With high social spirits and a brilliant, somewhat fantastic, gaiety of bearing, Stevenson was no stranger to the storms and perplexities of youth. A restless and inquiring conscience, perhaps inherited from covenanting ancestors, kept him inwardly calling in question the grounds of conduct and the accepted codes of society. At the same time his reading had shaken his belief in Christian dogma; the harsher forms of Scottish Calvinistic Christianity being indeed at all times repugnant to his nature. From the last circumstance arose for a time troubles with his father, the more trying while they lasted because of the deep attachment and pride in each other which always subsisted between father and son. He loved the aspects of his native city, but neither its physical nor its social atmosphere was congenial to him. Amid the biting winds and rigid social conventions of Edinburgh he craved for Bohemian freedom and the joy of life, and for a while seemed in danger of a fate like that of the boy-poet, Robert Fergusson [q. v.], with whom he always owned a strong sense of spiritual affinity.
But his innate sanity of mind and disposition prevailed. In the summer of 1873 he made new friends, who encouraged him strongly to the career of letters. His first contribution to regular periodical literature, a little paper on ‘Roads,’ appeared in the ‘Portfolio’ (edited by Philip Gilbert Hamerton) for December 1873. In the meantime his health had suffered a serious breakdown. In consequence of acute nervous exhaustion, combined with threatening lung symptoms, he was ordered to the Riviera, where he spent (chiefly at Mentone) the winter of 1873–4. Returning with a certain measure of recovered health in April 1874, he went to live with his parents at Edinburgh and Swanston, and resumed his reading for the bar. He attended classes for Scots law and conveyancing, and for constitutional law and history. He worked also for a time in the office of Messrs. Skene, Edwards, & Bilton, of which the antiquary and historian, William Forbes Skene [q. v.], was senior partner. On 14 July 1875 he passed his final examination with credit, and was called to the bar on the 16th, but never practised. Since abandoning the engineering profession he had resumed the habit of frequent miscellaneous excursions in Scotland, England, or abroad. Now, in 1875, began the first of a series of visits to the artistic settlements in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, where his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, was for the time established. He found the forest climate restorative to his health, and the life and company of Barbizon and the other student resorts congenial. In the winter of 1874–5 he made in Edinburgh the acquaintance of Mr. W. E. Henley, which quickly ripened into a close and stimulating literary friendship. In London he avoided all formal and dress-coated society; and at the Savile Club (his favourite haunt) and elsewhere his own Bohemian oddities of dress and appearance would sometimes repel at first sight persons to whom on acquaintance he soon became endeared by the charm of his conversation. Among his friends of these years may be especially mentioned Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. James Payn, Dr. Appleton (editor of the ‘Academy’), Professor Clifford, Mr. Walter Pollock, Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, Mr. Andrew Lang, and Mr. Edmund Gosse. In 1876 he went with Sir Walter Simpson on the canoe tour in Belgium and France described in the ‘Inland Voyage.’ In the spring of 1878 he made friends at Burford Bridge with a senior whom he had long honoured, Mr. George Meredith; and in the summer had a new experience in serving as secretary to Professor Fleeming Jenkin in his capacity of juror on the Paris Exhibition. In the autumn of the same year he spent a month at Monastier in Velay, whence he took the walk through the mountains to Florac narrated in the ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.’
During these years, 1874–8, his health, though frail, was passable. With his vagrant way of life he combined a steady and growing literary industry. While reading for the bar in 1874–5, much of his work was merely experimental (poems, prose-poems, and tales not published). Much also was in preparation for proposed undertakings on Scottish history. His studies in Highland history, which were diligent and exact, in the end only served to provide the historical background of his Scottish romances. Until the end of 1875 he had only published, in addition to essays in the magazines, an ‘Appeal to the Church of Scotland,’ written to please his father and published as a pamphlet in 1875. In 1876 he contributed as a journalist, but not frequently, to the ‘Academy’ and ‘Vanity Fair,’ and in 1877 more abundantly to ‘London,’ a weekly review newly founded under the editorship of Mr. Glasgow Brown, an acquaintance of Edinburgh Speculative days. In the former year, 1876, began the brilliant series of essays on life and literature in the ‘Cornhill Magazine’ which were afterwards collected with others in the volumes called severally ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ and ‘Familiar Studies of Men and Books.’ They were continued in 1877, and in greater number throughout 1878. His first published stories were: ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (Temple Bar, October 1877); ‘The Sire de Malétroit's Door’ (Temple Bar, January 1878); and ‘Will o' the Mill’ (Cornhill Magazine, January 1878).
The year 1878 was to Stevenson one of great productiveness. In May was issued his first book, ‘The Inland Voyage,’ containing the account of his canoe trip, and written in a pleasant fanciful vein of humour -nd reflection, but with the style a little over-mannered. Besides six or eight characteristic essays of the ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ series, there appeared in ‘London’ (edited by Mr. Henley) the set of fantastic modern tales called the ‘New Arabian Nights,’ conceived in a very spirited and entertaining vein of the realistic-unreal, as well as the story of ‘Providence and the Guitar;’ and in the ‘Portfolio’ the ‘Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh,’ republished at the end of the year in book form. During the autumn and winter of this year he wrote ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes,’ and was much engaged in the planning of plays in collaboration with Mr. Henley, of which one, ‘Deacon Brodie,’ was finished in the spring of 1879. This was also the date of the essay ‘On some Aspects of Burns.’ In the same spring he drafted in Edinburgh, but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics (a study to which he once referred as being always his ‘veiled mistress’) under the name of ‘Lay Morals.’ In few men have the faculties been so active on the artistic and the ethical sides at once, and this fragment is of especial interest in the study of its author's mind and character.
By his various published writings Stevenson had made little impression as yet on the general reader. But the critical had recognised in him a new artist of the first promise in English letters, who aimed at, and often achieved, those qualities of sustained precision, lucidity, and grace of style which are characteristic of the best French prose, but in English rare in the extreme. He had known how to stamp all he wrote with the impress of a vivid personal charm; had shown himself a master of the apt and animated phrase; and whether in tale or parable, essay or wayside musing, had touched on vital points of experience and feeling with the observation and insight of a true poet and humourist.
The year 1879 was a critical one in Stevenson's life. In France he had met an American lady, Mrs. Osbourne (née Van de Grift), whose domestic circumstances were not fortunate, and who was living with her daughter and young son in the art-student circles of Paris and Fontainebleau.