Stevenson, Robert Louis

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS. - Scottish narrator, b. in Edinburgh on 13 Nov. 1850, d. in Samoa on 3 Dec. 1894.

He is one of those rare writers in whom culture is wedded to inventive flair, the better bringing out its native originality. His astonishing imagination does not prevent his admirable prose from being solidly and skillfully constructed. S. was an original continuer of Walter Scott in his novels of Scottish historical setting, among which should be remembered above all Kidnapped (1886), Catriona (1893), The master of Ballantrae (1889) and finally the unfinished Weir of Hermistone (1896), considered by some critics to be his masterpiece. Alongside them stand the tales inspired in him by the South Seas, where he settled for reasons of health: the extremely popular Treasure Island (1883) and several collections of exotic short stories and sketches. For these he took his start from reading the American Melville, but he drew especially on his vivid impressions of landscape, which he captured with an artist's eye and rendered in pages admirable for their consummate style. He also wrote verse, especially for children: A child's garden of verse (1885)

and a sensational and symbolic tale: The strange case of dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde (1886), based on a splitting of personality and in which his tormented faith as a Puritan believer is reflected. The same religious unease is recognizable in some of his Scottish novels and notably in Weir of Hermistone. Cecchi has rightly pointed out among the sources of S.'s fantastic and symbolic tale, together with the novels of Melville, the Ancient mariner of Coleridge and, further back in history, the Robinson Crusoe of De Foe. When the memory of the heroic Catholic missionary Joseph Damien de Veuster, who died of leprosy at Molokai where he cared for the plague-stricken, was attacked by a fanatical Calvinist, S. responded with a most noble open letter in defense of Fr. Damien, a letter that is a masterpiece of English apologetic literature, worthy to figure alongside the Apologia of Newman, and undoubtedly one of the writer's most elevated and most beautiful works (1890).

Augusto Guidi