INTRODUCTION

I

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Robert Louis Stevenson was horn in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850. He came of a family conspicuous for worthy accomplishment. His mother was the daughter of Lewis Balfour, minister of the parish of Colinton, and granddaughter of James Balfour, a professor in the University of Edinburgh. His father, Thomas Stevenson, a member of a firm of lighthouse builders, continued with distinction a profession in which the family had already won notable success. The firm of Stevensons, which included Robert Louis's two uncles, Alan and David, built a large number of shore-lights and beacons, chief among them the noble deep-sea light of Skerryvore. Thomas Stevenson was a man fond of books and a somewhat prolific writer on subjects relating to his own profession; a man, his son records with pride, "of reputation comparatively small at home, yet filling the world." His chief success was won in his inventions for the improvement of lighthouse illumination, which "entitled their author to the name of one of mankind's benefactors." 1

That Louis should take up the hereditary profession of his family was at first assumed as a matter of course, but the leadings of his genius determined otherwise. Many of the influences of his boyhood were such as to awaken and stimulate an imaginative nature. The intervals of his formal schooling (which was rendered intermittent by his

1 Memories and Portraits:

Thomas Stevenson.

frail health) were spent in travel,-to Germany and Holland, to Italy and the south of France, to England, and, not least, to the lighthouses on the coast of Fife, in congenial neighborhood to the sea. The impression made by all these fresh and changing experiences upon the quick imagination of the boy may be inferred from a passage written in later years: "When the Scotch child sees them first [the English windmills] he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the bush hedgerows, stiles, and privy pathways in the fields, the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smockfrocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly sounding English speech-they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night."

The effect of such scenes, and of those in the neighborhood of the Manse of Colinton, where he often visited his grandfather, the Reverend Mr. Balfour, was further increased by Louis's love of reading. Even before he could read with ease and that ability came somewhat tardily, he began to take keen delight in listening to romantic and adventurous stories, stories of the sort that always appealed to him strongly even in his maturest years. "For my part," he says, speaking of his boyhood preference, "I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards the end of the year 17-, several gentlemen were playing bowls.'

Give me a highwayman, and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but a highwayman was my favorite dish."

Such a boy would naturally turn early to writing, though A History of Moses, dictated in his sixth year, and Travels in Perth, written in his ninth, bear no sign of

special precocity. The chief significance of these early efforts is that their author was already busy on his "own private end, which was to learn to write." 1

When he was seventeen, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh, with the intention of ultimately becoming an engineer. At the various schools which he had previously attended among them the Edinburgh Academy— his industry had been languid and interrupted because of his ill health and natural disinclination to perform set tasks. Now, his application to the work of the University classes was much impaired by "an extensive and highly rational system of truantry." But if he had little or no interest in prescribed studies, his mind, "insatiably curious in the aspects of life," found much to absorb it. He read widely in English poetry, fiction, and essays, and, if less widely, still considerably, in French literature. He took a great interest in Scottish history, and was a genuine student of it. He had a share in founding the Edinburgh Literary Magazine. He became a member of the famous Speculative Society,—an undergraduate literary organization which had enrolled Walter Scott among its members, and took an active part in its discussions. In consequence of much reading and speculation, he began to question certain matters of religious dogma. This attitude of doubt caused for a time. a breach between him and his father, who held a strictly orthodox faith; yet the son, though greatly grieved at a difference with one for whom he felt so much affection and esteem, was too sincere with himself to conceal his convictions.

In the meantime, steady application to what for him was the main business of these university years was showing results. Continuing to practise the art of writing “as

For the full text of this passage, often quoted as good counsel for young writers, see Memories and Portraits: A College Magazine.

men learn to whittle, in a wager with himself," he produced much in both prose and verse-romances, poetical dramas, lyrics, epics-most of which he kept to himself and finally destroyed. In his twenty-third year he made his first contribution to a regular periodical, an essay entitled Roads. In the same year several friends whose opinion he valued urged him to adopt letters as a profession.

Several years before this, his purpose to follow the calling of his father, a purpose never more than halfheartedly entertained, had been given over entirely. This change of plan was not made because Stevenson had shown no aptitude for engineering; in the same year in which he made his decision he received from the Edinburgh Society of Arts a silver medal for a paper on the improvement of lighthouse apparatus. Nor was the engineer's life likely to prove wholly uncongenial, the opportunity for seafaring appealing to him strongly. But for the drudgery of the office he was entirely unfitted by reason of his health and his impatience of irksome confinement. Accordingly, in 1871, it was decided, with great reluctance on the father's part, that Louis should study law. For his legal studies he manifested somewhat more zeal than for the more mechanical subjects that preceded them, though his work was interrupted by a severe illness, with symptoms which threatened consumption. In 1875, he passed his examinations with credit, and was admitted to the bar of Scotland. For a time, chiefly to please his parents, he made some attempt to practise; but, though he attended trials and appeared in legal wig and gown, the sum total of his briefs was four. The absence of clients was no sorrow to him; there was all the more leisure for his chosen craft.

But even these none too serious attempts he felt to be an impediment to the exercise of his true occupation, and he soon abandoned them altogether. Released from the restrictions of a formal profession, he began to lead a life