May Byron

“ No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether. Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and beyond the appreciation of the general public. For money,—though it was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,—for money he did not care, except as a means to an end. "Wealth is only useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly want." ”

“ It contains the exquisite imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of one who has also lived in Arcadia. But to the child, they are the very commonplaces of existence. To sway to and fro in a swing, "the pleasantest thing a child can do,"—to bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is gold,"—these are everyday affairs to the country-child,—just as watching the lamplighter is to the town child. ”

“ Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love. And perhaps the nearing vision of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and laisser-faire, and the equalisation of things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.
Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts of life. ”

“ And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?" (Virginibus Puerisque.) ”

“ Spring buds of pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom; a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air—the rising of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses of April. And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad hosts of life. ”

“ Stevenson,—the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather moss,—was now, under a woman's tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort. "Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit down in it. No other room is so lovely in the world ... ”

“ Stevenson had no children of his own. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such. The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses," were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders, so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal habitat was "The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe. ”

“ 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." ”

“ They were living in Bournemouth to be near their only son. The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably failing. The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a poignantly pathetic one. ”

“ His expression, of mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic presence"—together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so unique as could command all love at will. ”

“ And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more than justified his choice.
All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit condition. ”

“ To read verses about them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in similar avocations. But to the grown-man who can never play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,—these reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing. ”

“ Jekyll, was very much a man to be reckoned with.
Probably few modern books have met with such instantaneous and triumphant success as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll. The first, after running its course, unannounced and comparatively unrecognized, the serial of an obscure author, in Young Folks' Paper, was published in book form,—and Stevenson, like Byron, "awoke to find himself famous." The honours which he had failed to obtain with all the dainty humour, all the valiant fatalism, of Virginibus Puerisque, had been accorded without stint to Treasure Island. ”

“ Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine should enter—that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and Herrick the cockney vagabond. "The spice of life is battle," he said ”

“ 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. ”

“ Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. ”

“ All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. ”

“ In Ordered South and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,—and the curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of life,—from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little children with their long possibilities before them. ”

“ It is hardly to be wondered at, that some critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last enemy,—and his inveterate optimism in the face of all calamities. ”

“ And the friends were very many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore. First and foremost was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described him. "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth ”

“ O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour." (Virginibus Puerisque.)
The author desires to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Cassell & Co., in allowing short extracts to be made from The Master of Ballantrae, The Wrecker, and Catriona ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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 ”