"Sunset by the Beira Lake - Sri Lanka" - Watercolour

 

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish author. He was one of the most versatile of writers. His romantic novels of adventure captured the public fancy as had no British works since Sir Walter Scott’s. Treasure Island (1883), a story of a search for pirate treasure, is the most popular of these romances and one of the best children’s books in English. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), an allegorical novel about man’s dual nature, is a suspenseful horror story that shows psychological insight. A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) is a classic.

Stevenson proved himself a master of the short story in such tales as the eerie “Marheim” and “Thrawn Janet,” the tragic “The Beach at Falesa,” and the fanciful “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.” His essays travel books, and letters are polished, witty, informative. Stevenson’s writings brought him great popularity during his lifetime, but after his death, his literary reputation declined for several years and he was thought of only as a competent writer of children’s tales. Toward the middle of the 20th century, however, a new critical evaluation of his work ranked him with the great writers of the 19th century.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, the son of a prosperous engineer who wanted him to follow the same profession. Instead, Stevenson studied law at the University of Edinburgh. He passed the bar examinations in 1875 but never practiced law. Since 1873 he had been publishing essays in various periodicals and he now turned all his attention to a literary career. Stevenson had never been robust and he began traveling early in life, partly for health and partly for pleasure. In 1888 he sailed to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, settling finally in the Samoan island of Upolu in 1890. There Stevenson bought a large estate he called “Vailima.” He took an active part in Samoan political affairs and wrote extensively.

Stevenson died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. He left an unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, that was published as a fragment in 1896. This novel, set in 18th century Scotland, contains some of Stevenson’s most powerful and realistic characterizations. Some critics believe it would have been his masterpiece. Samoan friends affectionately called Stevenson Tusitala (teller of tales). They carried his body to the top of Mount Vaea, where it was buried under this epitaph written by himself :

Under a wide and starry sky

Dig a grave and let me lie

Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will

This is the verse you grave for me

Here he lies where he longed to be

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill

H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres but is best known now for his early science fiction novels including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The War in the Air (1907) among many others and also his comic novels. Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. His science fiction novels revealed him as a writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas. He also wrote many short stories. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web.

John Higgs writes: Wells’s genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. Originality was Wells’s calling card. In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called “scientific romance” novels, This was a dazzling display of new thought, endlessly copied since. A book like The War of the Worlds inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that followed. It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us all forever.

Wells's earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathizing with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of a journalist. Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English Society as a whole.

From the Travelogue

 

Because I had gone to Nuwara Eliya in November, I found it was off-season and intensely cold. After tea I went to a hotel. The owner was inquisitive to know why I was traveling and I explained my philosophy of travel. I said I was traveling all around the country using only public transport and I wanted to draw or paint everything I came across. He looked at me like I was from another planet.

But the great train journey uphill had aroused my interest in Surrealism so I started to draw my first surrealist drawing. Surrealism is an odd thing. Everyone accepts that something illogical has no value, but the objective of this Surrealist movement is exactly this – to create unnerving, illogical scenes with the objective of freeing the unconscious. Nothing less. Amazed by what I saw in the hill country, I drew a landscape following the strange theories of the Surrealists. It was an enthralling experience. In an attempt to draw realistic and impressive drawings and avoid mistakes, the artist sometimes loses the thrill of drawing and painting...His output drops...But in this new Surrealist method I invented, mistakes are modified or left as they are to make the drawing more energetic. The artist finds the true purpose of art - to express oneself and be happy...I felt incredibly proud of my first Surrealist drawing, it really had freed, if not my unconscious, at least the full potential of my creativity. So I took my drawing to show the owner, and all he could say was, “What the hell is this?” Damned if I knew.

But that was nothing compared to my experiences in selling drawings. Many years ago, I came up with a novel way of drawing. For me Art has always been synonymous with magic, so one day I wondered whether there was some theory that, when applied, would lead to interesting paintings or drawings. Unfortunately there seemed to be no such theory, for some reason some paintings are pleasing while others fail to satisfy the mind. But I didn’t want to give up so easily. So I analyzed the paintings of famous artists and found that the most interesting paintings had an element of crudeness in them. Take Vincent van Gogh’s “The Church at Auvers” for example, the whole building is crooked and the colors unnatural. But what would have happened if he painted it straight using natural colors, then it would be like a million other architectural drawings, competent but boring. This was good news for me because I was one of those people in this world who is too lazy or too incompetent to draw buildings perfectly. I felt that the real secret behind a really good painting was a certain crudeness mingled cleverly with a really impressive element. The impressive element makes the painting realistic, while the crudeness energizes the painting or drawing making the whole painting interesting.

I used this theory to paint and came up with some eerie paintings. Part of my technique involved random squiggles, particularly for the sky, which I called energy lines. Apart from the energy they added they helped balance the composition which I think is crucial in any drawing. The next step was to find someone to sell it to. At that time, I was attending a tuition class to pass an exam, but the people there were not the kind who would buy a drawing. But there was a certain intelligent person who took the trouble to have creative conversations with me. She was much older than the others, and said she also had a law degree, and had an intellectual air to her, which made her an ideal candidate to sell my drawing to. So I talked about the subject and showed her the drawing, hoping to charge only a small amount because it was my first sale. She was immediately repulsed. She took the drawing and turned it sideways and then upside down and looked at me in a weird way that some people reserve for particularly stupid people. I was shocked, why I wondered was she turning it upside down, after all it was one of my best landscape drawings with energy lines for the sky. Then she said "I don't know whether it is upside down or not, but after framing it make sure you display it the wrong way to the wall. Life is a joke.