Sixth Contributory Incident.
Swift conclusion.
Character revelation.
152. “In the ravine; I am going to bury him.
He died a Christian; I shall have a mass sung for him.
Let some one tell my son-in-law Tiodoro Bianchi to come and live with us.”
STEVENSON AND HIS WRITINGS
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, as he was baptized, was born November 13, 1850, at Edinburgh, Scotland, of Scotch parents. He entered Edinburgh University when he was seventeen, intending to learn his father’s profession, civil engineering—though he had always longed to be a writer, having dictated books at the precocious ages of six, seven, and nine. At twenty-one he decided to study law, and four years later passed the bar examination in his native city. In 1880 he married Mrs. Osbourne, with whose son, Lloyd, he collaborated in the writing of several stories. Stevenson’s health, which was never robust, sent him on many journeys in search of strength—to the European continent, several times to the United States, and once on a two years’ voyage to the South Seas. In 1890 he finally settled in Samoa, where he died at his home, Vailima, December 3, 1894. He was buried on the nearby summit of Mount Vaea.
Stevenson was a brilliant novelist, essayist, poet, and short-story writer. Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and Weir of Hermiston—the last of which he left unfinished—are his best novels. His journeys were chronicled by such delightful travel-sketches as An Inland Voyage, Travels With a Donkey, and The Silverado Squatters. A Child’s Garden of Verse contains his best poems. His most noteworthy essays are found in Memories and Portraits, and Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Most famous among his short-stories are “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (a novelette in length), “The Pavilion on the Links,” “Thrawn Janet,” “Will o’ the Mill,” “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door,” “The Merry Men,” “Markheim,” published first in Unwin’s Annual, London, 1885, and given in this volume in full, and “A Lodging for the Night,” which follows entire. It was first published in The Temple Bar magazine, October, 1877.
Stevenson was a supreme craftsman. No writer of the short-story in English, except Edgar Allan Poe, was so conscious of his art and so gifted to create up to the measure of his orderly knowledge. In criticism of the story-teller’s art, Poe was the greater originator, Stevenson the more brilliant generalizer; Poe was the deeper, Stevenson the broader; Poe’s opinions as to form grew largely out of his own consciousness, and shaped his practices—they were arrived at deductively: Stevenson’s standards grew as his creations shaped themselves, and were measurably molded by his own writings—they were examples of inductive reasoning. Thus Stevenson was doubly equipped to produce incomparably the greatest group of short-stories ever written by a Briton before the days of Kipling, and some sound critics will dispute even this reservation. In charm, in dash of style, in a sense of form, in pure romantic spirit, and in penetrating human interest, Stevenson ranks among the ten greatest short-story-tellers of his era.
I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little strength?—R. L. Stevenson, Vailima Letters.