Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 105
last four years—in Samoa, where he purchased a home,
became a sort of feudal chief, and was all but adored by the
natives, who called him “Tusitala,” meaning “Teller of
Tales.” He took an active part in Samoan affairs, exposed
the incompetency, or worse, of the representatives of the
three powers (the United States, Germany, and England),
had these officers dismissed, and while never himself the ac-
credited agent of the powers, he became the spokesman of
Samoa to the world at large. Indeed, for most of us Rob-
ert Louis Stevenson is Samoa. He and a certain hurricane
have made for us an actual place of what would otherwise
be a fly-speck on the map of the Pacific Ocean.
One afternoon late in 1894, about a month after his forty-
fourth birthday, he was laughing and talking in his gay man-
ner with his wife, when suddenly a startled look crossed his
face and he fell at her feet. A blood-vessel had burst in
his brain, and two hours later he was dead. It has been
said that Robert Louis Stevenson died of good health. His
general condition had greatly improved, his blood had be-
come so enriched in volume and quality that the vessels,
weakened by long illness, were not strong enough to bear
the pressure.
I have never regarded myself as belonging to the Steven-
son “cult,” that inner circle of the devout, who, as has been
said, rate literature with “Stevenson first, Shakespeare a poor
second, and the Bible hardly a poor third.” But I shall
never forget the December afternoon when I was hanging
on a strap in a New York elevated railway train, and, un-
folding my paper, read that Stevenson was dead. The world
suddenly seemed empty, like a house from which the one
most loved has moved away.
Sixty Samoan natives cut a path through the forest on
Mount Vaea, and to the mountain’s top they bore his body,