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. 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 miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
— “AES TRIPLEX” (1878/1923)
By January 1891, Louis and his entourage had moved into his new plantation-style home, called Vailima, in the hills overlooking the port of Apia on Samoa. With the exception of some brief island sojourns and visits to Sydney, he was settled for good in this island enclave. His correspondence from September of 1890 (when he first took up residence in Samoa) to his death in December of 1894 spans over two volumes and eight hundred pages. Although he still had some occasional spells of fever and a few bouts of spitting blood from his embattled lungs, his Samoan life was far different from the bed-bound years of France and England. He maintained a diligent routine of rising early and writing everyday. He worked outside in the garden and forest “(I love the work. I love weeding even, but clearing bush is heaven to me”), rode his horse to town, played his flageolet (if not terribly well), and often entertained visitors for dinner. He wrote to a female friend from his Bournemouth days:
I am a very different person from the prisoner of Skerryvore… . It is like a fairy story, that I should have recovered liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest. (Letter 2312)
At the same time that Louis embraced the physical work of his developing estate in the Samoan forest, he was also accepting his new role as the “lord and master” of his compound. His letters to Colvin and his mother (who had returned to Edinburgh to close up their home there) detail his efforts to manage the native servants and negotiate property boundaries with local landowners. There was not a small amount of the Scottish “Laird” in him as he accepted the feudal structure that Samoan society was built on and the role that he occupied within this hierarchy.
I am the head of a household of five whites, and of twelve Samoans, to all of whom I am the chief and father; my cook comes to me and asks leave to marry—and his mother a fine old chief woman, who has never lived here, does the same. (Letter 2626)
As the overseer of the manor, he had to discipline and ultimately throw out Belle’s husband, Joe Strong, when he caught him stealing from their supplies. Lloyd was a titular foreman and second in command on the property, but as in most ventures in his life, proved more indolent than industrious. Belle served as a seamstress and was invaluable in forming warm connections with the native women and children who lived on the compound. Louis did his best to tutor young Austin, Belle’s son, but the boy also loved to escape with the Samoan children into the forest and streams that engulfed the property.
As Belle grew to be Louis’s confidante and eventually his main amanuensis for his correspondence and manuscripts, Fanny continued to drift apart from her husband and family in general. She gardened with a fanaticism that left her filthy and exhausted by the end of the day. She took to sleeping in a separate room from Louis, staying up late, and smoking incessantly. Her famous temper grew even more volatile; she easily took offense or expressed suspicion about their old friends, the Samoan servants, and even Louis himself. Here is Louis’s description of Fanny during the Samoa years in a letter to J. M. Barrie (future author of Peter Pan and at the time a fledgling Scottish writer and young admirer of Stevenson):
Fanny V. de G. Stevenson.
The Weird Woman.
Native Name, Tamaitai.
This is what you will have to look out for, Mr. Barrie. If you don’t get on with her, it’s a pity about your visit. She runs the show. Infinitely little, extraordinary wig of gray curls, handsome waxen face like Napoleon’s, insane black eyes, boy’s hands, tiny bare feet, a cigarette, blue native dress usually spotted with garden mould. In company manners presents the appearance of a little timid and precise old maid of the days of prunes and prism; you look for the reticule. (But wouldn’t be surprised to find dagger in her garter, Am [meaning added by Belle, the amanuensis]) Hellish energy; relieved by fortnights of entire hibernation … Doctors everybody, will doctor you, cannot be doctored herself. The Living Partizan: A violent friend, a brimstone enemy … Is always either loathed or slavishly adored; indifference impossible. The natives think her uncanny and that devils serve her. Dreams dreams, and sees visions. (Letter 2550)
Once the mainstay and sounding board for all his writing, Louis was no longer certain about Fanny’s judgments of his work. He was less inclined to share new drafts with her. And certainly he depended less on her, both physically and emotionally. Previously it had always been Fanny and Louis versus the world; she had been his indisputable champion and he, her unimpeachable defender. Now, there was friction between them, suspicion and criticism surfacing from both quarters. At one point Louis hurt Fanny deeply by telling her, out of both admiration and exasperation at her obsessive concern over their planation, that she had the “soul of a peasant” and not an artist. As time went on, she clearly resented his increasing reliance on Belle, as well as some of the attention he paid to lady visitors to their estate. By early 1893, her volatility would devolve into periods of outright paranoia and psychosis. Her delusions reached such a peak that there was a night when Belle and Louis had to keep guard at her bedside and were uncertain if she would ever come back to herself. Louis wrote Colvin about this episode:
At first it only seemed a kind of set against me; she made every talk an argument, then a quarrel; till I fled her, and lived in a kind of isolation in my own room …
The last was a hell of a scene which lasted all night … in which Belle and I held her for about two hours; she wanted to run away. (Letter 2549)
Combined with the descriptions of earlier periods of episodes of severe bedridden depression, Fanny may have suffered from bipolar illness in addition to her various physical ailments, which included severe migraines, gastrointestinal problems, and Bright’s disease affecting her kidneys. She did recover from this psychotic break, and her physical health rebounded as well, but her periodic moodiness and isolation from the rest of the family continued right up to Louis’s death. Interestingly, after Louis died, Fanny’s mental health seemed to stabilize and, first in Samoa, then later in California, where she lived out the rest of her life (passing away in 1914), she again became the great protector of his legacy.
Considering Louis’s own psychological status, the sickly boy, who found solace in his imagination and suffered shame for this passive “dissolute” indulgence, had largely receded from the scene. He had finally overcome his “Escape from Shame” script that had dominated much of his life. No longer the cherished Ariel of the London crowd, released from the judgment of his father’s Calvinism, he was finding a way to be in the world that did not ricochet him between extremes of liberation and constraint. He had at last become a driving actor in his own life rather than the boy who dreamed of knights and soldiers while bound up in the counterpane. Although he indulged in Belle’s daughterly attentions to him (she even cut his hair and clipped his nails for him), he was more likely to offer guidance than be guided by her. He might still have bouts of cold and fever (there was a particularly debilitating one during a visit to Sydney), but the days of collapse into Fanny’s control were over.
Despite this step forward in psychological growth, the restlessness that was at the heart of Stevenson’s personality still held sway. A fear of aging and an accompanying loss of mental and artistic powers now replaced his daily laments about physical ailments. His incessant worry over his financial affairs pervaded his communications with Baxter, Colvin, and his publishers.
Even as he displayed more responsibility, he still stole away to play soldiers with Austin and wrote affectionate letters to his friends’ children. In one famous letter to Annie Ide, the daughter of the American Land Commissioner for Samoa, Henry Clay Ide, Stevenson presents her with the gift of his birthday since she herself had had the misfortune to be born on December 25. The fictitious proclamation read in part:
In consideration that Miss A. H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the town of St Johnsbury, in the county of Caledonia, in the State of Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon Christmas Day, and is therefore, out of all justice, denied the consolation and profit of a Proper Birthday,
And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained an age, when O, we never mention it, and that I have now no further use for a birthday of any description;
… Have transferred and do hereby transfer to the said A. H. Ide, All and Whole my rights and privileges to the thirteenth day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby, and henceforth, the birthday of the said A. H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse, according to the manner of ancestors … (Letter 2328)
Even as this playful dimension of Stevenson never left him, neither did his incredulity at the contrast between the atavistic urges of human nature versus the pretenses of social convention. Stemming all the way back to Cummy’s mix of sensuality and self-denial in bedtime tales, he wrote to his cousin Bob in September, 1894, three months before his death,
But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child: I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen; the sight of Belle and her twelve-year-old boy, already taller than herself, is enough to turn my hair grey; as for Fanny and her brood, it is insane to think of. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and “I could wish my days be bound to each” by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and whether I wish it or not. (Letter 2782)
Stevenson is quoting ironically from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold.” Wordsworth had wished the adult artist could preserve a child’s instinctive wonder so that each of his days could be bound to the next by “natural piety.” In contrast, Stevenson notes in the unpublished fragment, “Early Memories,” written in October–November of that same year, that his childhood recollections were characterized by something quite different than simple wonder:
I seemed to have been born with a sentiment of something moving in things, of an infinite attraction and horror coupled. There should be some word ready-made in English to express this feeling, but I cannot find one.
Later in this same essay, he writes of what he defines as the “imminent tragedy” of living,
… of emotion without motive; of the penalties of life courted and endured, and the soul bartered, for nothing …The same emotion which seized me in childhood at the sight of certain streets and houses, overcomes me to-day before the spectacle of futile tragedies and lives sacrificed for the ugly and the cheap. The child does not understand, his morality is uninstructed; he does not, like the grown man, seek out a reason for the shock received, he receives it, cowers—and stares fascinated and mumbles the sensation in his memory. It is possible that the whole process of moralizing sensation is a pleasant error, and that we only confound and sophisticate that which was received pure at first. That mixture of unholy attraction and disgust, both extreme, both nightmarish, that sudden storm of melancholy that darkens and disperses throughout, may or may not have any necessary relation to these thoughts; they may be the symptoms of a moral or an aesthetical abhorrence, and again they may not. It is certain at least that the process by which man grows, is by a progressive synthesis of himself. He binds discrete sensations arbitrarily into bundles, which he tickets with a name and refers to a common source. The ship is afterwards more handy, it answers the helm better. [my italics]
These musings about our untidy process of bundling conflicting sensations and emotions under a coherent “ship of selfhood” is a far cry from Romanticism’s vision of a self that is at its core innocent and pious. This recognition of our emotional complexity is the true artistic heritage of Stevenson rather than the “seraph in chocolate” (in Henley’s memorable and mocking phrase)—the iconic “eternal boy” imagery—that rose up after his premature death and the hagiography that ensued, perpetuated in part by Fanny, Lloyd, and others of his entourage.
In the same letter to Bob quoted earlier, Stevenson sounds more realist and reconciler than romantic. He still values his earlier commitment to bohemianism and rebellion against convention, but he admits that he sees convention as connected to survival, to “feeding the belly” and that we must have civilization to meet this need. The impulse for food and security drives us toward social structures, even as the same animal urges pull us toward the Dionysian impulse—this is the contradiction of human nature.
Along with Freud and other late Victorians, Stevenson leaned into the twentieth century; his ideas anticipated Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, published nearly forty years later. (There is no evidence that Stevenson was aware of Freud’s early work from the 1880s and 1890s, but he was familiar with the writings of Charcot and the French physician’s studies of hysteria and hypnosis, which played a significant role in Freud’s developing theory of psychoanalysis.) Steeped in Darwin, skeptical of organized religion, deeply cynical about the colonial-capitalist empire that governed his beloved Samoa, he was free-associating about how to make sense of modern life. “I defend civilization for the thing it is, for the thing it has come to be.” He says if he could begin again, the one change he would make is to be upfront about the centrality of sex in all of human life (Freud again!). At the same time, always the proper pirate, he acknowledges that he will not be the pioneer to lead this charge.
It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and hallow most. Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.
In concert with the ideas that he shared with Bob, one of his projects was to finish the collection of Fables from which the earlier story “House of Eld” was drawn. He had revised them over the last twenty years, and the full collection never surfaced in his lifetime. Fanny discouraged him from publishing them due to their obscure and fatalistic quality.
Similar to “House of Eld,” most of the fables concern the problem of self-deception and in particular how humans cling to ideologies or received “truths” in an apparently indifferent universe. The fables consistently take on these abstract ideals and confront them with the concrete, contingent facts of daily life. In opposition to rigid ideology, there are many little truths to be found in the moments of contradiction when these larger truths inevitably collide. The honorable individual acknowledges this state of affairs and soldiers on with as much dignity, wisdom, and humor as he or she can muster.
Anticipating existential questions raised by Sartre and Camus in the coming century, the captain in “The Sinking Ship” asks his panicking first lieutenant, Why does it matter that the ship is sinking, since we have been faced with certain death from the first day of our birth? The captain questions why anyone with knowledge of mortality invests in any action or gives meaning to any moment of existence. Caught up in his philosophical abstractions, he asks the sailor smoking a pipe in the powder magazine if there is any difference between this reckless choice and the man who shaves in the morning. Taking his sophistry to its ultimate conclusion, the captain lights a cigar and finishes off the ship with a “glorious detonation.”
In “Something in It,” a missionary’s life is saved repeatedly by the very native gods he has repeatedly renounced, but once safe in his mission again, he starts up his service, holding on to whatever “pinprick of truth” he can find in his original beliefs. Much humbled, he is still determined to carry on his life’s work and stay loyal to the converts who have trusted him.
“The Touchstone” depicts the fate of two brothers who both desire a princess’s hand in marriage. The king has explained that only the one who brings home a touchstone bearing the light of truth will be able to have her for his bride. The older brother is a bold seeker; he sets out on his expedition for the touchstone, leaving the kingdom behind. The young brother stays close and complies with his father’s advice at each turn, taking to heart the older man’s words that “when the teeth are shut, the tongue is at home.” The younger brother settles for the “plain truth,” since the touchstone his father hands to him shows him exactly what he sees already. The elder brother’s lifelong quest leads to many possible touchstones of different truths, but he is reluctant to settle on one. Finally, he uncovers one small shining pebble in an old man’s cottage and sees through its illuminating light how all the other touchstones depend on it. The one truth is in fact that there are many meaningful smaller truths and no single “Truth.” He returns to the old kingdom to find his brother married to the princess. The younger brother mocks him for his foolish quest and wasted years, but when the elder brother takes out his pebble, its light reveals all of the younger brother’s world to be a sham and his wife, just a “mask of a woman” and dead inside. The elder brother leaves his brother to his delusions and sets out to continue his quest for hard-won insights in an unsettled world.
This concern for moral choice amid uncertainty was at the center of Stevenson’s most important final works of fiction. The first two, “The Beach at Falesá” and “The Ebb-Tide,” were set in contemporary times in the South Seas, as I have briefly mentioned before. The last unfinished work, Weir of Hermiston, takes place in Edinburgh and the outlying Lowlands of Scotland, during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, around 1814–1815.
“The Beach at Falesá” tells the story of a white trader, Wiltshire, who lands a post on a relatively obscure island and is quickly encouraged by the older existing trader, Case, to take a native “wife,” a beautiful young girl named Uma. “Wife” is in quotations because the traders’ practice was to generate a bogus marriage decree, indicating the marriage would last only for the conjugal night and end in the morning. This was an ironic nod toward the missionaries’ concern for propriety, but the traders took full liberty of this deception to exploit the illiterate native women. They could stay with their “wives” as long as they liked and leave them at will without any legal responsibilities.
However, Wiltshire has also been duped. The local villagers have tabooed Uma due to rumors Case spread about her after she refused his advances. The result is that no one will trade with Wiltshire and his new wife (all the business goes to Case), and only slowly does he learn how Case has tricked him. When Wiltshire discusses this with Uma, she realizes that Case has deceived her, too. He had told her that Wiltshire was aware of the taboo, but he ignored it due to his desire to be with her. She insists she should leave so Wiltshire will be able to recover his trading business, but he loves her and will not let her go. He tracks down a missionary, and they marry in a legal ceremony. In the rest of the story, husband and wife work together, each showing ingenuity and courage, to overcome Case and his crooked monopoly over the islanders.
Told in a first-person narrative, this story has none of the pretty styling and learned allusions that often marked Stevenson’s prose. It is a rough-and-tumble story of the white traders’ racism and mistreatment of the native villagers. Similarly, there is no romanticizing of the islanders. Uma is a wonderfully rich character—simultaneously childlike and wise, endearing in her loyalty and bravery on behalf of her husband. Stevenson had often been accused of being unable to write female characters and to give them any depth or sensual dimension. The relationship between Uma and Wiltshire conveys a vibrant sexual attraction, which is only intensified by their commitment to each other. To portray a reciprocal relationship between a white trader and a native woman was hardly the norm for Victorian society. Stevenson knew that he was breaking new ground and was aware that the reception might not be welcoming. He wrote to Colvin,
It is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life; everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost … You will know more about the South Seas after you read my little tale, than if you had read a library. As to whether anyone else will read it, I have no guess. (Letter 2351)
For exactly the reasons Stevenson is suggesting, Colvin and the general public did not take to the story, despite its skill. Contemporary literary scholars have rediscovered “The Beach of Falesá” and consider it among the best of Stevenson’s short stories. It anticipates the stories of Joseph Conrad, especially Victory and An Outpost of Progress, in exploring the moral degeneration of whites living in exile. There is a direct link between the two writers since Conrad became part of Colvin and Henley’s circle and was much influenced by Stevenson’s work.
Another indication of Stevenson’s innovation is that the putative hero of the story, Wiltshire, clearly displays the bigotry of white society throughout the story, right up to the ending lines. He notes that his and Uma’s sons can be sent off to school, but there is little he can do with his biracial daughters:
But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half-castes, of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half-castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas [natives], and I’d like to know where I’m to find the whites?
“The Ebb-Tide” took this commitment to flawed protagonists even further. If Stevenson felt that “The Beach of Falesá” was stripped of romance, he referred to “The Ebb-Tide” as “about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as hateful.” It lays bare the full range of human weakness and cruelty with few hints of redemptive currents. As one reviewer put it, “This is not the Stevenson we love.”
“The Ebb-Tide” begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men.” The lines from Shakespeare’s play go on to say that if men do not seize this tide at its high point, then “all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and miseries.” The three drifters at the story’s beginning could not be at a lower point of misery. Scrounging for food and alcohol, they squat in an abandoned jail on the outskirts of Papeete, the main port town of Tahiti. Stevenson described them in a letter as “rogues” who represent “three types”—“the bad man, the weak man, and the strong man with a weakness, that are gone through and lived out.” They are characters from a Beckett play—barren figures on an empty landscape.
The weak man, and the main protagonist, is Robert Herrick, an Oxford-educated dreamer who has failed in any business or profession he has tried. Shame at his feckless behavior has led him to the tropics’ easy life. Lacking courage to be an artist or the work ethic to succeed in business, he lives in a sea of self-loathing—too intelligent for his own good. In many ways he seems a shadow stand-in for Stevenson’s feared self—a disillusioned half-formed adult.
Next there is Davis, “the strong man with a weakness,” a ship captain of some talent who destroyed his life by crashing a ship while drunk, causing the death of crew members, and then subsequently abandoning his family in disgrace. Finally, Huish, “the bad man,” is a pint-sized petty thief whose only redeeming characteristic is his fearlessness.
Davis learns that a quarantined ship carrying a cargo of champagne needs a captain and crew to complete its delivery to San Francisco. Since no able-bodied sailor would risk boarding a ship plagued by small pox, Davis gets the billet. Hoping to raise money for his family, he actually plans to steal the ship, sail to Peru, and sell the cargo. Once at sea, he and Huish succumb to drinking the champagne, but soon discover that the majority of the bottles are filled with water. Realizing that the cruise had been an insurance scam from the first, and running low on food, they find refuge on an uncharted island.
There they meet Attwater, a fanatical Christian pearl trader who has ruled over the native islanders with armed servants. Davis and Huish hatch a plan to kill him and make off with his pearls; Herrick feels torn between loyalty to his comrades and self-disgust that he might sink to this next level of sin. Attwater, recognizing Herrick’s similar social class and educational background, urges him to accept his faith, but Herrick cannot commit to a belief in God. Tortured by his weakness, he tries to drown himself but loses his resolve. Figuring out the men’s plot, Attwater kills Huish in a final confrontation. Davis falls to his knees in abject weakness and becomes Attwater’s convert. Despite his defeat, Herrick will not join Attwater, and the reader is left wondering if he ever leaves the island and rebuilds his life.
What possessed Stevenson to write this story that he himself called “cynical” and fatalistic? He labored heavily over it, spending days suffering over a few sentences and encountering months of writing block. Close to finishing it, he wrote to Colvin,
The tale is devilish … The truth is of course that I am wholly worked out; but God, it’s nearly done and it shall go somehow according to promise. I go against all my Gods, and say it is not worth while to massacre yourself over the last few pages of a rancid yarn, that never will be worth a damn, and that the reviewers will quite justly tear to bits. (Letter 2577)
Stevenson’s investment in this “rancid yarn” (which began as a collaboration with Lloyd, but ended up very much his own work) speaks to some of the fatalistic concerns that preoccupied his last years. Despite the positive turn in his health, he had lived with the shadow of an early death his whole adult life. His self-imposed exile from the London circle and his Scottish home made him feel isolated, even obsolete, as younger writers like Rudyard Kipling and Barrie were capturing attention. Fanny’s bouts of madness had shaken him to the core. He confronted daily the hypocrisy of the colonial powers. He continued to question his talents and the purpose (besides supporting his family) of the work he produced, and he had little sense of God’s will or favor in his life. Amid these doubts and intimations of failure, “The Ebb-Tide” spoke directly to the problem of how to take action in a world often indifferent to one’s concerns.
This theme channels Stevenson’s earliest qualms about moral action, fueled by the confusion Cummy invoked and further complicated by his father’s saturnine rigidity during his adolescence and early adulthood. Passivity in the face of the father and the Father were hopelessly entwined for Stevenson. Submitting to an unbending father seems unacceptable and yet killing the father (as Herrick plots to do to Attwater) appears equally impossible.
If Herrick cannot find the will to act, Attwater, not unlike Thomas Stevenson, has no hesitancy about his faith. In debating with Herrick, he offers a parable of pearl divers in their full diving suits with their heads fully encased in metal helmets.
Well, I saw these machines come up dripping and go down again, and come up dripping and go down again, and all the while the fellow inside as dry as toast! … and I thought we all wanted a dress to go down in the world in and come up scatheless. What do you think the name was?
Herrick responds cynically, “Self-conceit” and then again, “Self-respect.” But Attwater thunders back at him:
And why not Grace? … Why not the grace of your Maker and Redeemer, He who died for you, He who upholds you, He whom you daily crucify afresh? “There is nothing here”—striking on his bosom—“nothing there”—smiting the wall—“and nothing there”—stamping—“nothing but God’s Grace!” We walk upon it, we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe …
This same man who speaks of God’s grace brutally punishes the islanders and does not hesitate to use violence. Does his faith also encompass God’s cruel silence in the presence of human suffering?
In “The Ebb-Tide” Stevenson succeeds in presenting the Scylla and Charybdis of human action. On one side there is the absolute moral certainty and fanaticism of Attwater’s Christianity and on the other, Huish’s carnal will, amoral and bestial in its appetites. In the middle, we find moral weakness (Davis)—the intention toward goodness that falls short; and passivity (Herrick) that leaves one adrift in self-abnegation.
As much as Stevenson found the writing of this existential tale abhorrent, he would not give up his personal struggle to carve out a sense of purpose—a kind of truth that felt authentic to him (not unlike the elder son who continues his journey for the touchstone of truth). As the literary scholar Alan Sandison wrote about Herrick’s refusal to join with Attwater at the story’s conclusion, it reflects, “an inability to give up altogether on the notion that some moral basis can be discovered on which to construct a coherent and sustainable identity.”
Stevenson’s preoccupation with these fatalistic themes does not mean that he lived in Vailima mired in a dark funk of angst and self-questioning. What makes him a rewarding subject of study is how different he actually was from the fictional Herrick. His last letters show him rebounding from moments of doubt. He paints glorious word pictures of the tropical morning sunrises, refracting multicolored light off pond and palm frond. He jokes with Belle, rides his beloved horse, Jack, and stages balls with Fanny for the naval officers anchored at the harbor in Apia. He continues to lobby tirelessly for his side of the Samoan conflict, bringing meals and comfort to the rebel chiefs during their imprisonment by the puppet government. During the nine-day war in July of 1893, he visits the wounded in a makeshift infirmary and composes his letters to protest the colonial soldiers’ brutality.
And in another layer of his ability to reconcile contradictory values, at the request of his mother and his Christian Samoan servants, he led his entourage in Sunday prayers. Even if he could not come around to a full belief in God, he ended up writing devotions that are moving in their simple commitment to a dutiful and honorable life. Here is one from a collection that Fanny published after his death:
Grace
Grant that we here before Thee may be set free from the fear of vicissitude and the fear of death, may finish what remains before us of our course without dishonour to ourselves or hurt to others, and, when the day comes, may die in peace. Deliver us from fear and favour: from mean hopes and cheap pleasures. Have mercy on each in his deficiency; let him be not cast down; support the stumbling on the way, and give at last rest to the weary.
It is not easy to reconcile the creator of the monstrous Attwater with the author of these pious words, but perhaps this is the essence of Stevenson, who told a reporter in an interview, “My profound conviction is that there are many consciousnesses in a man … I can feel them working in many directions.” Similarly, he wrote to F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in July of 1892, about his personal experiences of dreams, fevers, and uncanny sensations that drew on dual consciousnesses, what he called “myself and the other fellow.” To think only one way or limit oneself as a person was an anathema to Stevenson. The real danger had always been to simplify—to seek the “plain truth” when truth could never be anything but complicated and multilayered.
In his writing and his Samoan home, Stevenson was solidifying one of the last pieces of his unique identity as “the proper pirate”—the creation of a meaningful ideological identity. His “Honor in Honesty” script had led him to accept that we must simultaneously question blind faith while respecting the traditions that our ancestors have accrued. His life among the Samoans only reinforced for him that there are many gods rather than one God, and the effort to live life with integrity regarding one’s personal convictions brings honor to existence. It had never been his nature to be a nihilist, and now a patriarch himself, he was carving out his own tentative credo. The enemies were still ideological arrogance and hypocrisy, but he had more respect than ever for enduring loyalty and commitment to a life of decency.
Stevenson’s most important unfinished work, Weir of Hermiston, probes these same themes of loyalty and moral conflict in the context of father–son relations. Weir of Hermiston is one of several Scottish-themed works that were ongoing when he died (two others are Heathercat, a novel set in the seventeenth century during the period of Covenanter persecution called “The Killing Time,” and Records of a Family of Engineers, a history of his illustrious predecessors and their work upon the harbors and lighthouses across the British isles). Despite embracing his South Seas home, he longed for his native land and wrote to fellow Scotsmen of his memories for its landscape, sounds, and smells. He composed the following lines in a poem sent to the Scottish writer S. R. Crockett:
Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and I hear again the call—
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all.
To the same writer, he reflected on the actual fact that he would never see “Auld Reekie” again, and “Here I am until I die and here I will be buried.” Yet both his memory and commercial pressures kept Scotland prominent in his final work. The London crowd remained highly skeptical of his South Seas writing. His old friend Gosse commented dismissively, “The fact seems to be that it is very nice to live in Samoa, but not healthy to write there,” and Colvin had little desire to see “The Ebb-Tide” go into print. Louis’s letters to Baxter made it clear that his bread and butter were still Scottish topics.
Luckily, Weir of Hermiston gave the reader more than an historical fiction with the Stevenson panache. Adam Weir, the Lord Justice-Clerk, is the feared “hanging judge” of Edinburgh. He is a self-made man who has married a wealthy woman, who is pious and meek in his presence. He administers the ultimate penalty of the court with an absolute respect for the law, but with zeal and bitter mockery of his victims that borders on sadism. At home, he is gruff with his wife and young son Archie, and he becomes more irascible as his cups of wine accumulate. Archie, inheriting his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s stubbornness, embraces her religious values and grows to detest his father’s brutality. Aligning with the social and political ideals of the French and American Revolutions, Archie sees his father as a symbol of ironclad authority.
After his mother’s passing, the teenaged Archie, now studying law, can no longer abide his father’s public displays of cruelty. Moments after his father’s latest victim succumbs to the hangman’s knot, Archie shouts out to the gathered crowd, “I denounce this God-defying murder.” The ramifications of this denunciation are immense—as an advocate in training, he has contravened his superior and disgraced him in front of his fellow citizens; as a son, he has defied his father and aired their private tensions in public. To compound matters, Archie then continues the attack at the Speculative Society’s gathering of law students later that night.
To save face for the family and protect Archie from the consequences of his insubordination, Lord Hermiston banishes him to their estate on the Scottish borders. Stevenson then takes up a second plotline in which Archie falls for a country girl from a different social class, but the narrative breaks off before this full story can be developed.
Stevenson presents a variegated portrayal of Hermiston’s relationship with his son. He has come very far from the one-dimensional tyrannical father and weak-willed son that faced off in “The Story of a Lie.” The day after the incident Archie has a chance encounter with the family physician, who recounts a story of Hermiston’s subtle release of breath upon learning the infant Archie had survived a dangerous illness (“Good folk are scarce, you know; and it is not every one that would be quite so missed as yourself. It is not every one that Hermiston would miss.”). It begins to dawn on Archie how deeply he may have injured his flesh and blood, the one person who has given him shelter and provided for all his needs.
When his father finally confronts Archie about his actions, he shames him for his immature rush to judgment over matters of law and adult responsibility that he has barely begun to grasp. Lord Hermiston’s denunciation of his son is a tour de force, spoken in Scottish dialect and laced with biting humor and disparagement of Archie’s “Frenchifeed” pretenses. The reader sees the ferocity of Hermiston’s spirit when he believes wrong has been committed but also his bracing intelligence in his unvarnished grasp of practical truths. His power is formidable as he reduces his son to a trembling supplicant. We see also his underlying love for Archie in providing him a way out of his disgrace through his exile to the country (“Weel, by my way of it—and my way is the best—there’s just one thing it’s possible that ye might be with decency, and that’s a laird. Ye’ll be out of hairm’s way at the least of it.”). As Archie contemplates his banishment and confers with his beloved mentor and family friend, Lord Glenalmond, he recognizes how he has underestimated his father and how much he has wounded him. Yet Archie’s initial boldness in confronting his father reflects how similar they actually are.
Parallel to “The Ebb-Tide,” the reader is uncertain how the younger man will ultimately respond in the face of an authority that exudes an unclouded will and unambiguous sense of right and wrong. Unlike Herrick who personifies weakness, Archie presents the prospect that over the course of the novel he might synthesize the gentle compassion of his mother with the strength of will embodied in his father. Since the novel is incomplete, we are unsure of where Stevenson would have taken the further chapters, but at least some of his notes indicate that Archie kills a villainous rival and then comes before his own father’s court to face punishment for his act. This confrontation would certainly have allowed Stevenson to explore how the son, more knowledgeable about the world and a more fully realized actor within it, might revisit his relationship to his father’s authority. Such an imagined ending never quite took place in Stevenson’s own life, and sadly it remained unrealized in his fictional world as well.
After a productive morning of work on the Weir of Hermiston on December 3, 1894, and an afternoon session of French lessons for Austin, Louis joined Fanny around 6 p.m. in preparing a dressing for the dinner salad. In the middle of this innocuous act, he suddenly gave a start and cried out, “What a pain!” Addressing Fanny, he asked, “Do I look strange?” and then fell backward. Fanny and a servant helped him to a chair, but already his breathing was labored, and he soon lost consciousness. Fanny, Maggie, and Belle hovered around him, immersing his feet in hot water, and rubbing his skin with brandy, while Lloyd rushed to Apia to fetch a doctor. By eight o’clock that evening, he was pronounced dead of cerebral hemorrhage. Perhaps the insidious blockages, caused by the HHT, had taken their final toll.
The next day, a large band of his beloved Samoans along with his family and servants, cut their way through the jungle undergrowth to bring his body to a hilltop burial site overlooking the sea beyond the island. On his tomb are carved the lines from the poem “Requiem,” which he had written some years earlier when crossing the American plains in pursuit of Fanny,
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
What is striking about these words for Stevenson’s epitaph is the phrase “laid me down with a will.” They speak of design and concerted action—of a vision pursued and a project completed.
In many ways Stevenson left much undone—so many false starts in his writing, so many manuscripts outlined and abandoned before completion. Having sampled several genres of writing, the direction of his future work remained unclear. There were unsettled aspects in other domains of his life as well. His relationship with Fanny was in flux; his friendships with the London crowd equivocal, his relationship to his reading public more tentative than he would have hoped. Emotionally, he was still mercurial—or what he liked to call “the old man virulent.” A good friend described his moodiness in the last years of his life:
I have seen him in all moods. I have seen him sitting on my table, dangling his bony legs in the air, chatting away in the calmest manner possible; and I have seen him, becoming suddenly agitated, jump from the table and stalk to and fro across the floor like some wild forest animal … His face would glow and his eyes would flash, darkening, lighting, scintillating, hypnotizing you with their brilliance … They carried in them a strange mixture of what seemed to be at once the sorrow and joy of life, and there appeared to be haunting sadness in their very brightness. (Moors 1910)
Despite all of this volatility in work, relationship, and emotion, which was after all the essence of his temperament, he had found a way to anchor himself as a man of will and action in the world. Unlike the many passive and paralyzed Hamlets he had created in his stories, Will o’ the Mill, Prince Otto, Henry Durie, Robert Herrick, or the sickly boy who could only dream at the edge of the counterpane, he had achieved meaningful action as an adult. He took on the responsibility of supporting a family, and running a household, while staying true to his calling as an artist. He pushed against all kinds of social conventions but somehow maintained an unyielding center of moral decency. He became a defender of a conquered people and forcefully confronted the representatives of his own government and social class. When his dear friend Colvin had scolded him for his preoccupation with “your beloved blacks or chocolates,” he had responded,
Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my “blacks or chocolates” … You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? (Letter 2726)
He had faced charges of sedition by representatives of the consulate and widespread condemnation in the press. Some might have accused him of dilettantish grandstanding, but his letters to The Times were considered and serious. The sight of severed heads of the rebels and their young daughters made clear that his objections were not just part of some romantic shadow play. The Samoans’ gratitude for their beloved Tusitala’s (the “teller of tales”) loyalty to them was real as well. In October, two months before he died, the chiefs, freed from prison, finished “The Road of the Loving Heart,” a road they built to provide better access to his home and as a tribute to his compassion for their people and his work on their behalf.
Although ever skeptical of his own motives and capacity for action, and questioning of his powers to the very end of his life (he wrote in July of 1894, “No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent”), Stevenson sat down to write every day and saw this as his moral duty. He had written to one of his literary idols, George Meredith, in the year before died:
For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health. I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness, and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been rightly speaking since first I came to the Pacific and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be that dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I could have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. (Letter 2626)
Although he had sailed the wide seas, his most concerted voyages had been imaginative ones. He had been a hunter of word and images rather than wild beasts. And this legacy mattered most—he had not shied from the work he had been fated to do. Engineer, lawyer, bohemian, amateur emigrant, professional sickist, celebrity, expatriate, the one place he had always felt at home was the room in which he wrote. “Keepsake Mill” imagined the return of the grown-up boys to Colinton manse and their beloved flowing river:
Home from the Indies and home from the ocean,
Heroes and soldiers we all shall come home …
The true home for Stevenson was the sense that he had done right by his imaginative art—like his forefathers, he had taken up his craft and pursued it with sedulous determination. He had fashioned an identity through his essays, stories, novels, and poems. The success of these efforts had freed him from a script of shame and self-condemnation for his “childish” pursuits. He had evolved from stories for boys to tales of hardened and complicated men. He had kept at this work despite the grim and grimy realities of an indifferent universe—constant physical duress—the proliferation of uncertainties that characterized a world too quickly becoming modern. On the day of his death, he had filled fresh pages. What more could a writer ask?