AFTER the death of Thackeray and Dickens, English prose fiction tended more and more towards “the novel with a purpose,” and in the last quarter of the century, when Stevenson first made himself felt, the reading public was wholly under the power of fiction, which was properly classed as “degenerate.” Much of it was radically unhealthy. It is no exaggeration to say that tons of fair, white paper were desecrated by “studies” of problems of physiology and psychology on which no healthy mind will wish to dwell—if for no other reason than that their existence as “problems” does not become evident except through abnormality in its most diseased and generally its most contagious form. Stevenson brought about a strong reaction. His “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century, was in some sense a “problem book,” but it deals with the whole problem of human life as a struggle between good and evil. Stevenson, who saw things, as he expresses it, “bare to the buff,” felt this struggle in himself, and saw it everywhere in the world outside of himself. The expression he gives it in “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” verges on the supernatural. In this book at least, Scott’s greatest pupil is greater than his master. The romantic novel and the prose allegory found their perfect union and their climax in this book, which stands quite unique in English literature, since Stevenson himself never approached it afterwards. His other stories and novels show, however, a great and compelling genius for narration. In some of them it is almost too great to be endurable. “Treasure Island,” for instance, is professedly a book for boys, but any one of any age who surrenders himself to it is apt to feel an effect from it comparable to nothing less violent than that of brandy. This intensity appears in all Stevenson’s work. He had an extraordinary power of focusing all his energies,—a power as dangerous as it is unusual. It belongs only to genius and it cannot be exercised except at the expense of vitality. What Landor knew of “the pangs of approaching the gods,” Stevenson felt as he gradually burned his life away in the brilliant flame of his own powers. He welcomed death with joy, as the reward of one who had done his best without sparing himself. There is nothing more pathetic in literature than the stanza he wrote for his own epitaph:—

	“Under the wide and starry sky,
	Dig me a grave and let me lie;
	Glad did I live and gladly I die
	And I laid me down with a will.
	“This be the verse that they grave for me:
	‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
	Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
	And the hunter home from the hill.’”

    No one who reads this will need to be told that its author was a poet capable of attaining the highest reaches of poetical expression. But Stevenson sang only in snatches. In some of these, he is more musical than Burns at his best. In such verses as:—

	“It is ill to break the bonds which God decreed to bind;
	Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind,”

we hear echoes of such melody as the world had not known for eighteen hundred years. It appears from them, unmistakably, that Stevenson as a poet might have surpassed his highest successes in prose. Why he did not do so it is idle to inquire, but the cause is probably closely involved with the painful reactions which brought him his untimely death (Apia, Samoa, December 3d, 1894).

  He was born at Edinburgh, November 13th, 1850. His father was a lighthouse engineer, a son of Robert Stevenson, and the family represented a Scottish ancestral tradition which inspired Stevenson’s best work. He had all possible advantages of early training, including education at Edinburgh University and for the bar. After his first literary successes, he went to live in London, but, except in his deep love for Scotland, he was a cosmopolitan. He found his wife in America, and from 1889 he lived, or rather slowly died, in Samoa, where he had gone, that in spite of increasing weakness due to consumption, he might gain strength to complete his work. When he had completed it, the objection that remains against it, is that he did himself too little justice as a poet while putting into his novels the full intensity of a genius which in prose narrative is frequently too close to the intoxicating to be entirely healthy for those who indulge it without reserve. As an essayist, however, no such objection lies against him. Had he attempted his greatest success in essay writing instead of in fiction, he might have become easily first among the essayists of the nineteenth century. In delicacy, he is equaled only by Lamb, while he has the strength of Thackeray. But even when he is gayest or most commonplace, he never ceases to be unearthly. In his essays as in his poems and his fiction, he is the dying man who, having already awakened to realities beyond the earthly, is waiting for death as a deliverance and working for it as a reward.