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3y EDWIN WILEY 
 
?^^";.6 
 
 THE OPTIMISM OF 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 By Edwin Wiley 
 
 T HERE seems something pecu- 
 liarly significant in the coming 
 of Robert Louis Stevenson to 
 California, for there are many 
 things here that could not but 
 find their spiritual response in 
 a nature constituted like his. 
 Life to him was a divine adventure, and 
 he yearned for spaces more open and far- 
 reaching than the heaths and uplands of 
 his Scotland; for stretches of ocean more 
 infinite and mysterious than the North 
 Sea; islands more distant, lovely and 
 strangely-peopled than the Orkneys or 
 the Hebrides. Here, on the coast of the 
 Pacific, he found a measure of satisfac- 
 tion for those longings; he found nature 
 in its largest and freest utterance, and a 
 people whose souls, like his, were fired 
 with an inextinguishable optimism. The 
 quality of divine hopefulness, of denial 
 of limitations, was with him an attitude 
 of mind so "fixed and constant" that 
 never, save perhaps in Pulvis et Umbra, 
 did he voice the other mood. How much 
 of this spirit was due to inheritance, we 
 know not ; yet this we do know, that in his 
 veins ran the blood of indomitable men. 
 
 Delivered Be/ore the Stevenson Fellowship 
 San Francisco, California 
 
men who linked culture with efficiency, 
 the dream ^Wth its fulfilment — builders 
 of lighthouses and docks for mighty ships. 
 He, too, was a light-bringer and dreamer 
 of dreams. Indeed, the dream, with him, 
 was the most of life. 
 
 The casual person, thrilled by Prince 
 Otto or The New Arabian Nights, might 
 think him an Epicurean, but the one who 
 knows the toil that perfected his exquisite 
 style, knows the man who labored so 
 patiently "under the very dart of death," 
 would rather call him a stoic. Yet, in 
 truth, he was neither. He was more 
 keenly alive to physical pain than less 
 sensitive beings, but he had the vision of 
 the sage and perceived that life had mean- 
 ings and implications wider and deeper 
 than the pangs of a distempered body, 
 even the threat of death itself. "He had 
 fiddled so long on the side of the volcano 
 that he had forgotten the tune." It was 
 a poor sort of cheerfulness, he thought, 
 that flourished only in bonny days, that 
 which survived the dour ones was more 
 heroic stuff. There is an old English 
 poem called The Dialogue Between the 
 Body and the Soul, in which the soul 
 chides the body for leading it astray. But 
 the body of R. L. S., much as it obtruded 
 itself upon his attention, never made his 
 soul its victim ; indeed, he treated that body 
 as something over which to gain victories 
 of the spirit. The fable goes that Socrates, 
 upon being asked why he did not divorce 
 
Xanthippe, replied: "Ah, never! She is 
 my salvation; it was she that made a 
 philosopher of me." It was Stevenson's 
 body, perhaps, that made of him a story- 
 teller and a poet. Who knows, but that 
 otherwise, he might have built strong and 
 serviceable towers to light the way of 
 ships by perilous shores, and a greater 
 world still would have been left darkling. 
 
 No, the light raised by R. L. S. was the 
 light of romance; he was a builder much 
 needed by an age of bricks and mortar 
 and ever-turning wheels. Like Rudel and 
 the far-away Princess, he followed ro- 
 mance even until he died. And what a 
 legacy he has left us ! His books may not 
 comprehend all of life, but they do com- 
 prehend a fine and generous portion of 
 it. With the clairvoyance of genius he 
 saw quite through the deeds of men, re- 
 vealing to us the good in evil and the evil 
 in good. Life, he perceived, was no 
 simple affair of plus and minus, of right 
 and wrong, but it was an infinite complex 
 of tangled skeins, yet colored and re- 
 deemed by the threads of beauty, of 
 divine hopefulness, of large endeavor. 
 Thus it was that he could follow, with 
 shaking sides, Villon and Macaire through 
 dark alleys and pot-rooms, could wander 
 through the wilds of Canada with black- 
 hearted James Durie, or could make the 
 most outrageous and clap-trap old scoun- 
 drel of a pirate the hero (for certainly 
 
John Silver was the hero) of a book and 
 put it over! 
 
 Did he love these gamesters with life, 
 these wayward souls that play skittles 
 with the most precious of society's or- 
 dered decencies? I think he did. After 
 all, are they not a part of life as it is now 
 constituted, and do not their very devia- 
 tions from the norms of society, their rags, 
 their tinsel and their oaths, contrast them 
 against the blacks and grays and duns of 
 the everday? "Better," he says, "to lose 
 life like a spendthrift than to waste it like 
 a miser. It is better to live and be done 
 with it than to die daily in the sick room." 
 
 After all, his men and women are but 
 a part of his optimism, his boyish delight 
 in just living. For the skulker, the 
 whiner, the evader, he had no patience; 
 a large scoundrel he might love, but he 
 hated a little man. "If your morals make 
 you dreary, depend upon it they are 
 wrong. I do not say 'give them up,' for 
 they may be all you have; but conceal 
 them like a vice, lest they should spoil the 
 lives of better and simpler people." 
 

 
 
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