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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Robert Louis Stevenson, by Walter Raleigh
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+Author: Walter Raleigh
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 17, 2007  [eBook #333]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1906 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+BY
+WALTER RALEIGH
+
+PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+AUTHOR OF
+'STYLE,' 'MILTON,' 'WORDSWORTH,' ETC.
+
+_FOURTH IMPRESSION_
+
+LONDON
+EDWARD ARNOLD
+41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
+1906
+
+THE GREATER PART OF THIS
+ESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTURE
+AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
+ON THE 17TH OF MAY
+1895
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a
+nervous generation to ask is the question, 'Will he live?'  There was no
+idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable to
+answer.  It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promise
+immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer with
+the assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes are
+thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with delight.  But 'there
+is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth
+all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and
+sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.'  Let us make sure
+that our sons will care for Homer before we pledge a more distant
+generation to a newer cult.
+
+Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary
+immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of
+Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff.  His fame has spread, as
+lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many.  Fifteen years ago
+his essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small and
+discerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell the
+British public with _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ he
+had shown himself a delicate marksman.  And although large editions are
+nothing, standard editions, richly furnished and complete, are worthy of
+remark.  Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our literary history
+who have been honoured during their lifetime by the appearance of such an
+edition; the best of his public, it would seem, do not only wish to read
+his works, but to possess them, and all of them, at the cost of many
+pounds, in library form.  It would be easy to mention more voluminous and
+more popular authors than Stevenson whose publishers could not find five
+subscribers for an adventure like this.  He has made a brave beginning in
+that race against Time which all must lose.
+
+It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves with
+the presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a world of
+other business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in the
+position of a great writer.  Let us leave that foolish trick to the
+politicians, who never claim that they are right--merely that they will
+win at the next elections.  Literary criticism has standards other than
+the suffrage; it is possible enough to say something of the literary
+quality of a work that appeared yesterday.  Stevenson himself was
+singularly free from the vanity of fame; 'the best artist,' he says
+truly, 'is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who
+loves the practice of his art.'  He loved, if ever man did, the practice
+of his art; and those who find meat and drink in the delight of watching
+and appreciating the skilful practice of the literary art, will abandon
+themselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing their
+unborn and possibly illiterate posterity to answer solemn questions.  Will
+a book live?  Will a cricket match live?  Perhaps not, and yet both be
+fine achievements.
+
+It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death.  In
+the dedication of _Prince Otto_ he says, 'Well, we will not give in that
+we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health again; I still
+purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to launch a
+masterpiece.'  It would be a churlish or a very dainty critic who should
+deny that he has launched masterpieces, but whether he ever launched his
+masterpiece is an open question.  Of the story that he was writing just
+before his death he is reported to have said that 'the goodness of it
+frightened him.'  A goodness that frightened him will surely not be
+visible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of eyes.  His greatest was
+perhaps yet to come.  Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none
+of the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no
+Waverley Novels.  Dying at the height of his power, and in the full tide
+of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspiration
+and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:
+
+   'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a
+   precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
+
+   'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love
+   die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of death
+   also in their eye.  For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man,
+   this is to die young.  Death has not been suffered to take so much as
+   an illusion from his heart.  In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
+   highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side.  The
+   noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are
+   hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
+   happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.'
+
+But we on this side are the poorer--by how much we can never know.  What
+strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed himself and
+dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, for the flavour of
+wisdom and old experience hangs about his earliest writings, but a vague
+sense awakened by that brilliant series of books, so diverse in theme, so
+slight often in structure and occasions so gaily executed, that here was
+a finished literary craftsman, who had served his period of
+apprenticeship and was playing with his tools.  The pleasure of wielding
+the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many
+of the works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy,
+arabesques carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.
+
+All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to translate
+a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power; Sophocles,
+Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make game of
+life.  But to make game of life was to each of these the very loftiest
+and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet; to hold
+the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see herself;
+to 'be a candle-holder and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the
+candle-holder, would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness,
+filled them with the pride of place.  Stevenson had the sport-impulse at
+the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an
+instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-building and
+iron-founding.  In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,' contributed to a
+magazine years ago, he compares the artist in paint or in words to the
+keeper of a booth at the world's fair, dependent for his bread on his
+success in amusing others.  In his volume of poems he almost apologises
+for his excellence in literature:
+
+   'Say not of me, that weakly I declined
+   The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
+   The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,
+   To play at home with paper like a child;
+   But rather say: _In the afternoon of time_
+   _A strenuous family dusted from its hands_
+   _The sand of granite_, _and beholding far_
+   _Along the sounding coasts its pyramids_
+   _And tall memorials catch the dying sun_,
+   _Smiled well-content_, _and to this childish task_
+   _Around the fire addressed its evening hours_.'
+
+Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games.  In _The
+Wrong Box_, for instance, there is something very like the card-game
+commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous corpse, and
+each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym and
+bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance.  It is an admirable
+farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the breath of reality,
+full of fantastic character; the strange funeral procession is attended
+by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally melts into space.
+
+But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is
+stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy
+and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if
+they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals.  The
+decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half-
+human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to
+paint an easel picture.
+
+Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich
+fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him,
+what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant
+field for self-denial.  Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the
+luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned
+for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a
+Dutch garden.  His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell
+of training that would emaciate a poorer stock.  From the first, his
+delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his zest in
+life
+
+      'put a spirit of youth in everything,
+   That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him;'
+
+and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around him
+an enchanted pleasance.  The realism, as it is called, that deals only
+with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its
+story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with
+him in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it
+had the brains.  Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb
+of London.  The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the
+inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash;
+the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the front
+window--the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariable
+citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes--a
+person, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the
+day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music
+of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses
+for the theatre of romance?  Set a realist to walk down one of these
+streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keys
+and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and
+petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion.  Yet
+Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brick
+bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginative
+possibilities of the place.  Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he
+says:
+
+   'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's
+   imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that
+   stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four
+   million private lives.  He glanced at the houses and marvelled what
+   was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face
+   after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest,
+   criminal or kindly.'
+
+It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name of
+Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington.
+In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits were
+being tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside.  So also, in,
+_The Rajah's Diamond_, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed the
+sudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and his treasures precipitated
+over the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles
+suddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief.  A monotony of bad
+building is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities
+or frustrate the agonies of the mind of man.
+
+To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every work of
+human hands became vocal with possible associations.  Buildings
+positively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which even
+for Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 'vera
+weel preserved,' gave him the cardinal incident of _Kidnapped_.  How
+should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station
+would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the
+pavement told their story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of any
+flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the
+open ocean,' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'?  To
+have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and
+familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.
+
+His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was one
+prolonged passion of praise and joy.  There is none of his books that
+reads like the meditations of an invalid.  He has the readiest sympathy
+for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor,
+and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer.  Of one
+of his earlier books he says: 'From the negative point of view I flatter
+myself this volume has a certain stamp.  Although it runs to considerably
+upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the
+imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could
+have made a better one myself.'  And this was an omission that he never
+remedied in his later works.  Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived in
+the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that it
+seems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been dowered
+with better health.
+
+   'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
+      The way that takes the town,
+   Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book,
+      And wrap me in a gown,'
+
+says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have
+ruffled it with the best at the court of King James.  But from Stevenson,
+although not only the town, but oceans and continents, beckoned him to
+deeds, no such wail escaped.  His indomitable cheerfulness was never
+embarked in the cock-boat of his own prosperity.  A high and simple
+courage shines through all his writings.  It is supposed to be a normal
+human feeling for those who are hale to sympathize with others who are in
+pain.  Stevenson reversed the position, and there is no braver spectacle
+in literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices in
+his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them feel at
+ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice.  'Once when I
+was groaning aloud with physical pain,' he says in the essay on _Child's
+Play_, 'a young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if
+I had seen his bow and arrow.  He made no account of my groans, which he
+accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the
+inexplicable conduct of his elders; and, like a wise young gentleman, he
+would waste no wonder on the subject.'  Was there ever a passage like
+this?  The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the
+child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings.  It might have been
+safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be
+free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist.
+
+And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.'
+It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of
+the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and
+Robert Louis Stevenson.  In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold
+likens his own state to that of the monks:
+
+   'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
+   The other powerless to be born,
+   With nowhere yet to rest my head,
+   Like these on earth I wait forlorn.
+   Their faith, my tears, the world deride--
+   I come to shed them at their side.'
+
+To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady of the Snows is a mistaken
+divinity, and the place a monument of chilly error,--for once in a way he
+takes it on himself to be a preacher, his temperament gives voice in a
+creed:
+
+   'And ye, O brethren, what if God,
+   When from Heaven's top He spies abroad,
+   And sees on this tormented stage
+   The noble war of mankind rage,
+   What if His vivifying eye,
+   O monks, should pass your corner by?
+   For still the Lord is Lord of might;
+   In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight;
+   The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
+   The field, the founded city, marks;
+   He marks the smiler of the streets,
+   The singer upon garden seats;
+   He sees the climber in the rocks;
+   To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks;
+   For those He loves that underprop
+   With daily virtues Heaven's top,
+   And bear the falling sky with ease,
+   Unfrowning Caryatides.
+   Those He approves that ply the trade,
+   That rock the child, that wed the maid,
+   That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
+   Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
+   And still with laughter, song, and shout
+   Spin the great wheel of earth about.
+
+   But ye?--O ye who linger still
+   Here in your fortress on the hill,
+   With placid face, with tranquil breath,
+   The unsought volunteers of death,
+   Our cheerful General on high
+   With careless looks may pass you by!'
+
+And the fact of death, which has damped and darkened the writings of so
+many minor poets, does not cast a pallor on his conviction.  Life is of
+value only because it can be spent, or given; and the love of God coveted
+the position, and assumed mortality.  If a man treasure and hug his life,
+one thing only is certain, that he will be robbed some day, and cut the
+pitiable and futile figure of one who has been saving candle-ends in a
+house that is on fire.  Better than this to have a foolish spendthrift
+blaze and the loving cup going round.  Stevenson speaks almost with a
+personal envy of the conduct of the four marines of the _Wager_.  There
+was no room for them in the boat, and they were left on a desert island
+to a certain death.  'They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough
+it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they
+stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried, "God bless the King!"
+Now, one or two of those who were in the boat escaped, against all
+likelihood, to tell the story.  That was a great thing for us'--even when
+life is extorted it may be given nobly, with ceremony and courtesy.  So
+strong was Stevenson's admiration for heroic graces like these that in
+the requiem that appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death as
+of a hearty exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure and
+toil:
+
+   'Under the wide and starry sky
+   Dig the grave and let me lie.
+   Glad did I live and gladly die,
+      And I laid me down with a will.
+   This be 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_.'
+
+This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour and
+music of a soldier's funeral.
+
+The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular
+combination of style and romance.  It has so happened, and the accident
+has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous
+followers of romance have been careless stylists.  They have trusted to
+the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared
+little about the manner of its presentation.  By an odd piece of irony
+style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or
+nothing to tell.  Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid
+romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase,
+'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.'  He wrote carelessly
+and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day.
+But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set
+himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty
+of style.
+
+I.  STYLE.--Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature,'
+unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it
+first.  A poet is born, not made,--so is every man,--but he is born raw.
+Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the
+art of writing,
+
+   'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
+   Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.'
+
+Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education,
+are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature--they
+are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind.  All writing is a kind of
+word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the
+diverse fibres of words.  But to care for words, to select them
+judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing,
+all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking,
+our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words.  The work of a
+feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed
+from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up
+from the rags in the street.  We make our very kettle-holders of pieces
+of a king's carpet.  How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare
+suddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in their
+context!  'The cry is still, "They come!"'--'More honoured in the breach
+than the observance,'--the sight of these phrases in the splendour of
+their dramatic context in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ casts shame upon their
+daily degraded employments.  But the man of affairs has neither the time
+to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so he
+borrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste to
+purposes that they do not exactly fit.  Such a man inevitably repeats,
+like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in
+the material that has been woven into consistency by others.  It is a
+matter of natural taste, developed and strengthened by continual
+practice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases.
+
+The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of fine
+phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but cultivates
+his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the raw fibres in
+novel and bewitching patterns.  To this end he must have two things: a
+fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, meaning, and
+associations of individual words, and next, a sense of harmony,
+proportion, and effect in their combination.  It is amazing what nobility
+a mere truism is often found to possess when it is clad with a garment
+thus woven.
+
+Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high decree.
+His careful choice of epithet and name have even been criticised as
+lending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive air of
+deliberation.  His daintiness of diction is best seen in his earlier
+work; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and direct, fitter for
+its later uses, but never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrill
+of pleasure to the reader.  Of the value of words he had the acutest
+appreciation.  _Virginibus Puerisque_, his first book of essays, is
+crowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a single
+word.  'We have all heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South
+America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this
+tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by
+the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in
+the greenest corner of England.'  You can feel the ground shake and see
+the volcano tower above you at that word '_tremendous_ neighbourhood.'
+Something of the same double reference to the original and acquired
+meanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedate
+electrician,' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of a
+city; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spoken
+of as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the _impassable_.'
+
+The likeness of this last word to a very different word, '_impassive_,'
+is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like image
+of death.  Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meanings
+almost leads to punning.  In _Across the Plains_ Stevenson narrates how a
+bet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes,
+'_liquidated_ at the bar.'  This is perhaps an instance of the excess of
+a virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works of
+Milton.
+
+His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more
+stirring works.  He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases on
+the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans.  In _The Beach of
+Falesa_ the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South
+Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief
+description of the fate of the last dealer in copra.  It may serve as a
+single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang;
+
+   '"Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain
+   continued.  "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he took
+   and shook me by the hand.  'I've dropped into a soft thing here,' says
+   he.  'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny!  I never saw him again
+   but the once . . . and the next time we came round there he was dead
+   and buried.  I took and put up a bit of stick to him: 'John Adams,
+   _obit_ eighteen and sixty-eight.  Go thou and do likewise.'  I missed
+   that man.  I never could see much harm in Johnny."
+
+   '"What did he die of?" I inquired.
+
+   '"Some kind of sickness," says the captain.  "It appears it took him
+   sudden.  Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-Killer
+   and Kennedy's Discovery.  No go--he was booked beyond Kennedy.  Then
+   he had tried to open a case of gin.  No go again: not strong enough. .
+   . . Poor John!"'
+
+There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in the
+speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in _The Wrecker_; and a
+wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in _Kidnapped_,
+_Catriona_, and many other stories.  It was a delicate ear and a sense
+trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of
+them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that
+remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose.
+
+But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description
+of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases.  His
+mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in
+sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater.  And
+here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose.
+Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and
+a style will hardly bear expatriation.  Scott's sentences are, many of
+them, shambling, knock-kneed giants.  Stevenson harked further back for
+his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers
+of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of
+English prose.  'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in
+one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.'  And
+he quotes a passage from Harrington's _Oceana_:
+
+   'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man,
+   but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own
+   hand, is herself King People.'
+
+It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned
+something of his craft.  Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly
+mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who
+compiled the ever-memorable _Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen_.  Mr.
+George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose
+influence may be detected in his style.
+
+However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion
+borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of
+stories.  Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the
+slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words,
+show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even
+to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation.  A nimble literary tact
+will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them
+nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp.  This
+was what Stevenson did, and the very conversations that pass between his
+characters have an air of distinction that is all his own.  His books are
+full of brilliant talk--talk real and convincing enough in its purport
+and setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actual
+commonplace conversation.  It is an enjoyment like that to be obtained
+from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at
+the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr.
+Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and
+Sir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special pleading
+to be found in _A Lodging for the Night_ and _The Sire de Maletroit's
+Door_.  But people do not talk like this in actual life--''tis true, 'tis
+pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true.'  They do not; in actual life
+conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so
+invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into
+meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into
+mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass.  The exact
+reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken
+by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy as
+by a grit in the eye.  Conversation is often no more than a nervous habit
+of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular remark
+is as much as to describe each particular twiddle.  Or in its more
+intellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our
+thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of the
+thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and
+black--like a tarpaulin!  It is pleasant to see thought and feeling
+dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them.
+
+There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one
+and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works.  Even when
+he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for
+another man's.  All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres
+from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and
+pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.
+
+If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it was
+through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style.  His open
+letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps
+his only literary mistake.  It is a matchless piece of scorn and
+invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote.  But that it
+was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all.  'I
+remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged
+to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is
+permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.'  And the only disquietude
+suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim
+to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the
+assistance of a literary freelance.  The Saint who was bitten in the hand
+by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed.  As it was in
+the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something
+officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the
+plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled
+over Stevenson's letter.  The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt
+thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely
+covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.
+
+II.  ROMANCE.--The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered
+on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of
+development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from
+childhood unblemished and undiminished.  It is of a piece with
+Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could
+pass back into that airy world without an effort.  In his stories his
+imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its
+working.  And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor
+character, but romance.  In one of his essays he defines the highest
+achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or
+emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the
+mind's eye.'  His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was
+that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are
+for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or
+homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting.  Now,
+it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance
+resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible
+of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel,
+which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century.  'The
+artistic result of a romance,' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon the
+memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated
+and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something
+as simple as nature. . . .  The fact is, that art is working far ahead of
+language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of
+suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct
+name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into
+the necessities of life.  Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
+often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in
+thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able
+to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
+sufficiently shaped to that end.'  He goes on to point out that there is
+an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not
+presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such
+masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
+
+The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in
+the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in
+story.  Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature
+of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a
+story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements.  With
+Scott vague influences that qualify a man's personality begin to make a
+large claim; 'the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively
+small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills
+pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.'  And the achievements of
+the great masters since Scott--Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those
+in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry--have added new realms to the
+domain of romance.
+
+What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond
+problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise?  What is the nature
+of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great
+romance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_,
+_The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_?  These questions can
+only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these
+works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy.  But an
+approach to an answer may be made by illustration.
+
+In his _American Notebooks_ Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down subjects
+for stories as they struck him.  His successive entries are like the
+souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of them never received;
+they bring us very near to the workings of the mind of a great master.
+Here are some of them:
+
+   'A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme
+   doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like.  He goes
+   about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of
+   making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the
+   appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped.  Much
+   may be made of this idea.'
+
+   'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a
+   street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the
+   catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'
+
+   'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against
+   his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and
+   a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert.  It might
+   shadow forth his own fate--he having made himself one of the
+   personages.'
+
+   'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two
+   principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then
+   passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'
+
+   'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'
+
+Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.
+
+   'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a
+   human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the
+   operation of a certain vice on him.'
+
+M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel
+called _Le Disciple_. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he
+pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher's
+experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France.
+Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and
+would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality.'
+
+   'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the
+   point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'
+
+This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in
+_Marion Delorme_, and of Captain Flint in _Treasure Island_.
+
+   'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being
+   seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at
+   length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich man's
+   mansion, and there dies--assuming state, and striking awe into the
+   breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'
+
+These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to
+a romance--of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind's
+eye.  Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others are of value
+chiefly as symbols.  But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a
+story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be
+painted nor moralised.  It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to
+the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks
+for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger,
+mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance--to the
+superstitions of the heart.  Romance vindicates the supernatural against
+science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality.
+
+Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory.
+Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on
+board the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers of
+Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that
+abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the
+dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them
+subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in
+them.  But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and
+secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear.  The cry of
+the parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blind
+pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of
+inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in
+_Kidnapped_, and of the disguise of a blind leper in _The Black Arrow_,
+are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art.  The
+last appearance of Pew, in the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written in
+collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all
+the scenes of terror.  The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when he
+puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room
+where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every
+movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'
+
+The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never to
+be found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly and
+disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception.
+The main situation in _The Wrecker_ is a splendid product of romantic
+aspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective,
+so that some of the best passages in the book--the scenes in Paris, for
+instance--have no business there at all.  The story in _Kidnapped_ and
+_Catriona_ wanders on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream,
+and the reader feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty
+in leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James
+Stewart.  _The Master of Ballantrae_ is stamped with a magnificent unity
+of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a series of
+scattered episodes.
+
+That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part
+Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have made
+him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,' is the
+light and meaning of the whole book.  Innocent and benevolent lives are
+thrown in his way that he may mock or distort or shatter them.  Stevenson
+never came nearer than in this character to the sublime of power.
+
+But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be apprehended in
+the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot as of
+impression and atmosphere.  His islands, whether situated in the Pacific
+or off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate of its own, and
+the character of the place seems to impose itself on the incidents that
+occur, dictating subordination or contrast.  The events that happen
+within the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cut
+off from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art.  The
+long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of
+crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining
+tropical lagoons in _Treasure Island_ and _The Ebb Tide_, the captivity
+on the Bass Rock in _Catriona_, the supernatural terrors that hover and
+mutter over the island of _The Merry Men_--these imaginations are plainly
+generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in some
+sort the genius of the place it inhabits.
+
+In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured freely
+enough into the realm of the supernatural.
+
+When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows
+his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the
+solemn dialect in which they are dressed.  The brief tale of _Thrawn
+Janet_, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in _Catriona_, are
+grotesque imaginations of the school of _Tam o' Shanter_ rather than of
+the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts.  They are
+turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can
+awaken.  Even _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and the story
+of _The Bottle Imp_ are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and
+not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing
+allegory in what is only dream-fantasy.  The supernatural must be rooted
+deeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing
+stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man.  And Stevenson shows a
+sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of
+_Will o' the Mill_ and the grim history of _Markheim_.  Each of these
+stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier.  The
+personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving
+gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn.  The wafted
+scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden
+since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude
+the arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine
+tops standing above it like plumes.  And Will o' the Mill makes the
+acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his
+travels.  In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the
+house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered.  It is not such
+a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:
+
+   'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
+      Groping in the windy stair
+   (Darkness and the breath of space
+      Like loud waters everywhere),
+   Meeting mine own image there
+         Face to face,
+   Send it from that place to her!'
+
+but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare
+before him his motives and history.  At the close of that wonderful
+conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements,
+Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police.  These two stories,
+when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imagination
+quickened and strengthened when it played full upon life.  For his best
+romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, and
+no mere idle games.
+
+III.  MORALITY.--His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was
+doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful
+morality.  But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy
+prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality.
+He has left no work--unless the two short stories mentioned above be
+regarded as exceptions--in which romance and morality are welded into a
+single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside _The Scarlet Letter_
+or _The Marble Faun_ for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one.
+Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective
+wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories.
+
+A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no
+question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes,
+but rather of insight both deep and wide.  Polygamy and monogamy, suttee,
+thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose
+business is with the heart of a man in all times and places.  He is not
+bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can
+be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral
+order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation
+can be broken by the fall of china--the morality without which life would
+be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the
+feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society.  For the
+appreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imagination
+are necessary.  Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and thereby
+made apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for the
+murderer--the sympathy of intelligence.  These gifts of imagination and
+sympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances
+there are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon
+life, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously
+that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion of
+homily.  In _The Black Arrow_, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of
+Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had
+taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story.  The Duke of
+Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers,'
+yields the favour reluctantly.  Then Dick turns to Arblaster.
+
+   '"Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than
+   ships or liquor.  Say you forgive me, for if your life is worth
+   nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune.  Come, I
+   have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish."
+
+   '"An I had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe
+   on the high seas--I and my man Tom.  But ye took my ship, gossip, and
+   I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him
+   down, 'Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again.  'Murrain' was the
+   last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed.  'A will never
+   sail no more, will my Tom."
+
+   'Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take
+   the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch.
+
+   '"Nay," said he, "let be.  Y' have played the devil with me, and let
+   that content you."
+
+   'The words died in Richard's throat.  He saw, through tears, the poor
+   old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed
+   head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels;
+   and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we
+   play in life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or
+   remedied by any penitence.'
+
+A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the lips of
+the spiritual visitant in Markheim.
+
+   '"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other.  "All sins
+   are murder, even as all life is war.  I behold your race, like
+   starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of
+   famine, and feeding on each other's lives.  I follow sins beyond the
+   moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is
+   death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother with
+   such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with
+   human gore than such a murderer as yourself."'
+
+The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like these
+is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick appreciation
+of, character.  The variety of the characters that he has essayed to draw
+is enormous, and his successes, for the purposes of his stories, are
+many.  Yet with all this, the number of lifelike portraits, true to a
+hair, that are to be found in his works is very small indeed.  In the
+golden glow of romance, character is always subject to be idealised; it
+is the effect of character seen at particular angles and in special
+lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt
+to analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it
+certain principles, and works from those.  It has often been said of
+Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; the
+glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described his
+emotions and aspirations.  Something of the same disability afflicted
+Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian.  He loved heroic vice only less
+than he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise his
+villains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived
+for an idea.'  Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the
+great scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of _Treasure
+Island_, breathes out its soul in a creed:
+
+   '"For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good and
+   bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and what
+   not.  Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet.
+   Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my
+   views--Amen, so be it."'
+
+John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eye
+like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted
+crime that can only be described as sparkling.  His unalloyed maleficence
+is adorned with a thousand graces of manner.  Into the dark and fetid
+marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly
+distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered,
+unless it were in the study of Huish in _The Ebb Tide_.
+
+Of his women, let women speak.  They are traditionally accredited with an
+intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created for
+man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him
+should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other
+woman, is a question that cries for solution.  Perhaps the answer is that
+disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge
+of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume
+towards the other sex.  Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the
+heroine of _The Black Arrow_ is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the
+course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of
+describing the demeanour of a girl.  Mrs. Henry, in _The Master of
+Ballantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss
+Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of _Kidnapped_ are real
+enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male
+readers of the book;--but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other
+party: a walking doll will find suitors.  The question must stand over
+until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide
+us among these perilous passes.
+
+One character must never be passed over in an estimate of Stevenson's
+work.  The hero of his longest work is not David Balfour, in whom the
+pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a very pretty gentleman,' is
+transfigured at times by traits that he catches, as narrator of the
+story, from its author himself.  But Alan Breek Stewart is a greater
+creation, and a fine instance of that wider morality that can seize by
+sympathy the soul of a wild Highland clansman.  'Impetuous, insolent,
+unquenchable,' a condoner of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their
+hands in any little difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them
+that have'), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and
+as vain and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable
+characters in all literature; and his penetration--a great part of which
+he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle 'through a
+throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his tail'--blossoms
+into the most delightful reflections upon men and things.
+
+The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable.  To
+combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternate
+telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, to
+breathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it with
+absolute unity, and express it in perfect style,--this thing has never
+yet been done.  A great part of Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds
+its readiest outlet in his essays.  In these, whatever their occasion, he
+shows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of
+the phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the
+vision of most writers and thinkers.  He has an unerring instinct for
+realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace.  In his lately
+published _Amateur Emigrant_ he describes one of his fellow-passengers to
+America:
+
+   'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
+   before for all good human purposes but conversation.  His eyes were
+   sealed by a cheap school-book materialism.  He could see nothing in
+   the world but money and steam engines.  He did not know what you meant
+   by the word happiness.  He had forgotten the simple emotions of
+   childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.  He
+   believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had
+   been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor,
+   was his god and guide.'
+
+This sense of the realities of the world,--laughter, happiness, the
+simple emotions of childhood, and others,--makes Stevenson an admirable
+critic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of the
+heart.  The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on
+_Beggars_ is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is it
+untrue?
+
+   'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity.
+   In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it
+   is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.  We are
+   all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem to pay it, if in
+   nothing else, then with the delights of our society.  Here, then, is
+   the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he
+   stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer,
+   if possible, than ever; that he has the money, and lacks the love
+   which should make his money acceptable.  Here and now, just as of old
+   in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he
+   takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks
+   in vain for a recipient.  His friends are not poor, they do not want;
+   the poor are not his friends, they will not take.  To whom is he to
+   give?  Where to find--note this phrase--the Deserving Poor?  Charity
+   is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded,
+   with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes
+   merrily forward.  I think it will take a more than merely human
+   secretary to disinter that character.  What! a class that is to be in
+   want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from
+   strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite
+   devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part of friendship,
+   and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the
+   face of all the laws of human nature:--and all this, in the hope of
+   getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye!  Oh, let him
+   stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let
+   his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to
+   form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of
+   man!  For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no
+   salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel
+   of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor.'
+
+An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force of a
+natural law to the pathos of _Old Mortality_, that essay in which
+Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who
+'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but
+once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.'  The
+whole description, down to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan that
+closes it, is one of the sovereign passages of modern literature; the
+pathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or
+the onset of the legions commanded by
+
+   'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord,
+   That all the misbelieving and black Horde
+      Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
+   Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.'
+
+Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of a writer
+who has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at what is perhaps
+the most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost test, where it is
+successfully encountered, of nobility,--the practice, namely, of self-
+revelation and self-delineation.  To talk much about oneself with detail,
+composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of
+indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing,--the shores of the sea of
+literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who
+have adventured on this dangerous attempt.  But a criticism of Stevenson
+is happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect trust and
+perfect fluency to the man.  He shares with Goldsmith and Montaigne, his
+own favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers.
+'To be the most beloved of English writers--what a title that is for a
+man!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith.  In such matters, a dispute for pre-
+eminence in the captivation of hearts would be unseemly; it is enough to
+say that Stevenson too has his lovers among those who have accompanied
+him on his _Inland Voyage_, or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes in
+the wake of Modestine.  He is loved by those that never saw his face; and
+one who has sealed that dizzy height of ambition may well be content,
+without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese have taken
+London and revised the contents of the British Museum, the yellow scribes
+whom they shall set to produce a new edition of the _Biographie
+Universelle_ will include in their entries the following
+item:--'_Stevenson_, _R. L._  _A prolific writer of stories among the
+aborigines_.  _Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese_. _His works
+are lost_.'
+
+THE END
+
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