"She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a
stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.
Catriona.
Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries." Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of Jekyll had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is an accident." But now he was at liberty to give play to his infinite variety upon a true boys' book,—a story to satisfy the inveterate boyishness of his own heart. "Of the romance of boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master ... the philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature man." (J. W. Mackail.) And even the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys in petticoats." The phrase has reason. "I have never admired a girl," he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of mine." The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he hardly cared to solve,—a sealed book which he was not desirous to open. "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with the warfare.
And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life: and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes had changed. His wife,—"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very alter ego: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics: and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses." To while away the weary hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,—and subsequently the husband and wife would write them out together. She, with her "eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as companion, helpmate, friend;—and far—how infinitely far!—above the ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,—in his bachelor days,—that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections," and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her life-long comrade. The character of the ideal wife, as there indicated,—apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent tongue,—was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion. And now that Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity for him,—he was loth to speak of it, as to write of it. It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour. But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously insisted, in his desiderata of the female character.
"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily in his wife. Therefore it came about, that, unversed in women—as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic—and if they failed in flesh-and-blood-vraisemblance, they had that "steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he had chosen.
You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor; from Catriona, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when, having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the staggering side of the Rose into the little boat below;—when, in David Balfour's words:
"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself ... But this was to reckon without the lass's courage ... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than would be thought genteel in cities"—(Catriona.)
to Seraphina in Prince Otto, still inherently valorous in that desperate flight through the forest: where: