Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century Theories of Evolution: Crossing the Boundaries between Ideas and Art

Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century Theories of Evolution Crossing the Boundaries between Ideas and Art       .          Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer of wide and eclectic interests, has been seen as someone who made a serious effort “to account for the forces of science” (Paradis and Postlewait : ix–x).1 I contend that Stevenson attempted to do no such thing, and that this was especially true of his attitude toward Darwinism. Instead, he was concerned, through the medium of art, to defend the infinite scope and variety, autonomy and dignity of all life—and especially human life—in the face of what he saw as the new doctrine of evolution.2 Born into a family of distinguished engineers, the young Stevenson was originally destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. By , he had read a paper titled “On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses” at a meeting of the Royal Society in Edinburgh that won him a silver medal, another paper “On the Thermal Influence of Forests” again at the Royal Society, and one on “Local Conditions Influencing Climate” at a meeting of the Scottish Meteorological Society. Stevenson was fairly well read in scientific subjects in general, and he was also familiar with theories concerning human evolution.3 In his opinion, however, “Scientific men, who imagine that their science affords an answer to the problems of existence, are perhaps the most to be pitied of mankind” (Stevenson –: ), and he believed that science carries the intellect “into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man” (Stevenson : ). There are a number of possible reasons for the decisiveness with which Stevenson expressed himself in this regard. First, he was aware of inconsistencies in scientific theories; second, he recognized that the realm of the subjective played as important a role in devising such theories as it did in any other branch of knowledge; and third, in an increasingly mechanized and industrial age, he was wary of “a vague notion that everything in the physical world goes deftly and perfectly, like the play of an ideal machine” (Stevenson –: ). Finally, scientific ideas had to be expressed in language. Stevenson wrote that “Scientific language, like most other language, is extremely unsatisfactory” () and pronounced himself astonished at “how often there is no definite conception whatever, at the back of the most definite sounding words; and how often language is the cloak with which a man conceals, not his thought, but his want of thought” (). From the mid-nineteenth century, science, which supposedly deals with facts, may be said to have crossed a boundary from being specifically concerned with “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation , and theoretical explanation of phenomena” (Pickett et al : ) to participation in moral, ethical, philosophical, and even metaphysical debates. One of the scientific fields most involved in such debates was that of evolution. Ideas about evolution had existed in the works of poets and writers long before the age of Wallace and Darwin, and the publication of those ideas in the nineteenth century was met not so much with the shock of surprise as with that of recognition. Nevertheless, the ordered formulation of these ideas had confronted humanity with a “monstrous spectre” (Stevenson : ): a conception of man created not in the image of God but by Nature over the course of tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Stevenson, however, seems to have believed that there was something more to man than the scientific perspective of his time allowed. In “Lay Morals,” he contends that “Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides of man” (Stevenson : ), and he describes man’s inner essence as “This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his conduct [which] is something special to himself and not common to the race . . . I do not speak of it to hardened theorists: the living man knows keenly what I mean” (–). In this passage Stevenson might be describing conscience, rather than man’s inner being or soul, but perhaps they were synonymous for him. Significantly, the passage is then followed by a quotation, not from the Bible but from the Roman Emperor Turnbull: Stevenson and Theories of Evolution  [3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-18...