Robert Louis Stevenson, essayist

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One of the reasons I keep a blog is as a kind of commonplace book, to keep a record of things that I liked reading and found thought-provoking. I recently stumbled across, then read through The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, a modern and readily available selection of the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. Yes, that guy–Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll. They were surprisingly enjoyable: nineteenth-century prose is definitely a brain-stretcher for those of us raised on concise and direct twentieth-century English, but after a while I appreciated the great variety in his sentences. Many of his essays have timeless observations that stand with the classics of the genre. Here are three of my favorite bits: This passage from “The Day After Tomorrow” (1887) wonderfully captures the difficulty of getting a clear and objective view of the present day; the phrase “the obscurest epoch is today” feels particularly apt for 2025, even if it is true for every year: History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other’s blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is today; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by im…