Robert Louis Stevenson

by Margaret Moyes Black

The Sire de Maletroit's Door and The Pavilion on the Links, are most graphically written, especially the latter with its splendid description of the dreary sea and the wide and wind-swept stretch of drearier links where the curious characters play their mysterious parts. It is interesting to know that Mr Stevenson wrote The Pavilion on the Links while he was very ill in California. All the stories in the two volumes are favourites, and many readers give a preference to The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, or Prince Florizel.

Providence and the Guitar is also one of his best stories. Prince Otto, the first draft of which was written at Monterey, is the peculiar but very beautifully written story of a prince with no fancy for princedom and no talent for governing, who leaves his vain young wife and his unscrupulous prime minister in power and goes roaming among his subjects only to hear some far from complimentary opinions of himself. In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and re-read with infinite pleasure.

Mr Stevenson says, in its dedicatory preface, that he meant to make of it a masterpiece; if he did not succeed in doing so, as a story, he certainly gave in it a picture of the woods so true to nature and so exquisite in style and in expression that it will live as among his best work.

Good as this earlier writing was he had not yet found in it his full inspiration, and it hardly appealed to so wide a public as the fresh and delightful stories of adventure to which he finally turned his attention. In connection with Mr Stevenson's fiction, it is interesting to note that in his boyhood he greatly enjoyed the stories of a novelist called Smythe, who at that time contributed to the London Journal, and whose work had its influence on the boy's future tales. Smythe's novels were full of stirring adventures, and many lads of that day, besides the aspiring novelist, were much impressed by them, and can even now recall incidents in them read so long ago as 1868!

He had applied for work to Mr Henderson, the Scotch editor of Young Folks, and to the acceptance of this application the world owes Treasure Island and the charming stories which followed it. The editor of Young Folks, who offered to take a story from him, showed him a treasure-hunting tale by Mr Peace, and asked him to give him something on the same lines. The result was The Sea Cook, which appeared in the paper in the autumn of 1881, and was not very highly paid for. It was written under the nom-de-plume of Captain North to give the idea the author was a sailor; it was not given a very important place in the paper and it had no very marked success as a serial. It was, with very little alteration, published by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1883, under the name of Treasure Island, and it had an instant and well-deserved success. It is an excellent book for boys, full of stirring adventure, in the old-time fashion of fifty years ago, but it is much more; it is a book that grown-up folk, whose taste is still fresh enough to enjoy a good tale of the sea, delight in as heartily as the juniors. It was written while the Stevenson family were staying for a time at Braemar, and Mr Thomas Stevenson gave his son valuable help in it from his own experiences at sea while on his cruises of inspection round the coasts.

The Black Arrow also appeared in Young Folks during 1883 as by Captain North; it is said to have been very successful as a serial, but it has not been a great favourite in book form, and is one of the least interesting of his stories.

Kidnapped came out in 1886 in the same paper and was the first to be signed as by Robert Louis Stevenson. In its serial form it was not highly paid for but it had, when Messrs Cassell & Co. published it as a book, a large and an immediate success. It forms the first instalment of the delightful experiences of David Balfour, that somewhat pawky young Scot who, from the moment he leaves 'The Hawes Inn' at Queensferry and embarks on his adventures with Alan Breck and other strange worthies in Appin and elsewhere till we finally bid him good-bye on the last page of Catriona, never fails at odd times and places to remind one of Mr Stevenson himself at David's age and of what he might have been and done had David Balfour's fate been his in those early days of plot and turmoil in which his part is played.

Catriona, which is a continuation of Kidnapped, at first appeared in Atalanta, and was published in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1893. In the recent edition of 1898 both volumes are brought out as The History of David Balfour, and are beautifully illustrated. Catriona is a charming book, full of life and action, and the breezy, outdoor existence, in the picturing of which its author excels. The Edinburgh of the last half of the eighteenth century, with its quaint closes, and quainter manners, is admirably portrayed, and the old lady with whom Catriona lives, and Lord Prestongrange and his daughters, are very clever pictures from a bygone day. Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close, she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself, while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long feathers droop to the best advantage.

She and the two Kirsties in the unfinished Weir of Hermiston stand out alone among all the heroines in Mr Stevenson's books as real breathing, living women. They are natural, they are possible, they have life and interest; all the rest are more or less lay figures put in because a heroine is necessary—the more's the pity evidently from the author's point of view!—and drawn somewhat perfunctorily by their creator, with but a limited knowledge of the virtues, the faults, the failings, and, above all, the 'little ways,' which go to make up the ordinary woman.

The women are undoubtedly a weakness in the author's work. It looks as if he had known intimately only exceptional women,—who, possibly, had left behind them, before he knew them well, most of a young girl's faults and follies, and some of her attractions also,—and had never found other women worth studying deeply, so that the girls in his books do not read real enough to interest one greatly, and it is almost a relief to take up Treasure Island, The Wrecker, or The Ebb Tide, in which there is very little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine character'—a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers, because women and men regard as essential quite different facts in life; and she explains it by saying that it is the difference of personality and of point of view. Certainly Mr Stevenson's point of view in regard to his heroines is not a satisfying one to most women.