Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts of life. Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which Stevenson invested it. He has been sometimes charged with a certain lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and clear-headed conditions.
There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up, the same vitality of joy. It is hardly to be wondered at, that some critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last enemy,--and his inveterate optimism in the face of all calamities. "He jests at scars who never felt a wound," they practically told him,--and could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,--healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising the maladies incident to man,--instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a medicine-glass. But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded. For the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of pain and suffering....
In _Ordered South_ and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,--and the curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of life,--from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little children with their long possibilities before them.
Stevenson had no children of his own. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such. The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses," were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders, so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal _habitat_ was "The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.
