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Robert Louis Stevenson

Today is the birthday of Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (Edinburgh 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894 Vailima, Samoan Islands); novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.  Perhaps best know for his novels; Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the most translated authors in the world.

Stevenson was a sickly, moderately successful poet, essayist and travel writer, livin’ in France, when he fell in love with a woman after one look at her.  (Sounds like a friend of Jett!)  He was passin’ by the window of a house one night when he looked inside and fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eatin’ dinner with a group of her friends.  Stevenson stood there starin’ at her, and then opened the window and leapt inside.  The guests were shocked, but Stevenson just bowed and introduced himself.  The woman was an American named Fanny Osbourne, and she was unhappily married (another friend of Jett!).  After a few months in Europe, she returned to California, and Stevenson decided to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him.  He collapsed on her doorstep.  She divorced her husband, and they were married and moved back to Scotland.  Stevenson wrote a poem that served as inspiration for the Lyrics of the Day and that inspired the Song of the Day.

For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

• Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

• Truth of Intercourse.

And now Stevenson’s poem then the lyrics, then the song.  To Stevenson, love at first sight and you.