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<h2>
<a href="#startoftext">Robert Louis Stevenson, by Walter Raleigh</a>
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<pre>
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***
</pre>
<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
<p>Transcribed from the 1906 Edward Arnold edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1>ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">by</span><br />
WALTER RALEIGH</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">professor of
english literature in the university of oxford</span><br />
<span class="smcap">author of</span><br />
‘<span class="smcap">style</span>,’ ‘<span
class="smcap">milton</span>,’ ‘<span
class="smcap">wordsworth</span>,’ <span
class="smcap">etc.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap"><i>fourth
impression</i></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="smcap">london</span><br />
EDWARD ARNOLD<br />
<span class="smcap">41 & 43 maddox street</span>, <span
class="smcap">bond street</span>, <span
class="smcap">w.</span><br />
1906</p>
<p style="text-align: center">THE GREATER PART OF THIS<br />
ESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTURE<br />
AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION<br />
ON THE 17TH OF MAY<br />
1895</p>
<h2>ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early
death. In the dedication of <i>Prince Otto</i> 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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?</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, Molière, 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Say not of me, that weakly I declined<br />
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,<br />
The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,<br />
To play at home with paper like a child;<br />
But rather say: <i>In the afternoon of time</i><br />
<i>A strenuous family dusted from its hands</i><br />
<i>The sand of granite</i>, <i>and beholding far</i><br />
<i>Along the sounding coasts its pyramids</i><br />
<i>And tall memorials catch the dying sun</i>,<br />
<i>Smiled well-content</i>, <i>and to this childish task</i><br
/>
<i>Around the fire addressed its evening hours</i>.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as
paper-games. In <i>The Wrong Box</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote><p> ‘put a spirit of youth in
everything,<br />
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with
him;’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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, <i>The
Rajah’s Diamond</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Kidnapped</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Whereas my birth and spirit rather took<br
/>
The way that takes the town,<br />
Thou didst betray me to a ling’ring book,<br />
And wrap me in a gown,’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
<i>Child’s Play</i>, ‘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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead,<br
/>
The other powerless to be born,<br />
With nowhere yet to rest my head,<br />
Like these on earth I wait forlorn.<br />
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—<br />
I come to shed them at their side.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘And ye, O brethren, what if God,<br />
When from Heaven’s top He spies abroad,<br />
And sees on this tormented stage<br />
The noble war of mankind rage,<br />
What if His vivifying eye,<br />
O monks, should pass your corner by?<br />
For still the Lord is Lord of might;<br />
In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight;<br />
The plough, the spear, the laden barks,<br />
The field, the founded city, marks;<br />
He marks the smiler of the streets,<br />
The singer upon garden seats;<br />
He sees the climber in the rocks;<br />
To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks;<br />
For those He loves that underprop<br />
With daily virtues Heaven’s top,<br />
And bear the falling sky with ease,<br />
Unfrowning Caryatides.<br />
Those He approves that ply the trade,<br />
That rock the child, that wed the maid,<br />
That with weak virtues, weaker hands,<br />
Sow gladness on the peopled lands,<br />
And still with laughter, song, and shout<br />
Spin the great wheel of earth about.</p>
<p>But ye?—O ye who linger still<br />
Here in your fortress on the hill,<br />
With placid face, with tranquil breath,<br />
The unsought volunteers of death,<br />
Our cheerful General on high<br />
With careless looks may pass you by!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>Wager</i>. 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Under the wide and starry sky<br />
Dig the grave and let me lie.<br />
Glad did I live and gladly die,<br />
And I laid me down with a will.<br />
This be the verse you grave for me:<br />
<i>Here he lies where he longed to be</i>,<br />
<i>Home is the sailor</i>, <i>home from the sea</i>,<br />
<i>And the hunter home from the hill</i>.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and
colour and music of a soldier’s funeral.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I. <span class="smcap">Style</span>.—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,</p>
<blockquote><p>‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to
lerne,<br />
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
<i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Hamlet</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>, 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 ‘<i>tremendous</i> 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 <i>impassable</i>.’</p>
<p>The likeness of this last word to a very different word,
‘<i>impassive</i>,’ 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 <i>Across the Plains</i> Stevenson
narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, and
subsequently, he supposes, ‘<i>liquidated</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Beach of Falesá</i> 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;</p>
<blockquote><p>‘“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, <i>obit</i> eighteen and
sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.’ I missed
that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny.”</p>
<p>‘“What did he die of?” I inquired.</p>
<p>‘“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!”’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found
in the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in <i>The
Wrecker</i>; and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect,
in <i>Kidnapped</i>, <i>Catriona</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Oceana</i>:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
<i>Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen</i>. Mr. George Meredith
is the chief of those very few modern writers whose influence may
be detected in his style.</p>
<p>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 <i>A Lodging for the Night</i> and <i>The
Sire de Malétroit’s Door</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>II. <span class="smcap">Romance</span>.—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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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—<i>The Bride of
Lammermoor</i>, <i>Monte Cristo</i>, <i>Les
Misérables</i>, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, <i>The Master
of Ballantrae</i>? 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.</p>
<p>In his <i>American Notebooks</i> 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>‘A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of
snow.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in
his novel called <i>Le Disciple</i>. 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.’</p>
<blockquote><p>‘A story the principal personage of which
shall seem always on the point of entering on the scene, but
shall never appear.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of
Richelieu in <i>Marion Delorme</i>, and of Captain Flint in
<i>Treasure Island</i>.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Covenant</i>; 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 primæval 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
<i>Kidnapped</i>, and of the disguise of a blind leper in <i>The
Black Arrow</i>, are beyond the reach of any but the literary
form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the
play of <i>Admiral Guinea</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>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
<i>The Wrecker</i> 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 <i>Kidnapped</i> and <i>Catriona</i> 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. <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i> is stamped with a
magnificent unity of conception, but the story illuminates that
conception by a series of scattered episodes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>The Ebb Tide</i>, the captivity on
the Bass Rock in <i>Catriona</i>, the supernatural terrors that
hover and mutter over the island of <i>The Merry
Men</i>—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.</p>
<p>In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson
adventured freely enough into the realm of the supernatural.</p>
<p>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 <i>Thrawn Janet</i>, and Black
Andy’s story of Tod Lapraik in <i>Catriona</i>, are
grotesque imaginations of the school of <i>Tam o’
Shanter</i> 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
<i>The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i> and the story
of <i>The Bottle Imp</i> 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 <i>Will o’ the Mill</i> and
the grim history of <i>Markheim</i>. 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:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Ah! might I, by thy good grace,<br />
Groping in the windy stair<br />
(Darkness and the breath of space<br />
Like loud waters everywhere),<br />
Meeting mine own image there<br />
Face to face,<br />
Send it from that place to her!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>III. <span class="smcap">Morality</span>.—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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>
or <i>The Marble Faun</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Black Arrow</i>, 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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘“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.”</p>
<p>‘“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.”</p>
<p>‘Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he
sought to take the skipper’s hand, but Arblaster avoided
his touch.</p>
<p>‘“Nay,” said he, “let be.
Y’ have played the devil with me, and let that content
you.”</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on
the lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘“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.”’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>Treasure
Island</i>, breathes out its soul in a creed:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘“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.”’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>The Ebb Tide</i>.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Black
Arrow</i> 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 <i>The
Master of Ballantrae</i>, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in
the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation
of <i>Kidnapped</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Amateur Emigrant</i> he describes one
of his fellow-passengers to America:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
<i>Beggars</i> is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically,
but is it untrue?</p>
<blockquote><p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the
force of a natural law to the pathos of <i>Old Mortality</i>,
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</p>
<blockquote><p>‘The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord,<br
/>
That all the misbelieving and black Horde<br />
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul<br />
Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>Inland Voyage</i>, 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
<i>Biographie Universelle</i> will include in their entries the
following item:—‘<i>Stevenson</i>, <i>R. L.</i>
<i>A prolific writer of stories among the aborigines</i>.
<i>Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese</i>. <i>His works
are lost</i>.’</p>
<p style="text-align: center">THE END</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">billing and
sons</span>, <span class="smcap">ltd.</span>, <span
class="smcap">printers</span>, <span
class="smcap">guildford</span></p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON***</p>
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