Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson ill
And then one remembers that in this, as in most things,
Stevenson lived as he wrote, beginning fresh work before
the sheets were dry from the blood of the last hemorrhage,
and, dying, left two unfinished novels, perhaps his best—“St.
Ives” and “Weir of Hermiston.”
Stevenson could find no answer to Hamlet’s question as
to the meaning of life, nor did the question interest him.
But in every day’s activity he found the satisfaction of liv-
ing. In his fine essay, “Old Mortality,” he says: “To be-
lieve in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to
believe in life. . . . The average sermon flies the point,
disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need
to know, so little ; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momen-
tous fields of life, where destiny awaits us.” This man, who
for forty-four years hung over eternity by a thread slen-
derer and more brittle than supports most men, declined to
fret himself at all about eternity. He was an optimist in
many senses, including that of the Irishman who fell from
a twelve-story building and as he passed the sixth story re-
marked, “All ,s well so far.”
And the lesson, if we would grasp it, is a salutary one,
that if we bring our wills to bear 6n it we get most happi-
ness when our possessions are smallest, being then most
thrown back upon ourselves, where ultimately we must find
happiness if we find it at all. It has been said that if you
give an Irishman half a chance he is fine, but if you give him
no chance whatever he is superb. Stevenson was Scotch by
birth, but he had a superabundance of the Celtic instinct.
He understood the meaning of death so well that he was
resolved to understand living still better, with the result that
one of the liveliest expressions of the gratification of being
alive came from a man who was most of his life in a dying
condition.