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Henley's perfect description in verse is too well known to need quotation. Ugly, Stevenson called himself, but this was not so. He was original in looks and mind, his lank brown hair straggled over his high forehead, and framed his thin, high-cheeked, sallow, oval face. His brown eyes and full red lips gave a dash of colour to his features. His schoolmate, Mr.
It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson.
Let us not for a moment imagine that Stevenson has stolen these things and is trying to palm them off on us as his own. He has absorbed them. He does not know their origin. He gives them out again in joy and in good faith with zest and amusement and in the excitement of a new discovery.
He wrote just so much each day, usually an average of six pages, and this manuscript was so erased and corrected that it was finally compressed into two pages of print. The masters of English prose have been great workers. Stevenson and others like him gave hours and days to the study of words, phrases, and sentences.
The sociologists of the nineteenth century have come to regard circumstance as a prime motive for action, and environment as a prime influence on character; and recent writers have applied this philosophic thesis in their employment of the element of setting. The way in which the setting may suggest the action is thus discoursed upon by Stevenson in his "Gossip on Romance":
I had thought, as I wrote, that people might think I was going a good deal too far in my praise of Bagehot, but lo and behold! my purple patch was "turned down," not because of this but because it was held to be too laudatory of Stevenson, and not laudatory enough of my hero! I was, nevertheless, quite right.
The main source, in fact almost the only one, from which I have been able to draw a description of the childhood of Fanny Stevenson is an article on early reminiscences written by my sister herself, which was found among her papers after her death.
I did not take to it, but Mr. R. was so earnest about it, and had such confidence in his friend, that I finally let him have the money. There was quite a spirit of speculation of that kind at that time. Colonel Stevenson had laid out one on Suisan bay, at the mouth of the San Joaquin river, named New York of the Pacific.
Hyde had just made a tremendous impression on the reading public; the idea of dual personality was being discussed on all sides; ministers preached sermons about it. Stevenson was amazed and bewildered, though immensely pleased, at the sudden turn of fortune's wheel. Here, indeed, was success at last in full measure.
Stevenson, as far as one can learn, had no Celtic blood; none, at least, of traceable infusion: he was more purely Lowland than Sir Walter Scott.
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