The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 03 — Text and Context

A Critic Who Admits His Limits

Stevenson’s preface is remarkable for its honesty about the author’s own fallibility. He writes that 'not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.' This is not false modesty; it is a methodological statement. He treats his subjects as 'worthies' brought together from different ages and countries, and he makes no pretense of delivering final judgments. Instead, he offers what he calls 'familiar studies'—personal, provisional, and openly shaped by his own tastes and limitations.

The effect is to invite the reader into a conversation rather than a lecture. When he discusses Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau, he does so as a fellow writer trying to understand two 'types' of American character, not as a scholar pronouncing from on high. This approach gives the essays a freshness that more systematic criticism often lacks.

The Burglary at the College of Navarre

In the Villon essay, Stevenson pauses his biographical sketch to narrate a single criminal episode in extraordinary detail. The date is Christmas 1456; the place, the Mule Tavern and then an unoccupied house belonging to Robert de Saint-Simon. The gang includes Villon, Petit-Jehan, De Cayeux, Dom Nicolas the Picardy monk, and the hapless Tabary, who is left to guard the overcoats. Stevenson describes how they 'clambered over in a twinkling' a high wall, picked four locks on a chest, then three more on a walnut coffer, and emerged with five hundred crowns of gold.

The prose is brisk and almost journalistic, but it is also slyly humorous. Stevenson notes that Tabary, who had copied out 'a whole improper romance with his own right hand,' was awed by his companions' skill with picklocks. The passage reads like a heist story, complete with a ladder, shirt-sleeves, and a lantern. It is the most vivid set-piece in the volume, and it shows Stevenson’s ability to shift from critical analysis to narrative storytelling without missing a beat.

Voices Across the Essays

One of the pleasures of this collection is the variety of Stevenson’s voice as he moves from subject to subject. In the essay on Samuel Pepys, he is wry and intimate; in the study of John Knox, he is grave and respectful; in the piece on Charles of Orleans, he is almost tender. The Villon essay combines scholarly detachment with a novelist’s eye for character and setting. Stevenson refers to the 'muddy wits' of Tabary, the 'superb operators' Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux, and Villon himself as a man who 'could have made a new improper romance out of his own head.'

The short story 'The Body-Snatcher,' which closes the volume, offers yet another register: Gothic, tense, and grimly physical. The shift from the essays to this tale is abrupt, but it demonstrates Stevenson’s range. Readers moving through the volume will encounter a writer who is by turns a critic, a historian, a humorist, and a horror writer—sometimes within the same paragraph.

This volume rewards reading in two directions: forward, as Stevenson builds his portraits from scattered facts, and backward, as the essays illuminate each other. The Villon burglary, for instance, gains resonance when set beside the moral seriousness of the Knox essay. The reader is encouraged to treat the collection not as a unified argument but as a series of experiments in voice and method—each one a different key, but all unmistakably Stevenson’s.

There’s something tender about Stevenson calling his essays “personal, not definitive,” as if he’s whispering to us across the years. I kept thinking of that while re-reading the Villon burglary—not grand history, just a life mishandled. It felt oddly close to the quiet solemnity of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Given November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA — Context and Discussion, where grief, too, refuses to be anything but human.