There is a powerful rule about myth-making, however, and it forgives the writer. When Stevenson uses Marryat’s stockade in chapter XIX, it becomes our author’s own possession (lawyers would call it his intellectual property), because Stevenson transforms the stockade scene for his own uses, according to an ancient literary law of the rights of genius. In his essay he cheerfully admits that “stolen waters are proverbially sweet.” This confession tells a lot about Stevenson, for like Shakespeare he understood the mythological power of proverbs, but more personally he would know about the sweetness of stolen waters, for he had climbed many a mountainside and drunk the clear, free mountain streams (“burns,” as they are called in Scotland) tumbling down hills that legally belonged to someone else. Stevenson understood that all seriously inspired art requires a good deal of trespassing. Thus he cheerfully admitted his purloined letters and captured images: “It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.” This imaginative piracy was a kind of authorized disobedience, justified trespass requiring no legal permission.

One catches a glimpse of this dream in the way Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, chose to spend their honeymoon at an old California mining camp, a sojourn he chronicled in his little book The Silverado Squatters (1883). Their choice suggests they believed that love is prospecting for gold. Maritime yarns, including several of Conrad’s ironic novels, such as Heart of Darkness (1902) and Victory (1915), also suggest there is a link between travel of any kind and the acquisitive drive behind all extreme ventures. Of course, adventure is also fascinating for itself. Mallory’s oft-repeated statement that he climbed Mount Everest “because it is there” is a strong enough reason. Like others who travel much, Stevenson wrote many letters to give his impressions of “what’s going on.” At the end of his life, settled in western Samoa, he wrote letters to condemn imperial abuses in the islands. The letter-writing of empire always indicates its extent, but with Stevenson the range of his journeys everywhere goes further, and his activity as a letter writer is another way of recounting adventure, a method not without parallel among explorers of the period and before. Like others in his day, he often traveled in the least comfortable way, whether it be in the Cévennes in France, around Davos in Switzerland, in New York City, at Saranac in the Adirondack Mountains, crossing the United States by a miserable “emigrant train” (a journey that almost killed him on his way to meet his wife in San Francisco), or traveling by schooner to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Hawaii and thence to western Samoa, where, seeming to be settled for a change, he bought more than 300 acres of land on which he built Vailima. Even then his lust for movement was unsatisfied—off he went by sea to Australia and New Zealand, then again around to other Pacific islands, including the Marshalls and New Caledonia, mostly in small ships. One journey he was destined never to make, however. Despite some late plans, he never returned to Edinburgh and London, the cities of his science and religion and of his literary freedom. His fate was to be the author of a perpetual escape from his own people, except as he imagined them, including their darker side—in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he mystified the war between the evil and the good sides of the human soul. He wrote as he traveled—almost incessantly, it would seem, in order to defeat death itself. While he never really enjoyed sea travel—indeed was afraid of such voyages—he nevertheless traveled thousands of miles by sea, inevitably in all weathers. At sea he found his health improved. Like Conrad and Conrad’s friend R. B. Cunningham-Graham, both active participants in what we loosely have been calling adventure, Stevenson discovered that by moving from place to place, by standing still in each new place, if only for a moment, the writer gains an ever-changing point of perspective. Life is never then a blur. Life is a focusing process.

 

 

FEAR AND THE MAP

 

Psychologically, focus aims to overcome fear. In “A Humble Remonstrance,” a review indirectly addressed to Henry James, Stevenson wrote about the genre of Treasure Island, which he considered an elementary novel of adventure: “Danger is the matter to which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realize the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.” To the extent that Stevenson ministers to this interest, as Henry James saw, he might be writing far more serious fiction than at first appears. Fear, even treated idly, is as mysterious as it is powerful, and when it has deep early-childhood origins, it is likely to generate anxiety, “fear without an object.” A threatening glance animates many religions, chief among them those in the fundamentalist modes, which sow the seeds of a generalized climate of fear that, because societies are only human, needs to be strenuously denied or displaced onto “acceptable” expressions. Christianity has a long history of self-induced hostility to other religions, which it has periodically manifested by so-called crusades, military ventures underwritten by religious propaganda. Missionary zeal, leading to persecution, has an equally long history of being as violent and terrifying as it has been benevolent in occasionally bringing peace and equity to its converts.

For the literary historian, however, the relation of fear to literature is not well understood, though observations about this date back to Aristotle’s Poetics, about 330 B.C.