Robert Louis Stevenson’s tastes in literature are interesting. I read his essay “Books which have Influenced Me” not because I wanted to know about books that I should read but because I wanted some insight into his quirky mind
Here’s his main argument:
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change — that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.
Stevenson loved Shakespeare’s characters above all others. And outside Shakespeare his most beloved character was Alexander Dumas’s D’Artagnan, the older guy in Vicomte de Bragelonne.
I don’t share Stevenson’s sensibilities. But I was pleased that we share a love of Montaigne’s Essays. Stevenson said it’s “a book not easily outlived.” I like that line.
• Source: Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays on the Art of Writing; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905. Project Gutenberg’s edition is here:
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