Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial

When I left Braemar, I carried with me a considerable portion of the MS. of _Treasure Island_, with an outline of the rest of the story. It originally bore the odd title of _The...

To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out swear by everything, and as though by necessity, at the same time, a school of studious detractors, who will suspicio...

In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh, telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus gathered up in little the broad reflections...

At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance. George Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us,...

In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason he himself gave about _Deacon Brodie_ utterly fails in that healthy hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on w...

From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in _The Daily Ch...

My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result that I am pleased to think of. It brought me into personal association with R. L. Stevenson, who had writ...

From these sources now traced out by us--his youthfulness of spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to dream--symbolisms leading to disregard of common feelings--flows too ofte...

A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of the master. It is in the form of...

Among many letters received by me in acknowledgment of, or in commentary on, my little tributes to R. L. Stevenson, in various journals and magazines, I find the following, whic...

We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are, of necessity, of a very vital c...

In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it. "He would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." H...

Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical--to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fancif...

Nothing could perhaps be more wearisome than to travel o'er the wide sandy area of Stevenson criticism and commentary, and expose the many and sad and grotesque errors that meet...

More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane and true and disinterested view of Stevenson's claims, was that article of his erewhile "friend," Mr W. E. Henley, p...

Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar letters were the best medium to reveal a man. The letters must have been written with no idea of being used f...

It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over forty--the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had di...

The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut- and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if no...

Immediately on reading Lord Rosebery's address as Chairman of the meeting in Edinburgh to promote the erection of a monument to R. L. Stevenson, I wrote to him politely asking h...

The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends, are in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite of the idea having occurred to him, that so...

The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man who "perceives only the visible world"--he should not engage himself with problems in the direct sense...

R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year of the death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so finely celebrated. As a mere child he gave token...

"Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is conceived....

Mrs Strong, in her chapter of _Table Talk in Memories of Vailima_, tells a story of the natives' love for Stevenson. "The other day the cook was away," she writes, "and Louis, w...

In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well as the most varied in theme and style. When I use the word "powerful," I do not mean merely the produci...

Of the portraits of Stevenson a word or two may be said. There is a very good early photograph of him, taken not very long before the date of my visit to him at Braemar in 1881,...

Mr Edmund Gosse has been so good as to set down, with rather an air of too much authority, that both R. L. Stevenson and I deceived ourselves completely in the matter of my litt...

What is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams--the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human...

It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the...

Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson, who, like a youth, was all for _Heiterkeit_, cheerfulness, taking and giving of pleasure, for relief, ch...

His interest in engineering soon went--his mind full of stories and fancies and human nature. As he had told his mother: he did not care about finding what was "the strain on a...

The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost abnormal boyish reverence for mere...

Mr Hammerton, in his _Stevensoniana_ (pp. 323-4), has given the humorous inscriptions on the volumes of his works which Stevenson presented to Dr Trudeau, who attended him when...

From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the autobiographic vein--the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the quaint, genial, yet really chil...