“My mistress was the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.”
Ill health gave occasion and direction to many voyages and experiments, some of which bettered him, while others made him worse. As a bachelor he roamed mountains afoot and travelled rivers in his own boat, explored the purlieus and sublittorals of Paris, London, and Edinburgh, lodged “on the seacoast of Bohemia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant, and made himself vagrantly at home in California where he married the wife “the great Artificer made for him.” They passed their honeymoon in a deserted miner’s cabin, and then lived around, in Scotland, the Engadine, Southern France, Bournemouth, the Adirondacks, and on a schooner among the South Sea Islands, bringing up at last in the pleasant haven of Vailima. On all these distant roads Death pursued him, and, till the last ten years, Poverty was his companion. Yet he looked with keen and joyful eyes upon the changing face of the world and into its shadowy heart without trembling. He kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched even when the lights burned low. He counted life
“just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on and educe the man.”
He may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, things may have looked black to him; but he never gave up, and in spite of frailties and burdens, he travelled a long way,—upward. Through all his travels and tribulations he kept on writing, writing, writing,—the very type of a migratory author. He made his first appearance in a canoe. The log of this journey, An Inland Voyage on French Rivers, published in 1878, was a modest, whimsical, charming début in literature. In 1879 he appeared again, and this time with a quaint companion. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is one of the most delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a journey ever written in English. It contains no practical information but plenty of pleasure and profit. I do not envy the reader who can finish it without loving that obstinate little mouse-coloured Modestine, and feeling that she is one of the best-drawn female characters, of her race, in fiction.
From this good, quiet beginning his books followed rapidly, and (after Treasure Island, that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with growing popularity among the judicious, the “gentle readers,” who choose books not because they are recommended by professors or advertised in department stores, but because they are really well written and worth reading.
It is difficult to classify Stevenson’s books, perhaps just because they are migrants, borderers. Yet I think a rough grouping, at least of his significant works, may be made. There are five volumes of travels; six or seven volumes of short stories; nine longer novels or romances; three books of verse; three books of essays; one biography; and one study of South Sea politics. This long list lights up two vital points in the man: his industry and his versatility.
“A virtue and a vice,” say you? Well, that may be as you choose to take it, reader. But if you say it in a sour or a puritanical spirit, Stevenson will gaily contradict you, making light of what you praise and vaunting what you blame.
Industry? Nonsense! Did he not write An Apology for Idlers? Yet unquestionably he was a toiler; his record proves it. Fleeing from one land to another to shake off his implacable enemy; camping briefly in strange places; often laid on his back by sickness and sometimes told to “move on” by Policeman Penury; collecting his books by post and correcting his proofs in bed; he made out to produce twenty-nine volumes in sixteen years,—say 8,000 pages of 300 words, each,—a thing manifestly impossible without a mort of work. But of this he thought less than of the fact that he did it, as a rule, cheerfully and with a high heart. Herein he came near to his own ideal of success: “To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation,—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.” Of his work I think he would have said that he stuck to it, first, because he needed the money that it brought in, and second, because he enjoyed it exceedingly. With this he would have smiled away the puritan who wished to pat him on the back for industry.