Any consideration of the life and work of Stevenson must be a study of the reaction continually in progress between a delight in physical doing and making and being and an irresistible and more or less contradictory desire to write, to knit words together and to be absorbed wholly in an intellectual business. Stevenson felt that delight and this desire to be more or less opposed to each other; but, speaking with strict accuracy, the desire was no more than a result and at the same time a stimulus of the delight. Art with him as with all other artists was for life's sake; with him more obviously than with some others because of the comparative simplicity of the life of which he sought by means of art to make himself more intensely conscious. He ‘felt action’ he wrote in a letter: his art was a means of feeling it more clearly. It was precisely because he was an artist that he could write, ‘I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.’

This must not be forgotten when we read his laments for an active life. These laments are mere greedy desire for yet more of what he already possessed. He lived like a candle flame and towards the end of his life climbed higher and higher in hopes to catch and consume a little more of that life which he had valued with steady wisdom from the first.