Robert Louis Stevenson

Excerpt

SPIRIT OF THE AGE SERIES

The publishers desire to announce that it is their purpose to comprise in this series a collection of little books uniform in general style and appearance to the present volume and having for their subjects men and women, whose work and influence, in whatever field of literature or art was their chosen one, may be said to faintly reflect the spirit or tendencies of cultivated thought at the present time.

The treatment of the subject matter will not be conventional, the chief aim being to present to the readers a living, marching personality breathing with the individuality characteristic of the person.

Volume I of this series is Whistler
by Haldane Macfall

Volume II, Robert Louis Stevenson
by Eve Blantyre Simpson

Additional volumes to be announced shortly.

"A spirit all sunshine, graceful from
every gladness, useful because
bright." Carlyle.

The mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, when asked to inscribe a motto on a guest list, wrote:—

"The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be happy as kings."

"That," she said, "includes the whole gospel of R. L. S." These lines are certainly a concise statement of the spirit in which her son undertook to expound the benefits to be derived from "performing our petty round of irritating concerns and duties with laughter and kind faces." Before he could walk steadily, it had been discovered he was heavily handicapped by the burden of ill-health. Still the good fairy who came to his christening endowed him with "sweet content," a gift which carried him triumphantly through all hampering difficulties. He never faltered in the task he set himself—the task of happiness. He began to preach his gospel as a child. He would not have his tawdry toy sword disparaged even by his father. "I tell you," he said, "the sword is of gold, the sheath of silver, and the boy who has it is quite contented." In the same manner he transformed a coddling shawl into a wrap fit for a soldier on a night march. To the end of his days he was eager to be happy. We are told

"Two men looked out from prison bars;
One saw mud, the other stars."

When bodily ailments held Stevenson as a captive in bonds, his keen sight pierced through the obstructions which held him caged. We are not left in doubt, when we read his books, as to whether his gaze was earthwards or to heaven's distant lamps. He taught others to see with his clear vision, and he expounded his gospel in so taking a manner, even if the import of it had savoured more of mud than stars, it would have been studied for its style. He had the true artist soul within him. He wished to create or represent what came within the range of those brilliant dark eyes of his, so, with infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J. Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile and whimsical a nature, apparently so ready to be diverted from the main high-road by a desire to explore any brambly lane, had in him the deliberate goal-winning gait of the tortoise....