Robert Louis Stevenson

The return to Scotland marked for Stevenson, in life if not in letters, the end of his experimental period. He was married, his difficulties and disagreements with his parents were over, and his relationship with his father from that time onwards was one of affection and peace, partly no doubt because he was established as an adult with a separate family of his own, and partly because Fanny got on extremely well with both her in-laws, and made a conquest especially of Thomas Stevenson. What was she like? She looks out at us from her portraits, square, dark, determined, formidable, with good dark eyes set wide apart, a most resolute, perhaps an obstinate chin and a firm but not ungenerous mouth. She looks as if she meant to have her own way. To Henley she was somebody who dominated and possessed Stevenson. There is no doubt that she, or the deep-rooted jealousy she roused in Henley, was the rock on which that ardent friendship split. The Colvins were delighted with her, finding her a character "as strong, interesting and romantic as her husband's."

To him she was everything that he bad foreseen when he stood in the forest of Fontainebleau outside the inn and looked into the lighted room. Instinct was triumphantly vindicated. It was an extremely happy marriage. Stevenson did not often speak or write of his feelings for her, but in a letter written two years before his death, he said, "As I look back, I think my marriage was the best move I ever made in my life.""I love my wife," he wrote, "I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her." To some of the friends of his bachelor days she seemed to have clipped his wings and to dominate his personality too much. It is a thing which devoted friends are apt to feel about any marriage, but there seems no doubt that Stevenson, luckier in his Fanny than Keats in his, was far happier and more integrated with her than he had ever been before.

His wings were clipped severely by his health. From his first American journey until the last four years in the South Seas he was obliged to five the fife of an invalid prostrated by any cold or chill, and liable to sudden h?morrhages of the lungs. Only once, just before his death, did he admit to Lloyd Osbourne how much he hated the invalid life and how keenly he had felt the "physical degradation," but there was little direct sign of the kind of life he had to five in his writing, indeed he was determined that there should not be. The root of his sometimes almost too exuberant philosophy was his determination not to whine. He felt that whining was a disgrace, and "his feelings," said Henry James, "are always his reasons." That he lived on the edge of death probably had an indirect influence on his writing, for the lines were always clear and the colours vivid. He saw and felt sharply as men feel and see in danger.

Something should be said here about his attitude to his work. He was an artist, who cared passionately for the quality of what he wrote and spent his whole life trying to write better. He was also a moralist who believed it to be his duty to earn his own living, and a living for his wife and stepson. This is no place for the familiar discussion as to whether the two aims are compatible, nor for the fashionable consideration of how much money a writer needs to live on. What is relevant is Stevenson's attitude to the problem, and the way in which it affected his work. In his Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art , an essay which might with advantage be read and even learnt by heart by any aspiring young writer, since it states so clearly the problem of the professional author, Stevenson sets down the articles of his faith.