II. The Intersection of Wordsworth and Darwinism in Stevenson's Work

The interrelated influences of Wordsworth and evolutionary theory preoccupied Stevenson from the beginning of his career, originating in an early meditation on memory in 1871. In “Cockermouth and Keswick,” the twenty-one-year-old Stevenson combines a retrospective account of his Lake District travels with a reflection on memory and place. As Stevenson wanders onto Wordsworth's turf both literally and metaphorically, his path takes a Darwinian turn. He explains that he deliberately delays recording his experience to “allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the Survival of the Fittest” (The Works 101–02). Beneath this witticism lies the beginning of a serious line of inquiry which he would pursue for the rest of his career. The Wordsworthian pattern of experiencing nature, reflecting on the memory, and then writing about it backfires on Stevenson, as he confesses he has forgotten most of the trip. Stevenson describes meeting a hatmaker named Smethurst who typifies Wordsworth's celebration of rural people's ordinary speech, as his words “were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best writing and speaking to the blush” (107). Smethurst proposes a thoroughly Wordsworthian excursion. Because “he had little things in his past life that . . . gave him special pleasure to recall,” he would lend Stevenson his raft for a trip down the river so that he could look back “in after years . . . and get great pleasure from the recollection” (107-08). This offer recalls Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey,” directing Dorothy's experience to help her form beneficial future memories and the poet's own remembered boat excursions in The Prelude – all of which are marked in Stevenson's edition. Again, however, the Wordsworthian formula does not quite work, as Stevenson's obligation to enjoy and remember “turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty” of which he “soon wearied” (108). While Wordsworth believes that the “memory be[comes] as a dwelling place” and the “mind . . . a mansion for all lovely forms,” Stevenson emphasizes that some of these memories fail to achieve “survival of the fittest” (66, 140–42). These disappointments suggest that Wordsworth's poetry would need to interact and compete with evolutionary ideas in Stevenson's writing, and that not all of the poet's material would survive the selection process.

While Stevenson would later explore the tensions between evolution and Wordsworth's philosophy, this early essay also suggests that Darwinism would make him cling to certain elements of Wordsworth all the more tightly. Stevenson is touched that Smethurst would unselfishly take the trouble to make a memory for him, reflecting “that it gives [him] more pleasure to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation” than to remember his boat ride (109). While Smethurst's ideas may not be entirely sound, the benevolent sentiment behind them has a refreshing and redemptive quality that Stevenson values in a Darwinian world: “I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, . . . and dangers . . . so that what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at the ugly corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment” (109). Stevenson is perhaps thinking of Smethurst when he muses in his next essay that “a man who carries a pleasant face about to his friends and neighbors” does more good than someone like Darwin (“On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places” 148). “Cockermouth and Keswick” introduces a pattern that would span Stevenson's career of engaging Wordsworth and evolutionary thought simultaneously, demonstrating Wordsworth's shortcomings against this backdrop, and then using his work as a corrective against evolution's dark side.

Leslie Stephen's 1876 essay “Wordsworth's Ethics,” published in his Cornhill Magazine the same year Stevenson began writing for it, further solidified Stevenson's perception of the link between Wordsworth's poetry and evolutionary theory. Stephen considers the “real connection” which exists between “the evolutionist” and Wordsworth, “though in one sense they are almost antithetical” (142). Stephen anticipates links that Stevenson would continue to explore: the analogy between Wordsworth's notion of heavenly preexistence and primitive instinct, the poet's supposed neglect of nature's violence, and the power of the mind to recognize harmony beneath nature's chaos.Footnote ⁸ Stephen's essay would have further stimulated his thinking and encouraged him to continue reading Wordsworth through a Darwinian lens.

Stevenson's use of the “Intimations Ode,” his most frequently cited Wordsworth text, sheds light on his evolutionary interpretation of the poet's work. Stevenson repeatedly evokes Wordsworth's well-known phrase “trailing clouds of glory,” but always in a profoundly different sense from its original reference to a preexistent state with God (64). In his essay “Aes Triplex,” with a fitting foreshadowing of his own end, he praises those who “make one brave push” in their work before death: “In the hot-fit of life, a tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side . . . trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land” (53-54).Footnote ⁹ Here deeds in life, not otherworldly origins, glorify one's passing. The struggle for survival lends its luster to those “full-blooded” individuals vigorously striving in the “hot-fit.” For Stevenson, life can thus lend us grandeur, whereas for Wordsworth, our worldly dwelling lessens it as the earth strives “to make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, / Forget the glories he has known” (82-83). Stevenson, then, renders Wordsworth's spiritual visions temporal, elevating deeds in the earthly struggle – “the highest point of being” – above heavenly origins or destinations.

While Wordsworth celebrates divine purpose and origins, his words aptly describe Stevenson's view of instinctual inheritance. In Stevenson's evolutionary reading of the “Intimations Ode,” Wordsworth's “song of thanks and praise” is raised not to our spiritual capacity for transcendence, but to biologically inherited “high instincts” of prehistoric origins, the “first affections,” and “shadowy recollections” “of a Creature,” which “are yet a master light of all our seeing” and behavior (143–55). Whereas, for Wordsworth, these “impulses of deeper birth” (a phrase Stevenson marked in “A Poet's Epitaph”) signal spiritual origins, Stevenson views them as instincts inherited from a primitive evolutionary past (MS IV.192.47). In his essay “The Character of Dogs,” Stevenson mischievously borrows Wordsworth's elevated language to describe animal instincts and suggest their shared ancestry with humans: “Instinct . . . [the dog] certainly possesses . . . as though he came ‘trailing clouds of glory.’ But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is limited” (126). In his essay “On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places,” Stevenson describes visiting an ancient castle once defended by “old fighting men of the Norse breed” (10). He enters to “escape” from the wind “as from an enemy,” quoting Wordsworth's phrase from The Prelude, and “had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies’ who had built them” (11; Wordsworth VII.185). Stevenson's suggestion of inherited ancestral recollection draws on Samuel Butler's evolutionary theory of unconscious memory. Stevenson wrote in his essay “The Manse” that his ancestors’ experiences were “in his blood . . . in the very knot and center of [his] being” (107). In the face of this age-old ancestral memory of tribal violence at the ancient site, he quotes the “Intimations Ode,” writing that “our noisy years did indeed seem moments / In the being of the eternal silence,” as his life suddenly seems momentary when juxtaposed with millions of years of geological and biological transformation (11; Wordsworth 157–58).

III. Stevenson's Evolutionary Revision of Wordsworth

As Wordsworth's and Darwinism's influences intertwine, they also come into conflict. In addition to reading Wordsworth through an evolutionary lens, Stevenson criticizes and revises his poetry, emphasizing in his fiction that much of what is benign in Wordsworth's writing becomes problematic or sinister in Darwin's wake. Describing Wordsworth's influence, the first quality that Stevenson attributes to the poet's work is “a certain innocence” which clings to it (“Books” 164, my emphasis). When examined in Stevenson's writing, Wordsworth's beliefs about nature (that it exists to inspire us, serves as a moral anchor, and promotes sympathy) appear innocent, even naive in a Darwinian world of uncertainty and violence. This contrasting view of nature leads Stevenson to depart from Wordsworth's views on human relationships and poetry. Examining Wordsworth's tenets on these subjects through a Darwinian lens in his fiction, Stevenson emphasizes that his poetry has taken on radically different meaning, and seeks to debunk his philosophy.

A scene from Stevenson's final unfinished novel, The Weir of Hermiston, illustrates this revision. Stevenson evokes Wordsworth's poem “Stepping Westward” to describe the protagonist's meeting with his lover, but reframes it in evolutionary terms. As Archie approaches, Kirstie calls out to him with an echo of the titular question posed to Wordsworth by two women during his walking tour through Scotland: “Are you stepping west, Hermiston?” (107; ch. 6). For Wordsworth, this prospect represents access to the eternal (“and stepping westward seemed to be / A kind of heavenly destiny”), but enticing as the fantasy may be, he acknowledges that he has a more practical plan than following the sun: “’Twould be a wildish destiny, / If we . . . were in this place the guests of Chance” (11–12, 2–5). Whereas Wordsworth ultimately rejects the blind following of fortune, the course of Stevenson's young lovers is determined by chance as much as choice. Kirstie “never admitted to herself that she had come . . . to look for Archie. And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls. For the steps of love in the young . . . are instinctive and unconscious,” and Archie finds her only on an “off chance” (106; ch. 6). Leaving the lovers at the mercy of chance places them firmly on Darwinian soil. On the Origin of Species emphasizes that “natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur;” thus random variation partially determines evolution's winners and losers (563; ch. 6).Footnote ¹⁰ Kirstie engages in a self-display of beauty and vitality similar to what Darwin describes in sexual selection: “By an afterthought that was a stroke of art,” she “framed [her face] becomingly” with her kerchief and “leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round . . . in the fading light” (107; ch. 6).

While Kirstie encourages Archie's approach, Stevenson's portrayal of the scene's Darwinian implications is decidedly ominous. Whereas Wordsworth imagines stepping westward toward the divine, Archie walks toward destruction. Approaching Kirstie,

Seemingly innocent flirtations with a local girl can be fatal in a Darwinian world, in which life and the powers which create it are inextricably entangled with death. For Darwin, all the lovers’ games of chase and display and the entire process of sexual selection ultimately result in extinction as species evolve, with some members thriving at the expense of others. Archie does step toward death, as the affair will result in his murdering his romantic rival, Frank, and being sentenced to die. Being merely average, Archie is subject to deadly sexual competition. The lovers meet in spring as “the moss [begins] to renew itself in jewels of green,” but these signs of new life are haunted by the “unchanging face of the deathstone” nearby (107; ch. 6). Here death is the one constant in an ever-changing world. Stevenson's Darwinian portrayal of romantic love differs markedly from Wordsworth's. The Solitary in The Excursion finds “a blooming lady – a conspicuous flower . . . whom he had sensibility to love / Ambition to attempt, and skill to win” (II.187–90). Whereas Wordsworth celebrates this process as a high point in the Solitary's sad history, Stevenson cannot gloss over sexual selection's inherent violence and disappointment.

Stevenson's Darwinian view of instinctual drives makes him deeply mistrustful of another “innocent” Wordsworthian concept: that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads 327). Stevenson departed from contemporary anthropological understandings of primitive instincts by representing “survivals” or returns to these impulses as common rather than exceptional – a “stubbornly persistent force of savagery” constantly threatening to burst through the veneer of civilization (Reid 123–24). For Stevenson these instincts are never far away – an assumption that sheds light on his abiding evolutionary interest in Wordsworth's “Intimations Ode”: “our souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither, / Can in a moment travel thither” (166–68). Stevenson's work suggests that we did not leave our primitive instincts in the ocean, but that “the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be” (184–85). Stevenson both borrows and recasts Wordsworth's framework. When powerful feelings come to the surface in his fiction, they are almost always primitive and usually overflow in destructive ways.

In The Wrecker, Bellairs demonstrates how dangerous Wordsworth's poetic philosophy has become after Darwin. The conniving attorney is relentless in his attempt to blackmail Carthew, but also faithfully supports an unfaithful wife. He wins the sympathy of the protagonist, Loudon Dodd, in part because of his love for Romantic poetry. On their voyage to England, Bellairs tells Dodd of his “passion” for the sea, misquoting “Tintern Abbey” as he says, “And the tall cataract haunted me like a passion” (346; ch. 19). Of Bellairs, Dodd relates that “his taste for literature was naïve and unaffected; his sentimentality, although extreme and a thought ridiculous, was plainly genuine” (347; ch. 19). Notwithstanding his faults, Bellairs, like Wordsworth, exhibits “a certain innocence,” and his “essential passions of the heart” – sincerely held powerful feelings – recommend him to Dodd (Preface to Lyrical Ballads 597). But Bellairs's love of nature and Wordsworth's poetry give him no moral stability or refuge from his “latent and essential madness” (362; ch. 19). When Dodd tries to prevent Bellairs's efforts to blackmail Carthew, the Wordsworth-quoting attorney goes on a crazed, violent rant, screaming, “I'll hunt you down, hunt you, hunt you down! If I were strong, I'd tear your vitals out, here in this room – tear them out – I'd tear them out! Damn, damn, damn! You think me weak? I can bite, bite to the blood, bite you, hurt you, disgrace you . . .” (361–362; ch. 19). These animalistic threats show the sinister aspect of the “[exquisite] wild[ness]” Wordsworth prizes and the nature of the “haunting passions” and powerful feelings likely to spontaneously overflow in the Darwinian struggle (“To H. C. Six Years Old” 12). Far from the poet's vision in his Preface, this outburst leaves no room for tranquil recollection and seeks to give pain rather than pleasure.

If spontaneous overflows often backfire in Stevenson's fiction, tranquil recollection also fails.Footnote ¹¹ In The Weir of Hermiston, Archie's unplanned, emotional denunciation of the death penalty his father decrees sparks conflict and ultimately leads toward a deadly outburst, subjecting Archie to the same potential sentencing. In true Wordsworthian fashion, Archie seeks to follow the explosion at the hanging with “recollect[ion] in tranquility” as he “walk[s] in the country and admire[s] the beauties of nature” (32; ch. 3). Stevenson gently mocks these Wordsworthian wanderings, suggesting that they no longer work poetically any more than morally. Archie walks through the countryside on a warm spring day, “wonder[s] at [the] beauty” of the scene, and then “surprise[s] himself with a sudden impulse to write poetry” (86; ch. 6). This appears to be the perfect beginning for a Wordsworthian pedestrian composition. After Archie is comfortably settled on a boulder near some picturesque falls, however, the inspiration does not come, and “it still more surprise[s] him that he should find nothing to write” (86; ch. 6). This would-be Wordsworthian poet's innocent effort to connect to a benevolent nature is ultimately misguided and unfruitful.

Stevenson also takes issue with Wordsworth's portrayal of a benevolent natural world. He frequently quotes the final lines of “My Heart Leaps Up”: “And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety” (8–9). Wordsworth's speaker states that his heart will still leap up at the sight of a rainbow in old age as it did in childhood, declaring “or let me die!” (6). A Darwinian natural world, however, will let him die regardless of his emotional response to rainbows. Stevenson's quotation of this poem in a letter on aging emphasizes this helplessness in the face of nature's inevitable course: “And I could wish my days to be bound each to each . . . they are anyway, and whether I wish it or not” (8: 361). Stevenson's most telling adaptation of Wordsworth's phrase reverses it completely. In an 1884 letter to Bob and Louisa Stevenson, he reflects: “I am myself no more. Of that lean, feverish, voluble, whiskeyfied young Scot . . . there now remains no quality but the strong language. That, at least, I shall take gravewards: my last word, it's like, will be an execration. . . . My days shall thus be bound each to each in natural impietee” (4: 259–60). In this one quality, he muses, the child would be father of the man. This “natural impietee” functions on at least two levels. Personally, Stevenson considers himself impious by nature; thus his retention of profane language throughout his life would be only natural. Referring to vice as natural emphasizes an oppositional relationship between human instincts and religious morality. The second meaning of this revision is that nature itself, understood with significantly different associations after Darwin, is inherently impious. Stevenson lost his Christian faith by a “very hard” reading of Herbert Spencer's writing on natural science (Letters 1: 249). He approaches Wordsworth's phrase “natural piety” with some baggage. His copy of Wordsworth reflects this ambivalence; the entire poem is marked except this line, which bears only a faint, indecisive pencil dash, indicating a reluctance to fully endorse the concept of “natural piety” (Figure 6; MS I.147).

Figure 6.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Marking of Wordsworth's “My Heart Leaps Up,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (MS I.147).

For Stevenson, as for many Victorians, nature had become a place of doubt rather than of faith. In a letter from his sickbed, Stevenson quoted the lines from Wordsworth's “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,” describing Lord Clifford, who “moved to and fro, for his delight. / He knew the rocks which Angels haunt / Upon the mountains visitant” (3: 203; Wordsworth 127–29). Stevenson noted his last two years of inactivity due to ill health, relating his doctor's orders that he spend another winter at Davos: “[I] must soon be back again to that unkindly haunt ‘upon the mountains visitant’ – there goes no angel there but the angel of death” (3: 203). Unlike Wordsworth's Clifford, then, Stevenson's mountain scene is one of suffering, not delight, giving place not to religious belief, but to death. Wordsworth emphasizes that because of Clifford's time spent in nature, “in him the savage virtue of the Race, / Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead” (165–66). For Stevenson, nature is the source, rather than the antithesis, of these “savage” and “ferocious” instincts which never die.

Stevenson subjects not only Wordsworth's conception of the natural world but also nature's effects on individuals to a Darwinian revision. The natural world is not a sufficient moral anchor for Stevenson's characters, who invalidate Wordsworth's claim that “love of nature lead[s] to love of mankind” (Book VIII The Prelude). In The Ebb-Tide, the character closest to nature, Attwater, enjoys a Wordsworthian solitude on his remote island, but his destructive instincts are unrestrained as he exploits and even kills natives to maintain dominance. In “The Beach of Falesá,” Case is most nearly aligned with the natural world, and, like Attwater, he is violent and oppressive. When Wiltshire sets out alone to find Case's lair in the forest, he is frightened by the “sound of singing in the wind” (77; ch. 4). Notwithstanding his scorn for “native talk,” he believes that he is hearing an aitu, or evil spirit, and determines to pursue it (77; ch. 4). Discovering that the sound comes from a box with banjo strings attached to vibrate in the wind, he says, “I believe they call the thing a Tyrolean harp, whatever that may mean” (79; ch. 4). Though Wiltshire may not be thinking of Romantic poetry, Stevenson clearly is. The aeolian harp was an eighteenth-century emblem of the responsive poetic mind, frequently evoked by Wordsworth and his collaborator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though usually representing the poet in reflective harmony with nature, here the aeolian harp inspires fear until it is exposed as a cheap trick – an illusion planted by Case to exploit the indigenous people's beliefs for his own gain. This “innocent” Wordsworthian metaphor becomes a weapon in the Darwinian competition for resources and survival.

No discussion of primitive nature's dark side in Stevenson's work would be complete without Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and we find Wordsworth's poetry stirred into the doctor's transforming potion. Jekyll describes the intoxicating liberty of rejecting moral inhibition, echoing the “Intimations Ode.” For Wordsworth, though “the shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy,” “our souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither, / Can in a moment travel thither” (67–68, 166–68). Similarly, Jekyll “could plod the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into a sea of liberty” with a drug which “shook the prisonhouse of [his] disposition” (86, 84; ch. 10; my emphases). Wordsworth's intimations are ennobling and joyful, but Jekyll's plunge into the primitive brings devastating effects. Hyde's most vicious crime occurs against a Wordsworthian backdrop. Before witnessing the incident, a “romantically given” London maid takes in a picturesque scene from her window: a “cloudless” night “brilliantly lit by the full moon”; “never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world” (26; ch. 4). Her emotional association of the state of her environment with humanity is based on the quintessentially Wordsworthian tenet, often cited by Victorian critics, of “reciprocity” between people and the natural world, in which nature's mood “awakens a kindred or correspondent state of feeling in us.”Footnote ¹² The maid then sees Mr. Hyde approach an older man who emanates “an innocent and old-world kindness” (26; ch. 4). Given the scene's introduction, we might think of the apparently similar roadway encounters that occur in Wordsworth's poetry with leech gatherers, discharged soldiers, peddlers, and other passersby. Typically these meetings result in shared sympathy or lessons learned, after which the Wordsworthian impulse is to “let him pass, a blessing on his head!” (“The Old Cumberland Beggar” 162). Hyde's brutal primitive instincts, however, are quite different: “All of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger” (26; ch. 4). In a savage spontaneous overflow, the “troglodytic” Hyde beats the older man to (and for some time after) death with “ape-like fury” (18, 27; ch. 2, 3). Wordsworth's “innocent and old-world” notions about nature, human interaction, and poetry appear similarly beaten down with a Darwinian stick in Stevenson's work.Footnote ¹³

Whereas Stevenson corrects Wordsworth's view of a benevolent natural world in his writing, his marginalia highlight the poet's acknowledgement of nature's violence – a disconnect that illustrates the theory of Bloom's influential study: The Anxiety of Influence. While Stevenson's markings repeatedly emphasize Wordsworthian nature's tranquil benevolence, he also notes its precariousness in the phrase “calm is all nature as a resting wheel” (“Written in very early Youth” MS I.2.1).Footnote ¹⁴ Stevenson takes note “of doubt, and something dark, / Of the old Sea some reverential fear” that creeps into the poet's natural vision – an anxiety that evolution had linked more clearly to the sea and further darkened for the novelist (“Where lies the Land” MS II.275.12-13). Stevenson's markings also emphasize that identifying with nature too closely brings death. In “To H.C.,” Hartley's “exquisitely wild” instincts make him fragile as “a dew drop” and destine him to a premature demise (MS I.171.12, 27). Also marked is “Three years she grew,” in which nature's sinister “law and impulse” ultimately lead to Lucy's death (MS II.102.8). By recognizing Wordsworth's depiction of nature's destructiveness as a reader, but deliberately ignoring it as a writer, Stevenson commits what Bloom terms a misreading – “an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation” (30). Stevenson's evolutionary revisions of Wordsworth amplify and extend latent elements of his precursor's work, which Bloom calls Apophrades, or the return of the dead, paradoxically making these passages feel more Stevensonian than Wordsworthian. As Bloom explains, “the uncanny effect . . . makes it seem to us . . . as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work” (16).

Bloom's theory, however, can only take us so far as Stevenson's explanation of nature's indifference departs from his predecessor's. Stevenson marks phrases in Wordsworth's poetry which emphasize that chance natural occurrence and destruction in “life's uneasy game” are still divinely managed – a doctrine which Stevenson's study of evolution made difficult to accept (“The Pass of Kirkstone” MS II.168.30).Footnote ¹⁵ Wordsworth's declaration in “Imagination” that “the God of peace and love . . . guides the Pestilence . . . drought . . . [and] earthquake” caught Stevenson's attention (“Imagination – ne'er before content” MS III.116.1-12). While occasionally acknowledging nature's violence, Wordsworth maintained his teleological faith rooted in “hill and vale” that “Whate'er the weak may dread, the wicked dare, / Thy lot, O man, is good, thy portion fair!” – a belief which Stevenson marked but could not hold (“The Pass of Kirkstone” MS II.170.83-86). While highlighting Wordsworth's phrase that “to every natural form . . . I gave a moral life,” Stevenson had accepted the Darwinian view that nature was amoral and that the world had no divine order (The Prelude III, MS V.155.127-29). Thus his evolutionary revision of Wordsworth was more than competitive self-positioning, but grew out of fundamental philosophical disagreement.

IV. Wordsworth's Enduring Value for Stevenson

If Wordsworth's writing was no longer adequate for Stevenson, we must ask why it appears in his fiction at all. A study of Stevenson's essays makes clear that while he revised those elements of Wordsworth he considered invalidated by evolutionary theory, he also clung to “a certain innocence” in his work to counter Darwinism's troubling implications. Stevenson's essay “On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places” states that we can “perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favorably” by training our sensibilities (3). In seeking to cultivate this Wordsworthian power, Stevenson recognizes nature's brutality, but chooses to focus on its beauties – “We learn to live with her [nature], as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious” (3). This process takes time, but “things looked at patiently from one side to another,” he writes, “generally end by showing us a side that is beautiful” (3). Stevenson's Darwinian perspective prevents him from fully adopting Wordsworth's “cheerful faith, that all which we behold / Is full of blessings” (a phrase Stevenson's marking pencil does not quite reach in “Tintern Abbey”) (MS II.154.133-34). Still, Stevenson keeps at the task of discovering beauty in nature's “unpleasant places,” which he illustrates by quoting The Prelude. If nature's hostile “roar continues” and “winds blow loud,” it also offers nurturing protection: “sequestered nook[s]” and “shelter'd place[s]” to which we can “escape as from an enemy” (Stevenson 10; VII.168-71). Wordsworth's presence in the essay is also marked by Stevenson's statement that when we cannot sympathize with a panoramic landscape, “we begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature,” quoting “A Poet's Epitaph” (5; 19). Wordsworth helps Stevenson hold on to nature's softer side.

Wordsworth's poetry could address Stevenson's concerns about evolutionary theory, tempering its harshness, without demanding he subscribe to beliefs that he could no longer hold. He writes of the poet in “Books,”

The paradoxical phrase “austerity of joy” reflects Stevenson's Wordsworthian effort to celebrate the beauties of a violent natural world. Stevenson quotes ambiguous imagery from “Brougham Castle,” which permits both bleak and benevolent readings of nature. More than the attributes of nature itself, however, the quotation emphasizes the perception (sight, sound, and thrill) of it. It is not Wordsworth's ideas about nature that Stevenson values – he does not accept his “dogma” and “beliefs,” but he celebrates the poet's “spirit” and artistic vision. The “innocence” of Wordsworth's faith in nature, if not the belief itself, is, for Stevenson, “what is best in [him].” Wordsworth, then, functions somewhat like Smethurst in “Cockermouth and Keswick”: not all of his ideas hold up, but Stevenson is better and happier for the encounter. Writing to a friend about Samoa, Stevenson reflects: “On the frontier,” where “you may take in what books you will . . . men and women grow up, like trees in a still well-walled garden ‘at their own sweet will,’” quoting Wordsworth's “Westminster Bridge” (8: 415). Stevenson's observation also draws on T. H. Huxley's metaphor for civilization: “a small patch of the soil . . . cut off from the rest by a wall . . . [and] made into a garden,” in which the Darwinian “state of nature . . . was brought to an end . . . by the intervention of man” (9, my emphasis). Huxley suggests that ethics are based on “the elimination of [the] struggle” for survival, and “[suppress] the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle” (13, 31). Stevenson “take[s] in” Wordsworth, whose poetry limits and softens the violent chaos of nature with the ethical sympathy Huxley describes: “trees in a still well-walled garden.” For Stevenson, Wordsworth helps keep the will “sweet” rather than selfish and destructive. His quotation also introduces an element of personal agency into biological growth, imposing the significance of individual choice on evolutionary narrative. Most important, Wordsworth speaks “to what is best in us,” which helps Stevenson address what he sees as moral problems with evolution.

Wordsworth's “address to what is best in us” also relates to Stevenson's view of himself. Another reason Stevenson retains Wordsworth's influence in spite of challenges posed to it by evolution is that his life could be counted a success according to Wordsworth, but a failure by Darwinian standards. In a revealing letter to Bob Stevenson, the novelist confesses,

In his final letter to Edmund Gosse (perhaps the last letter he ever wrote), Stevenson describes himself, in contrast to Gosse the family man, as “a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed blighted youth” (8.399). “Blighted,” with its associations of diseased and stunted organisms, evokes the late-Victorian discourse of degeneration – the evolutionary inverse of progress. A childless invalid, Stevenson fell far short of the evolutionary ideal of the “fittest.” Being an only child, he felt that he had failed in his family's struggle for survival. His self-descriptions of “clear-eyed” and “rather bitter” make clear that he understood the evolutionary significance of his childlessness all too well. This bitterness shows through in the touch of irony behind Stevenson's wish that his days be “bound each to each” by his amazement at an intergenerational life cycle in which he cannot participate. Stevenson also regretted that he had not fulfilled his inheritance in the family business of lighthouse engineering, lamenting, “I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfour too” (Letters 8: 235). For many of Stevenson's contemporaries, becoming “more of a bewildered child” with age would signal degeneration, a harmful step backwards towards primitivism. While failing according to evolutionary biology, however, Stevenson finds Wordsworthian success as his “days are bound each to each” by his wonder at the world as “the child is father of the man” in his life.

Even when ostensibly departing from Wordsworth's notion that “the child is father of the man,” Stevenson enlists the poet in resisting some of evolutionary theory's troubling implications. He reflects in his “Memoir of Himself,” “I hope and I do believe I am a better man than I was a child. With my respects to Wordsworth . . . the sight of deformed persons and above all hideous old women moved in me a sort of panic horror” (157-58). Stevenson's childhood aversion to the deformed and elderly is an inherited trait that, while beneficial in natural selection, he finds morally objectionable. He has progressed beyond this primitive instinct, but the ethical growth that removes the man from the child paradoxically brings Stevenson closer to Wordsworth, as he internalizes the tenet of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” that “we have all of us one human heart” (146). This Wordsworthian brand of sympathy runs counter to the Social Darwinism of Stevenson's time. Wordsworth's character is an example of one of the “old” and “deformed” persons who would have frightened Stevenson as a child and serves no useful evolutionary purpose, but of whom Wordsworth warns, “deem not this man useless” (67).Footnote ¹⁶ Though Wordsworth and Herbert Spencer were both critical of the Poor Laws, that the beggar's class “will probably soon be extinct” represents crisis for the poet, whereas, for Spencer, allowing this natural process to run its course without artificial intervention is to “sacrifice the small immediate gratification for a future great one” (“A Description”; Spencer 363). Wordsworth's poetry, then, softened evolution for Stevenson, and provided a gentler perspective from which to approach nature, view society, and assess his own life.

V. A Darwinian Literary Relationship

The intersection of Wordsworth's influence and evolution provided Stevenson a lens through which to assess his career as well as his life. He saw his engagement with Wordsworth and literary influence more broadly in Darwinian terms. Stevenson's ambivalent response to Wordsworth's poetry is central to his view of their relationship, as reflected in his essay “Talk and Talkers.” He writes, “Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom, and effect,” echoing the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, which states that the poet only produces “shadows” of what is “uttered by men in real life” (61; Wordsworth 335). While the poet “describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial” feelings and experience (335, my emphases). For Stevenson, good talk “should keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and business of men,” just as Wordsworth sought to “keep [his] reader in the company of flesh and blood” and “adopt the very language of men” (65; 330).

Notwithstanding the essay's debt to Wordsworth, it is highly critical of him, specifically revising his poem “Personal Talk.” While Wordsworth does not “much or oft delight / To season [his] fireside with personal talk” because it limits the imagination, Stevenson declares that “there can be no fairer ambition than to excel in good talk . . . the first duty of man” (1-2; Stevenson 55–56).Footnote ¹⁷ Disregarding Wordsworth's aversion to fireside chats, Stevenson pulls up a chair, taking the adversarial position of the poet's ironically planted interlocutor who insists that “fits of sprightly malice do but bribe / The languid mind into activity” and that “love itself, and mirth and glee / Are fostered by the comment and the gibe” (17–20). Stevenson writes, “The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest . . . every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition” (62). For him, debate is a beneficial outlet for our primitive instincts for war, which are denied at our developmental detriment. While Wordsworth enjoys “smooth discourse” “remote / From evil-speaking [and] rancour,” Stevenson condemns “urbane and smiling coteries [which] indulge a man's vanities in silence . . . encourage him to be an ass, and . . . radically more contemptible” (44–48; 69).Footnote ¹⁸ Adding insult to injury, he commandeers Wordsworth's famous phrase to attack his position, writing that when such combative “talk is over, each goes his own way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory . . . the excitement of a good talk [still] . . . in the blood, the heart still hot within you” (64–65).Footnote ¹⁹ The thrill of competitive literary dialogue, not transcendent connection with nature, is, for Stevenson, “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” (“Tintern Abbey” 29). His connection with Wordsworth is a “durable bond,” at once “the friendliest relation” and “still a kind of contest.”

Stevenson's two-sided approach, to some extent, is inherent in literary influence generally, but it also relates to Darwinism itself. Creative writers compete not just for the present prizes of readership and prestige, but for the future of literary history, just as biological species battle not only for current position, but ultimately for the success of their offspring. We can recognize the struggle for survival in Bloom's description of “strong poets . . . with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death” (5). Stevenson's competitive instinct is certainly evident in his annotations. Next to “The Solitary Reaper,” Stevenson inscribes the earlier, slightly different version of a line and writes “old reading (and better)” (MS III.17).Footnote ²⁰ Aside from revealing his perceptiveness, Stevenson's criticism packs an evolutionary punch, suggesting that Wordsworth was regressing rather than advancing. Indeed, Stevenson's annotated edition is a record of one author's Darwinian engagement with another. Its pages give us an image of Stevenson, pencil in hand, physically – even violently – grappling with Wordsworth as he annotated and defaced, edited and altered the poet's text. His critical and mocking annotations might lead us to recall Hyde “annotat[ing]” Jekyll's esteemed pious book “with startling blasphemies,” an editorial attack Jekyll calls a primitive “ape-like trick” in Hyde's struggle for survival (64, 101; ch. 8, 10). Robin G. Schulze has developed a Darwinian theory of “authorial selection,” in which authors determine the “fitness” of competing versions of texts in revision (“Textual Darwinism” 299). A Darwinian theory of editorial criticism should also take stock of the more directly competitive struggle which occurs when one author revises another's text. The margins become a battleground for exploiting perceived weakness and asserting superiority. Of course, when Stevenson combats Wordsworth in his marginalia the poet is already dead, and Stevenson's annotations do not directly impact his literary afterlife, but they do allow him to prepare for the more direct and influential engagement of published writing.

Yet cooperation, as well as competition, characterizes influence and evolution. If Darwin's “entangled bank” is a natural battleground, it is also a site of network and interconnection (Origin of Species 413; ch. 14). While writers compete with their predecessors, they also pay them homage, recognizing their dependence on worthy rivals who merit response. Donna Haraway examines the attraction and interdependence of companion species, and the evolutionary significance of their benign interactions. Even in the most competitive of intertextual revisions are the fundamental elements of “respect and response” that are so critical in inter-species meetings (26).

Just as Jekyll's transformation into Hyde depends on the “thorough and primitive duality of man,” Stevenson's ambivalent engagement with Wordsworth is due to the two-sided nature of influence (79; ch. 10). As a reader of Wordsworth, Stevenson shows both Jekyll's reverent admiration and Hyde's mocking malice. As Darwinian evolution is both competitive and cooperative, the two opposing responses each plays a significant role in the literary relationship. This two-sided engagement can help reconcile longstanding division in influence theory, as it encompasses both Bloom's account of fiercely competitive self-assertion with T. S. Eliot's view of influence as a “continual surrender” and “self-sacrifice” of the artist (7). This tension is still evident in influence studies today, as seen in the combative struggle of Joseph Fruscione's “literary rivalry” and the benevolent collaboration of Schulze's “web of friendship.”