Robert Louis Stevenson’s Romantic Sensibility : Nature and Human Emotion in An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Abstract: In the latter half of the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson set off on two journeys through Belgium and France, two travels that were to become the subject of his early travelogues An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. In these two travelogues Stevenson elaborates extensively on depictions of nature, and through these depictions, Stevenson suggests that there exists a special relationship between natural beauty and human emotion. In fact, this portrayal of human emotion as bound with nature can be considered as significantly Romantic. Consequently, this study investigates Stevenson’s depictions of natural beauty from the Romantic conceptualizations, the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque. However, these Romantic theories are subject to various definitions and perceptions by different aesthetes and intellectuals. Therefore, in this study a few important Romantic philosophers have been given special consideration, those are, Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, William Wordsworth, and John Ruskin. The analysis of Stevenson’s depictions is conducted by way of discussing excerpts and quotations from Stevenson’s writing in relation to these Romantic perspectives. Although these travelogues are misplaced as Romantic in terms of period of time, I argue that Robert Louis Stevenson’s depictions of natural beauty and human emotion in An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes reveal an interesting Romantic sensibility, which is founded on a combination of the aesthetic and philosophical ideas of the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime.