was very nearly in at his own. The escapade brought on him
one of the worst and sharpest of his attacks of illness; the lady, being
on the spot, naturally threw herself into nursing him; and as soon as he
could stand on two rickety legs they were married. It caused
consternation to his family, who were however really reconciled
afterwards, it would seem, by the personal magnetism of his foreign
and almost exotic bride. Certainly in her society his literary work went
with a renewed swing and even regularity; and the rest of his story is
practically the story of his important works; varied by his, if possible,
still more important friendships. There was illness, in which, it should
be said, it was often a case of two invalids nursing each other. Then
came the decision to fall back on the secure climate of the Pacific
Islands; which led to his taking up his last station at Vailima on the
island of Samoa: in a coloured archipelago which our cheerful
forefathers might have described as the Cannibal Islands, but which
Stevenson was more disposed to describe as the Islands of the Blest.
There he lived as happily as can an exile who loves his country and his
friends, free at least of all the daily dangers of his lung trouble; and
there he died very suddenly, at the age of forty-four, the beloved
patriarch of a little white and brown community, to whom he was
known as Tusitala or the Teller of Tales.

That is the main outline of the actual biography of Robert Louis
Stevenson; and from the time when he clambered as a boy among the
crags and castellations of the Painted Hill, looking across the islets of
the Forth, to the time when tall brown barbarians, crowned with red
flowers, bore him on their spears to the peak of their sacred mountain,
the spirit of this artist had been permitted to inhabit, and as it were to
haunt, the beautiful places of the earth. To the last he had tasted that
beauty with a burning sensibility; and it is no joke, in his case, to say
that he would