Costume, dialect, scenery, were all thoroughly studied, and when himself distant from the scenes of his tales, he is to be found constantly writing from Vailima to friends in London or in Edinburgh for the books and the information he required. In the period between 1745 and 1816, in which the plots of Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae, Weir of Hermiston, and St Ives are laid, he is especially at home, and old record rolls, books on manners and on costume, are all laboriously studied to give to his stories that accuracy and truth to life which he considered to be absolutely necessary. To such good effect did he study volumes of old Parliament House trials, that the dress of Alan Breck, in Kidnapped, is literally transcribed from that of a prisoner of Alan's period, whose trial he had perused.
Nor did his conscientiousness stop here; he wrote and re-wrote everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder, therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal.
He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling.
In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end, troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of our memories with the problems they propound and worry over.
His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their absence from the novel of the day.
His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own. Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of far more ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself, has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply.
Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who, even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6]
In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart
'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.'