For someone so often compelled by the need for movement, it is remarkable that his complete works comprise about twenty-five volumes.

Stevenson died young in a home he built, called Vailima, the “House of the Five Streams,” in Western Samoa. Finally this frail man, so thin he looked like a friendly, rather tired ghost, marooned on a remote island of the South Pacific, seems to have seen the dark and the light of life, remaining, like many a good Calvinist, obsessed with the question of spiritual and artistic honesty. His religious and cultural background led him to prefer fictions that are subtler than they seem, always gaining their strength from a mixture of atmosphere, action, and expectation.

 

 

THE ARCHETYPE OF LIGHT

 

In spite of the contraries we have seen, there was one constant in the Stevenson family. His father enjoyed a measure of wealth and prestige as one of Europe’s finest civil engineers, specializing in the commercially important profession of lighthouse design and construction. This line of expertise went back from father to grandfather, with an uncle sharing in the honors. At twenty-one, Robert Louis Stevenson, the youngest member of the line, read his first and only scientific paper to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts; it was titled “A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses.” When he was eighteen years old, he had journeyed to the remote coastline of northern Scotland to study conditions for building lighthouses, and there he acquired firsthand knowledge of hostile shores, the sailor’s greatest fear. Later the author’s brief training as an engineer colored his writing, which displays an engineer’s care for precision, all the parts of a story fitted together like carefully cut stones, the whole structure producing masterworks of economy, never a wasted word, never a phrase or description overburdening the arc of the narrative.

Success in following the family profession was expected and would surely have been rewarded, though the fledgling writer would most likely have discerned unusual meanings in the profession. Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished story, probably his last tale, “The Light-house,” tells the dark side of the lighthouse—namely, isolation from all mankind. The connection to Poe could not be more intriguing, for lighthouses are among man’s most direct interventions against the forces of nature, and when they emit intermittent light, they resemble stories symbolically building on their own luminous variety, their “various light,” as the great poet John Milton once phrased it.

The young man’s family, it happens, were famous and financially secure in their chosen field of casting light over the waters. Creative engineering skill, careful and imaginative control over the details of construction, was a major family aim. Stevenson’s uncle built one of the most remarkable of all lighthouses, Skerryvore, an engineering triumph. Thomas Stevenson, the author’s father, would happily have called the technology of “intermittent light” a picturesque effect as much as a practical necessity.

When Treasure Island was composed, Thomas Stevenson called it “my kind of picturesque.” The invention of the story was intended specifically to please, first, an eleven-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne; second, Thomas Stevenson; and third, Stevenson’s new wife, Fanny Osbourne. Fanny was artistically talented, with strong literary tastes, and in later years herself became a writer. Thomas Stevenson had liked her almost at once, in part because he saw that she supported her husband’s literary endeavors. As a wedding present Thomas gave Fanny and Robert a house in England. An American, she had married a high-flying prospector whom she divorced, partly out of a desire to marry Stevenson. In all respects Thomas appreciated her for her strength and intelligence. She nursed her husband when he was ill, had no hesitations about roughing it, and was not afraid to take risks, and she understood the principles of a life of suspense-atmosphere, action, and expectation. She was an ideal partner in the enterprise.

TREASURE AND THE ADVENTUROUS QUEST

If we go back to the origins of adventure story fiction, we discover that the heroic quest remains its principal myth. Quest-romances take many different forms, whether it be the search for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend, for the Golden Fleece (as in the Argonautica, the ancient epic of Jason and the Argonauts), for the safe return home after perilous Homeric wanderings, as in the Odyssey, or for a wide range of ends both material and spiritual. What is important is that, once established in classic form, the great adventure stories render all readers, of any age, essentially children at heart. The quest gives us our dream of success, and when we tire of daily labor in making a living, it returns us to that time of the dream. Thus for Treasure Island the questing dream comes out of a long preceding history. Besides two early travel books based on journeys in France, Stevenson told stories in homage to the Near Eastern tradition of loosely woven adventures: his New Arabian Nights (1882), in which the exotic nature of travel to distant lands is imagined as occurring in stories set in Europe. This art of romance thrives on the incredible voyage, the sailor’s yarn (in his day perhaps more fashionable than any other type), the tall frontier tale, including exotic or utopian settings that could never actually exist, because romance demands almost complete power to overcome all human obstacles. The mode of romance therefore demands freedom to imagine. Yet the tradition seems to mix realism on some level with such unreal situations for the hero. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe mingles fact and fiction liberally. The same mixture appears in Arthurian lore, while with the rise of the modern middle classes a new kind of romance arises around the quest for material success.

By Stevenson’s time Protestant beliefs and secular technology had long since fueled the rise of capitalism. Robinson Crusoe, while it inaugurated the realistic tradition of the novel in England, makes a continuous critical commentary on mercantile capitalism and its value system, especially as they derive aid and comfort from Protestant Christianity. Crusoe, whose name plays on the name of Christ, is in effect a marooned capitalist, who must rebuild his fortune, by returning his commercial skills to their most primitive beginnings.