Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

R. L. STEVENSON

_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_:

J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE

HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER

HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS

THOMAS HARDY
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE

BERNARD SHAW
BY P. P. HOWE

WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMAS

WALT WHITMAN
BY BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT

SAMUEL BUTLER
BY GILBERT CANNAN

A. C. SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THOMAS

GEORGE GISSING
BY FRANK SWINNERTON

RUDYARD KIPLING
BY CYRIL FALLS

WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER

ROBERT BRIDGES
BY F. E. BRETT YOUNG

MAURICE MAETERLINCK
BY UNA TAYLOR

_Yours truly_

_Robert Louis Stevenson_]

R. L. STEVENSON

A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
FRANK SWINNERTON

LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI
MCMXIV

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

THE MERRY HEART
THE YOUNG IDEA
THE CASEMENT
THE HAPPY FAMILY
ON THE STAIRCASE

GEORGE GISSING:
A CRITICAL STUDY

_The Sargent portrait of Stevenson which forms the frontispiece to
this volume has been included by permission of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, to
whom the publisher wishes to express his acknowledgments and thanks._

TO
DOUGLAS GRAY
IN MALICE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BIOGRAPHICAL 9

II. JUVENILIA 36

III. TRAVEL BOOKS 42

IV. ESSAYS 62

V. POEMS 90

VI. PLAYS 102

VII. SHORT STORIES 116

VIII. NOVELS AND ROMANCES 143

IX. CONCLUSION 185

BIBLIOGRAPHY 211

I

BIOGRAPHICAL

I

As the purpose of this book is entirely critical, and as there already exist several works dealing extensively with the life of Stevenson, the present biographical section is intentionally summary. Its object is merely to sketch in outline the principal events of Stevenson’s life, in order that what follows may require no passages of biographical elucidation. Stevenson was a writer of many sorts of stories, essays, poems; and in all this diversity he was at no time preoccupied with one particular form of art. In considering each form separately, as I purpose doing, it has been necessary to group into single divisions work written at greatly different times and in greatly differing conditions. In Mr. Graham Balfour’s “Life,” and very remarkably in Sir Sidney Colvin’s able commentaries upon Stevenson’s letters, may be found information at first hand which I could only give by acts of piracy. To those works, therefore, I refer the reader who wishes to follow in chronological detail the growth of Stevenson’s talent. They are, indeed, essential to all who are primarily interested in Stevenson the man. Here, the attempt will be made only to summarise the events of his days, and to estimate the ultimate value of his work in various departments of letters. This book is not a biography; it is not an “appreciation”; it is simply a critical study.

II

Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850; and he died, almost exactly forty-four years later, on December 3, 1894. His first literary work, undertaken at the age of six, was an essay upon the history of Moses. This he dictated to his mother, and was rewarded for it by the gift of a Bible picture book. It is from the date of that triumph that Stevenson’s desire to be a writer must be calculated. A history of Joseph followed, and later on, apparently at the age of nine, he again dictated an account of certain travels in Perth. His first published work was a pamphlet on The Pentland Rising, written (but full of quotations) at the age of sixteen. His first “regular or paid contribution to periodical literature” was the essay called _Roads_ (now included in _Essays of Travel_), which was written when the author was between twenty-two and twenty-three. The first actual book to be published was _An Inland Voyage_ (1878), written when Stevenson was twenty-seven; but all the essays which ultimately formed the volumes entitled _Virginibus Puerisque_ (1881) and _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ (1882) are the product of 1874 and onwards. These, indicated very roughly, are the beginnings of his literary career. Of course there were many other contributary facts which led to his turning author; and there is probably no writer whose childhood is so fully “documented” as Stevenson’s. He claimed to be one of those who do not forget their own lives, and, in accordance with his practice, he has supplied us with numerous essays in which we may trace his growth and his experiences. That he was an only child and a delicate one we all know; so, too, we know that his grandfather was that Robert Stevenson who built the Bell Rock lighthouse. In the few chapters contributed by Robert Louis to _A Family of Engineers_ we shall find an account, some of it fanciful, but some of it also perfectly accurate, of the Stevenson family and of Robert Stevenson, the grandfather, in particular. In _Memories and Portraits_ is included a sketch of Thomas Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis; and in Mr. Balfour’s “Life” there is ample information for those who wish to study the influences of heredity.

For our own purpose it may be interesting to note three points in this connection. As a boy, and even as a youth, Stevenson was expected by his father to be an engineer and to carry on the family tradition. His early training therefore brought him much to the sea, with rather special facilities for appreciating the more active relations of man to the sea. The second point is that the Stevensons had always been, true to their Scots instincts, very strict religious disciplinarians (Robert Stevenson the elder is very illuminating on this); but that they were also very shrewd and determined men of action. Finally, another grandfather of Robert Louis, this time on the Balfour side, was in fact a clergyman. Stevenson significantly admits that he may have inherited from this grandfather the love of sermonising, which is as noticeable in _An Inland Voyage_ and in _Virginibus Puerisque_ as it is in his latest non-fictional work. We cannot forget that his contribution to festivities marking the anniversary of his marriage was upon one occasion a sermon on St. Jacob’s Oil, delivered from a pulpit carried as part-cargo by the “Janet Nichol.” From his mother, too, he is said to have inherited that constitutional delicacy which made him subject throughout his life to periods of serious illness, and which eventually led to his early death.

There was one other influence upon his childhood which must not be neglected as long as the pendulum of thought association swings steadily from heredity to environment. That influence was the influence exercised by his nurse, Alison Cunningham. It is admitted to have been enormous, and I am not sure that it is desirable to repeat in this place what is so much common knowledge. But it is perhaps worth while to emphasise the fact that, while Alison Cunningham was not only a devoted nurse, night and day, to the delicate child, she actually was in many ways responsible for the peculiar bent of Stevenson’s mind. She it was who read to him, who declaimed to him, the sounds of fine words which he loved so well in after life. The meaning of the words he sometimes did not grasp; the sounds--so admirable, it would seem, was her delivery--were his deep delight. Not only that: she introduced him thus early to the Covenanting writers upon whom he claimed to have based his sense of style; and, however lightly we may regard his various affirmations as to the source of his “style,” and as to the principles upon which we might expect to find it based, the sense of style, which is quite another thing, was almost certainly awakened in him by these means. Sense of style, I think, is a much greater point in Stevenson’s equipment than the actual “style.” The style varies; the sense of style is constant, as it must be in any writer who is not a Freeman. Alison Cunningham, being herself possessed of this sense, or of the savour of words, impressed it upon “her boy”; and the result we may see. All Stevenson’s subsequent “learning” was so much exercise: no man learns how to write solely by observation and imitation.

From being a lonely and delicate child spinning fancies and hearing stirring words and stories and sermons in the nursery, Stevenson became a lonely and delicate child in many places. One of them was the Manse at Colinton, the home of his clerical grandfather. Another was the house in Heriot Row, Edinburgh, where he played with his brilliant cousin R. A. M. Stevenson. R. A. M. was not his only cousin--there were many others; but the personality of R. A. M. is such that one could wish to know the whole of it, so attractive are the references in Stevenson’s essays and letters, and in Mr. Balfour’s biography. I imagine, although I cannot be sure, that it was with R. A. M. that Stevenson played at producing plays on toy-stages. We shall see later how impossible he found it, when he came to consider the drama as a literary field, to shake off the influence of Skelt’s drama; but anybody who has played with toy-stages will respond to the enthusiasm discovered in _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_, and will sympathise with the delight which Stevenson must later have felt on being able to revive in Mr. Lloyd Osbourne’s company the old Skeltian joys.

School followed in due course, the attendances broken by sickness and possibly by the incurable idleness which one supposes to have been due to lassitude rather than to mischief. Mr. Balfour details the components of Stevenson’s education, from Latin and French and German, to bathing and dancing. Football is also mentioned, while riding seems to have developed into a sort of reckless horsemanship. When he was eleven or twelve Stevenson came first to London, and went with his father to Homburg. Later he went twice with Mrs. Stevenson to Mentone, travelling, besides, on the first occasion, through Italy, and returning by way of Germany and the Rhine. It is, however, remarkable that he does not seem to have retained much memory of so interesting an experience; a fact which would suggest that, although he was able at this time to store for future use ample impressions of his own feelings and his own habits, he had not yet awakened to any very lively or precise observation of the external world. That observation began with the determination to write, and Stevenson then lost no opportunity of setting down exactly his impressions of things seen.

In 1867--that is, after the publication, and after the withdrawal, of _The Pentland Rising_--Stevenson began his training as a civil engineer, working for a Science degree at Edinburgh University. One may learn something of his experience there from _Memories and Portraits_ and even from _The Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_. It was now that he met Charles Baxter (the letters to whom are the jolliest and apparently most candid of any he wrote), James Walter Ferrier, Sir Walter Simpson (the real hero of _An Inland Voyage_), and Fleeming Jenkin, whose wife mistook Stevenson for a poet. Here, too, he joined the “Speculative Society,” of which presently he became an unimportant president. Moreover, the friendships formed at the University led to the foundation of a mysterious society of six members, called the L.J.R. (signifying Liberty, Justice, Reverence), which has been the occasion of much comment on account of the secrecy with which the meaning of the initials has been guarded.

It was while he was at the University that his desire to write became acute. By his own account, he went everywhere with two little books, one to read, and one to write in. He read a great deal, talked a great deal, made friends, and charmed everybody very much. In 1868, 1869, and 1870 he spent some time on the West Coast of Scotland, watching the work which was being carried on by his father’s firm at Anstruther, Wick, and finally at Earraid (an island introduced into _Catriona_ and _The Merry Men_). In 1871 he received from the Scottish Society of Arts a silver medal for a paper (_A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses_); and two years later another paper, _On the Thermal Influence of Forests_, was communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But it was in 1871 that Stevenson gave up, and induced his father most unwillingly to give up, the plans hitherto regarded as definite for his future career. He could not become a civil engineer; but determined that he must make his way by letters. A compromise was effected, by the terms of which he read for the Bar; and he passed his preliminary examination in 1872.

III

In 1873 Stevenson, then in great distress because of religious differences with his father, made the acquaintance of Mrs. Sitwell (now Lady Colvin) and, through her, of Sidney Colvin himself. The importance of these two friendships could hardly be over-estimated. Mrs. Sitwell gave readily and generously the sympathy of which Stevenson was so much in need; and Mr. Colvin (as he then was) proved to be, not only a friend, but a guide and a most influential champion. It was through Mr. Colvin that Stevenson made his real start as a professional writer, for Mr. Colvin was a writer and the friend of writers, a critic and the friend of--editors. Stevenson’s plans for removal to London were made, and to London he came; but he was then so prostrated with nervous exhaustion, with danger of serious complications, that he was sent to the Riviera for the winter. Mr. Colvin joined him at Mentone, and introduced him to Andrew Lang. Thereafter, Stevenson went to Paris; and it was not until the end of April, 1874, that he returned to Edinburgh, apparently so far recovered that he could enjoy, three months later, a long yachting excursion on the West Coast. Further study followed, and at length Stevenson was in 1875 called to the Scottish Bar, having been elected previously, through Mr. Colvin’s kindly agency, a member of the Savile Club. Membership of the Savile led to the beginning of his association with Leslie Stephen, and to his introduction to the then editors of “The Academy” and “The Saturday Review.” In this period of his life occurred the journey described in _An Inland Voyage_, and his highly important “discovery” of W. E. Henley in an Edinburgh hospital.

Finally, it is important to remember that in these full years, 1874-1879, Stevenson spent a considerable amount of time in France, where he stayed as a rule either in Paris or in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, most frequently at Barbizon. Details of his life in France are to be found in _The Wrecker_, in the essay called _Forest Notes_ in _Essays of Travel_, and in that on _Fontainebleau_ in _Across the Plains_. He was writing fairly steadily, and he was getting his work published without embarrassing difficulty, from _Ordered South_ in 1874 to _Travels with a Donkey_ in 1879. And it was in Grez in 1876 that he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Osbourne, an American lady separated from her husband. The meeting was in fact the turning-point in his career: even _Travels with a Donkey_, as he admitted in a letter to his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, contains “lots of mere protestations to F.” When Mrs. Osbourne returned to America in 1878 she sought and obtained a divorce from her husband. Stevenson heard of her intention, and heard also that she was ill. He was filled with the idea of marrying Mrs. Osbourne, and was determined to put his character to the test of so long and arduous a journey for the purpose, with the inevitable strain which his purpose involved. With perhaps a final exhibition of quite youthful affectation, and a serious misconception of his parents’ attitude to himself and to the desirability of such a marriage, Stevenson took parental opposition for granted. Nevertheless, it is a proof of considerable, if unnecessary, courage, that he followed Mrs. Osbourne to California by a sort of emigrant ship and an American emigrant train. His experiences on the journey are veraciously recorded in _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_.

The rough, miserable journey, and the exhaustion consequent upon the undertaking of so long and difficult an expedition, brought Stevenson’s vitality very low; so that, after much strain, much miscellaneous literary work, and many self-imposed privations, he fell seriously ill at San Francisco towards the end of 1879. Only careful nursing, and a genial cable from his father, promising an annual sum of £250, restored health and spirits; and on May 19, 1880, he was married to Mrs. Osbourne. Their life at Silverado has already been described in _The Silverado Squatters_; it was followed by a return to Europe, a succession of journeys from Scotland to Davos, Barbizon, Paris, and St. Germain; and a further series back again to Pitlochry and Braemar. At the last-named place _Treasure Island_ was begun, and nineteen chapters of the book were written: here, too, we gather, the first poems for _A Child’s Garden of Verses_ laid the foundations of that book. Again, owing to bad weather in Scotland, it was found necessary to resort to Davos, where the Stevensons lived in a châlet, and where the works of the Davos Press saw the light. After a winter so spent, Stevenson was pronounced well enough to resume normal life, and he returned accordingly to England and Scotland. But before long it was necessary to go to the South of France, and after various misfortunes he settled at length at Hyères. Here he wrote _The Silverado Squatters_ and resumed work on _Prince Otto_, a work long before planned as both novel and play.

Further illness succeeded, until it was found possible to settle at Bournemouth, in the house called Skerryvore; and in Bournemouth Stevenson spent a comparatively long time (from 1884 to 1887). Here he made new friendships and revived old ones. Now were published _A Child’s Garden_, _Prince Otto_, _The Dynamiter_, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and _Kidnapped_; and now, in 1887, occurred the death of Stevenson’s father, of whom a sketch is given in _Memories and Portraits_.

The relations of father and son were obviously peculiar. Thomas Stevenson was strict in the matter of faith--more strict than those of this day can perhaps understand--and it is evident that this strictness provoked conflict between Robert Louis and his father. By the letters to Mrs. Sitwell we gather that the differences greatly troubled Robert Louis; but it seems very clear on the other hand that wherever the elder Stevenson’s character is actively illustrated in Mr. Balfour’s “Life,” or in Stevenson’s letters, the instance is one of kindness and consideration. Mr. Charles Baxter recalls the dreadful expression of his friend when the first draft of propositions for the L.J.R. fell into Thomas Stevenson’s hands; and no doubt there is much that is personal in such stories as _Weir_, _The Wrecker_, and _John Nicholson_, in which the relations of fathers and sons are studied. That Thomas loved and admired his son seems certain; but it must be supposed that his own austerity was not always tolerable to a nature less austere and sensitive to the charge of levity.

Almost immediately after the death of his father, Stevenson left England finally. He went first to New York, and then to Saranac (in the Adirondacks), where the climate was said to be beneficial to those suffering from lung trouble. Here he began _The Master of Ballantrae_ while Mr. Lloyd Osbourne was busy on _The Wrong Box_; and, when summer was returning, the whole party removed, first to New Jersey, and then to the schooner “Casco,” in which they travelled to the Marquesas. In the next three years they wandered much among the groups of islands in the South Seas. _The Master of Ballantrae_ was finished in a house, or rather, in a pavilion, at Waikiki, a short distance from Honolulu. It was after finishing that book that Stevenson made further journeys, until at last, by means of a trading schooner called “The Equator,” the Stevensons all went to Samoa, where they settled in Apia. Here Robert Louis bought land, and built a home; and here, during the last years of his life, he lived in greater continuous health--broken though it was with occasional periods of illness more or less serious--than he had enjoyed for a number of years.

IV

At Apia he was active, both physically and in the way of authorship: his exile, trying though it must at times have been, involved health and happiness; and his loyal friends and his increasingly numerous admirers kept him, as far as they were able to do, from the dire neglect into which the thousands of miles’ distance from home might suggest that he would inevitably fall. I say his loyal friends, rather than many, because Mrs. Stevenson particularly declares that Stevenson had few intimate friends. Well-wishers and admirers he had; but there is noticeable in the majority of those letters so ably collected and edited by Sir Sidney Colvin a lack of the genuine give and take of true intimacy. Information concerning himself and his doings, which suggests the use of his friends as tests or sounding-boards, forms the staple of such letters. I am told that many intimate letters are not included--for reasons which are perfectly clear and good; but the truth is that it is only in the letters to Baxter that there is any sense of great ease. Even the letters to Sir Sidney Colvin, full, clear, friendly as they are, suggest impenetrable reserves and an intense respect for the man to whom they were written. They suggest that Stevenson very much wanted Sir Sidney to go on admiring, liking, and believing in him; but they are not letters showing any deep understanding or taking-for-granted of understanding. Candour, of course, there is; a jocularity natural to Stevenson; a reliance upon the integrity and goodwill of his correspondent; a complete gratitude. All we miss is the little tick of feeling which would give ease to the whole series of letters. They might all have been written for other eyes. When one says that, one dismisses the complete spontaneity of the letters in what may seem to be an arbitrary fashion. But one is not, after all, surprised that Stevenson should have made the request that a selection of his letters should be published.

Of friends, then, there must be few, because Mrs. Stevenson is obviously in a better position than anybody else to judge upon this point. She says that, contrary to the general impression, Stevenson had few really intimate friends, because his nature was deeply reserved. From that we may infer that, like other vain men, who, however, are purged by their vanity rather than destroyed by it, he told much about himself without finally, as the phrase is, “giving himself away.” His high spirits, his “bursts of confidence,” his gay jocularity--all these things, part of the man’s irrepressible vanity, were health to him: they enabled him to keep light in a system which might have developed, through physical delicacy, in the direction of morbidity. That he was naturally cold, in the sense that he kept his face always towards his friends, I am prepared to believe: if he had not done that he perhaps would have lost their respect, since personal charm is a fragile base for friendship. By his own family at Vailima he was accused of being “secretive,” as Mrs. Strong records in “Memories of Vailima.” And Stevenson, it must be remembered, was a Scotsman, with a great fund of melancholy. Quite clearly, Henley, his friend for years and his collaborator, never understood him. Henley deplored the later Stevenson, and loved the Louis (or rather, the Lewis) he had known in early days. He loved, that is, the charming person who had discovered him, and with whom he had talked and plotted and bragged. He did not love the man who seems to have turned from him. The cause of their estrangement I do not know. I imagine that they thought differently of the merits of the plays, that Henley pressed Stevenson at a time when Stevenson felt himself to be drawing away from Henley and passing into a rather delightful isolation, and that when Henley clung to their old comradeship with characteristic vehemence, Stevenson felt suddenly bored with so loud an ally. That may be sheer nonsense: I only infer it. Whatever the cause, Stevenson seems to me always a little patronising to Henley, and Henley’s attack in the “Pall Mall Magazine” (December, 1901) suggests as well as envy the blunt bewilderment of a man forsaken. Henley, of course, knew that he lacked the inventive power of Stevenson; and he knew that his power to feel was more intense than Stevenson’s. That in itself makes a sufficient explanation of the quarrel: literary friends must not be rivals, or their critical faculty will overrun into spleen at any injudicious comparisons.

Besides Henley, there is R. A. M. Stevenson, a fascinating figure; but imperfectly shown in the “Letters.” There is Sir Sidney Colvin, best and truest of friends. There is Charles Baxter, the recipient of the letters which seem to me the jolliest Stevenson wrote--a man of much joviality, I am told, and a very loyal worker on his friend’s behalf. For the rest, they are friends in a general sense: not intimates, but men whose good opinion Stevenson was proud to have earned: friends in the wide (but not the most subtle) scheme of friendship which makes for social ease and confidence and interest. Baxter and R. A. M. Stevenson were survivors of early intimacies. Mrs. Sitwell and Sir Sidney Colvin belonged to a later time, a time of stress, but a time also of growth. The others, whom we thus objectionably lump together in a single questionable word, were the warm, kind acquaintances of manhood. It is useless to demand intimacy in these cases, and I should not have laboured the point if it had not been suggested that Stevenson was one of those who had a genius for friendship. He was always, I imagine, cordial, friendly, charming to these friends; but his letters (unless we suppose Sir Sidney Colvin to have edited more freely than we should ordinarily suspect) do not seem to have much to say about his correspondents, and it is not perhaps very unreasonable to think that his own work and his own character were the basis of the exchange of letters. Stevenson no doubt liked these friends; but I am disposed to question whether he was very much interested in them. I think Stevenson generally inspired more affection than he was accustomed to give in return.

V

We must remember, in thus speaking of Stevenson’s friendships, that he was a Scotsman, that he had been really a lonely child and boy, accustomed to a degree of solitude, that he was an egoist (as, presumably, all writers are egoists), and that his personal charm is unquestioned. Men who met him for the first time were fascinated by his vivacity, his fresh play of expression, his manner; and Stevenson, of course, as was only natural, responded instantly to their admiration. He was carried away in talk, and in talk walked with his new friends until they, forced as they were by other engagements to leave him, gained from such a vivid ripple of comment an impression of something alive and mercurial, something like the wonderful run of quicksilver, in a companion so inexhaustibly vivacious. It was the nervous brilliance of Stevenson which attracted men often of greater real ability; he possessed a quality which they felt to be foreign, almost dazzling. So Stevenson, leaving them, strung to a height of exhilaration by his own excited verbosity, would go upon his way, also attracted by his happy feelings and his happy phrases. In such a case the man of charm has two alternatives: he can suppress his ebullience for the purpose of learning or giving; or he can recognise the excitement and, supposing it to be lyricism, can, if I may use that word (as I have above used the word “verbosity”) without any evil meaning being attached to it, _exploit_ his charm. Stevenson, I believe, exploited his charm. It is often so exploited; the temptation to exploit it is sometimes irresistible. The kind thing, the attractive thing, the charming thing--this is the thing to say and do, rather than the honest thing. Instinctively a girl learns the better side of her face, the particular irresistible turn of her head, the perfect cadence of voice. So does the man who has this personal charm. So, too, does he realise instinctively the value of the external details of friendship. In only one point does the knowledge of such externals fail. The kind thing makes friends (in the sense of cordial strangers); but it does not make anything more subtle than cordial strangeness; and it does not seem to me that anybody really ever knew Stevenson very well. He told them much about himself, gaily; and they knew he was charming. I do not suggest any duplicity on his part. He was perfectly real in his vivacity, but it was nervous vivacity, an excitement that led, when it relaxed, or was relaxed, to exhaustion, possibly even to tears, just as we know that Stevenson could be carried by his own fooling to the verge of hysteria. So it was that Stevenson became a figure to himself, as well as to his friends; by his desire to continue the pleasant impression already created, he did tend to see himself objectively (just as he is said to have made the gestures he was describing in his work, and even to have gone running to a mirror to see the expression the imagined person in his book was wearing). In his early books that is plain; in _Lay Morals_ we may feel that he is all the time in the pulpit, leaning over, and talking very earnestly, very gently, very persuasively, and with extraordinary self-consciousness, to a congregation that is quite clearly charmed by his personality. Above all, very persuasively; and above even his persuasiveness, the deprecating sense of charm, the use of personal anecdote to give the sermon an authentic air of confession.

The nervous, vivid buoyancy of his characteristic manner was a part of his lack of health. He was, it is known, rarely in actual pain; and it is very often the case that delicate persons have this nervous exuberance of temperament, which has almost the show of vitality. It has the show; but when the person is no longer before us, our memory is a vague, fond dream of something intangible--what we call, elusive. We talk of elusive charm when we cannot remember a single thing that has aroused in us the impression of having been charmed. Exactly in that way was Stevenson remembered by those he met--as a vivid butterfly is remembered; something indescribably strange and curious, not to be caught and held, for its brilliant and wayward fluttering. The charm was the thing that attracted men kinder, more staid, more truly genial, wiser than himself; it excused the meagre philosophisings and it excused some of those rather selfish and thoughtless actions which Mr. Balfour says nobody dreamed of resenting. The same charm we shall find in most of Stevenson’s work, until it grows stale in _St. Ives_. We shall speak of its literary aspects later. At this moment we are dealing exclusively with his manner. I want to show that Stevenson’s ill-health was not the ill-health which makes a man peevish through constant pain. It was, in fact, extreme delicacy, rather than ill-health; and the reaction from delicacy of physical health (or, in reality, the consequence of this delicacy) was this peculiar nervous brilliancy of manner which I have described. It is often mistaken by writers on Stevenson for courage; but this is an unimaginative conception resulting from the notion that he was constantly in pain, and that he deliberately _willed_ to be cheerful and gay. Nobody who deliberately wills to be cheerful ever succeeds in being more than drolly unconvincing. Stevenson had courage which was otherwise illustrated: this cheerfulness, this “funning” was the natural consequence of nervous excitability, which, as I have said, often appears as though it was vitality, as though it must be of more substance than we know it really is. It is like the colour in an invalid’s cheek, like the invalid’s energy, like the invalid’s bright eyes: it is due to the stimulus of excitement. Stevenson, alone, had his flat moments of dull mood and tired vanity; Stevenson, in company, thrilled with the life which his friends regarded as his inimitable and unquestionable personal charm.

You are thus to imagine a nervously-moving man, tall, very dark, very thin; his hair generally worn long; his eyes, large, dark, and bright, unusually wide apart; his face long, markedly boned. His dress, with velvet jacket, is bizarre; his whole manner is restless; his hands, skeleton-thin, constantly flickering with every change of pose. His grace of movement, his extraordinary play of expression, are everywhere commented upon by those who essay verbal portraiture; and all agree that the photographs in existence reproduce only the dead features which expression changed each instant. Stevenson, it seems, varied his position suddenly and frequently--moving from hearth-rug to chair, from chair, again, to table, walking quickly and brushing his moustache as we may see in Sargent’s brilliant impression. Nervousness was in every movement, every gesture; and the figure of Stevenson seems to be recalled, by many of those who attempt the description, as invariably in motion, the face alive with interest and expression, while the man all the time talked, like “young Mr. Harry Fielding, who pours out everything he has in his heart, and is, in effect, as brilliant, as engaging, and as arresting a talker as Colonel Esmond has known.”

I give the portrait for what it may be worth. No doubt it does not represent the Stevenson of Samoa; perhaps it does not represent the real Stevenson at all. It is Stevenson as one may imagine him, and as another may find it impossible to imagine him. There is room, surely, for a variety of portraits, as for the inevitable variety of critical estimates; and if the estimates hitherto have all followed a particular line of pleasant comment, at least the portraits one sees and reads are all portraits of diverse Stevensons made dull or trivial or engrossing according to the opportunities and skill of the delineator. I offer my portrait, in this and in succeeding chapters, in good faith: more, it would be impossible for me to claim.

II

JUVENILIA

I

Before we come to the main divisions of Stevenson’s work it may be as well to consider briefly those few early works which, to the majority of readers, were first made known by their inclusion in the Edinburgh Edition. It is unfortunately impossible to recover the original essay upon Moses, or the earliest romances; so that we are presented first with _The Pentland Rising_, published as a pamphlet when Stevenson was sixteen. This is conscientious and fully-documented work, written too close to authorities to have much flexibility or personal interest; but it is not strikingly immature. Daniel Defoe, Burnet, Fuller’s “History of the Holy Warre,” and a surprising number of other writers upon the period are successively quoted with good effect; and it is amusing to note the references to “A Cloud of Witnesses,” which appears to have been a favourite with Alison Cunningham. This pamphlet is decidedly the outcome of Alison Cunningham’s teaching, full as it is of the authentic manner of the Covenanters, which Stevenson was presently to imitate to the admiration of all the world.

Many readers of Stevenson must have regarded with eyes of marvel the two serious papers, the gravity of which is perfect, dealing with the Thermal Influence of Forests, and with a new form of Intermittent Light. I have no ability to determine the scientific value of these papers; and as literary works they have less interest than most of the other instances of Juvenilia. They are illustrated with diagrams, and they possess coherence and lucidity. In any work these two qualities are important, and we shall find that clearness is a quality which Stevenson never lost. He always succeeded in being clear, in escaping the obscure sayings of the philosopher or the enthusiast. That is to say, he was a writer. He was a writer in those two scientific papers, no less than in _Virginibus Puerisque_ or _Prince Otto_. When obscurity is so easy, clearness is a distinguished virtue; and if Stevenson sometimes errs to the extent of robbing his work of thickets and dim frightening darknesses, that is also because he was a writer, and because he preferred to be a writer.

There follow a number of shorter pieces, some of them the fruit of his University days of practising; some later, so that they include the papers on _Roads_ and _Forest Notes_ which are mentioned in the next chapter. These sometimes show obvious immaturity, but they also show more than anything else could do the real doggedness with which Stevenson pursued his aim of learning to write. They show him, at least, forming his sentences with careful attention to rhythm and to sound--not yet elaborate, not yet so “kneaded” as his manner was in a little while to be. It is here sometimes thin, as is the subject-matter. In one sketch, _The Wreath of Immortelles_, we may catch a glimpse of the method of opening an essay which Stevenson developed later; but, on the other hand, in the _Forest Notes_ (possibly more mature work) there is really excellent treatment of good and interesting matter. Three “criticisms” have point. One, of Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Slang,” is fairly conventional; the second, on Salvini’s Macbeth, was the one condemned by Fleeming Jenkin because it showed Stevenson thinking more about himself than about Salvini; the third is a very delightful little paper on Bagster’s illustrated edition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

All these short pieces are of interest because they show the growth of Stevenson as a writer. They are the more interesting because at the same time they illustrate the way in which Stevenson gradually made his work take on the impress of his personality. All young work lacks character, as young hand-writing does, and as young style does; and all young essay-work in particular appears sometimes rather tepid and even silly when the author tries to interest us in his “ego.” Stevenson from the first saw himself as the central object in his essay: it is amusing to watch how soon he begins to make himself count as an effective central object. At first the personality is thin: it has not carried. Later it develops with the development of style: the use of words becomes firmer, and with that firmness comes greater confidence, greater ease, in the projection of the author’s self. It is perhaps not until we reach the familiar essays that we find Stevenson fully master of himself, for literary purposes; but the growth provides matter for rather ingenious study.

II

In that volume of the collected editions which contains these early essays it is customary to include the works issued by the Davos Press; and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne (at the age of twelve the proprietor of the Davos Press) has also discovered a wholly amusing account of an important military campaign conducted in an attic at Davos by himself and Stevenson as opposed commanders of tin soldiers. The game, which had of course inexhaustible interest, has also, as described by Mr. Osbourne, its intricacies for the lay mind; but Stevenson’s account of this particular campaign, written by means of official reports, rumours, newspapers yellow and otherwise, offers no difficulty. It is an excellent piece of pretence. The Davos Press, which provided the world with unique works by Stevenson and by Mr. Osbourne, illustrated with original woodcuts, belongs, as does the war-game, to the time spent in the châlet at Davos shortly after Stevenson’s marriage. It shows how easily he could enjoy elaborate games (as most men do enjoy them, if they are not deterred by self-importance or preoccupation with matters more strictly commercial); and the relationship with Mr. Osbourne seems to have been as frank and lively as anybody could desire.

I have mentioned these matters out of their due place because they seem to me to have a value as contributing to certain suggestions which I shall make later. By his marriage, Stevenson gained not only a very devoted wife but a very intimate boy-friend, the kind of friend he very likely had long wanted. There was almost twenty years’ difference between them; but that, I think, made the friendship more suited to Stevenson’s nature. By means of this difference he could indulge in that very conscious make-belief for which his nature craved--a detached make-belief, which enabled him to enjoy the play both in fact and as a spectator, to make up for Mr. Osbourne’s admitted superiority in marksmanship by the subtilty of his own military devices; finally, to enjoy the quite personal pleasure of placing upon record, with plans and military terms, in the best journalistic style, accounts of his military achievements. The art of gloating innocently over his own power to gloat; the power to delight consciously in his own delight at being able to play--these, I believe, are naturally Scots pleasures, and profoundly Stevensonian pleasures. I hope that no reader will deny Stevenson the right to such enjoyments, for Stevenson’s not very complex nature is really bound up in them. If we take from him the satisfaction of seeing himself in every conceivable posture, we take from him a vanity which permeates his whole life-work, and which, properly regarded, is harmless to offend our taste.

III

TRAVEL BOOKS

I

“One of the pleasantest things in the world,” says Hazlitt, “is going on a journey; but I like to go alone.” In his earliest days of manhood, Stevenson also formed the habit of going alone; and in his own essay upon _Walking Tours_ he very circumstantially endorses Hazlitt’s view, for reasons into which we need not enter here. We may find an indication of his habit even so early as the fragment, included in _Essays of Travel_, which describes a journey from Cockermouth to Keswick. Other papers, of various dates, show that, either from choice or from necessity, he often did tramp solitary; but it is worth noting that only in the walk through the Cevennes and in his journey to America did Stevenson ever travel alone for any length of time. His other, and on the whole more important, travel-books are the descriptions of journeys taken in company.

Furthermore, in the early essay which we have just noted he rather ostentatiously proclaims his practice in writing accounts of his tours. He says, “I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been before me only a little while before; I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold.” Apart from the surprising alchemy of the declaration, this disability is wholly to his credit; but Stevenson found, of course, that when he planned to record a journey of some duration, in a form more or less chronological, he must preserve a sense of fabric in his book by keeping a daily diary of experiences. That is why, in his earliest book of travel, _An Inland Voyage_, he mentions “writing-up” his diary at the end of each day; and it explains also the frequent references in later books to such an evening occupation. As Stevenson admitted in _Cockermouth and Keswick_, the process of incubation might in the long run be unreasonably prolonged; and perhaps it is true that experience taught him very early that in the professional writer thrift is a virtue. It was, if so, a lesson that he never forgot.

Although the fragment on Keswick to which I have referred is clearly a juvenile piece of work, it is highly entertaining as a small piece of autobiography. On its own account the essay is rather pragmatical and anecdotal, after the manner of an afternoon sermon, and it gives as yet small evidence that the writer has any highly developed sense of accurate and significant observation. But to the reader who cares to go below its superficial interest, there is other material. Not without value are the boyish allusions to his pipe, to his whisky-and-soda, and to his importance in the smoking-room of the hotel. These are all typical, and interesting. What, however, is clear on the question of mere literary talent, is Stevenson’s ability to spin something out of himself. He must be talking; and, if he has nothing of much moment to say, there must follow some apt reflection, or a “tale of an old Scots minister.”

Would that the ability, a very dangerous ability, had been shed as soon as were some of Stevenson’s juvenile theories about the art of writing! This particular ability remains very noticeably in his first full-size travel-book, _An Inland Voyage_, along with another trait--his abnormal consciousness of his own appearance in the eyes of other people. Stevenson was always interested in that aspect of his personality: he could not forget for a moment that his costume, his face, his manner, all carried some impression to the beholder. It was a part of his nature that he should see children upon the river bank, not merely as children, but as an audience, a congregation of speculating souls busy wondering about him, likening him among themselves to some particular figure, interested in him. Nobody, I think, had ever failed to be interested in him.

II

_An Inland Voyage_, on the whole, is a poor book. It records a canoeing expedition made with a friend; and it is full of Puritanical obtuseness and a strained vanity which interferes with the main narrative. Setting out from Antwerp, the two friends paddled, often in the rain, and sometimes--as in the case of Stevenson’s arrest, and his dangerous accident with the fallen tree across the swollen Oise--in dire straits. They travelled on the Sambre and down the Oise by Origny and Moy, Noyon, Compiègne, and Précy; but the weather was bad, and there were trying difficulties about lodgings; and Stevenson’s account reads as though he had been chilled through and through, and as though he needed nothing so much as his home. Almost invariably, in this book, his little spurts of epigram and apophthegm suggest low spirits as well as a sort of cautious experimentalism; and the book, which apparently was very handsomely received by the Press on its publication, is eked out with matter which, beneath the nervous delicacy of Stevenson’s practising style, is raw and sometimes _banale_. In no other travel-book is there shown such obvious effort. What emerges from _An Inland Voyage_ is the charmingly natural behaviour on several occasions of Stevenson’s companion, a proof even thus early of the author’s ability to be aware of these traits in his friends which, on the printed page, convey to the reader an impression of the person so lightly sketched. This, however, is an exiguous interest in a book supposed to be a picturesque work of travel and topography.

Very much superior is the Sternian _Travels with a Donkey_. Here there is much greater lightness of touch, and a really admirable sense of observation is revealed. Some of the descriptions of things seen are written with indescribable delicacy, as are the character sketches. Just so are some of the descriptions of places contained in the series of letters to Mrs. Sitwell. In _Travels with a Donkey_ for the first time the reader actually makes a third with Stevenson and the endearing Modestine upon their journey, travelling with them and sharing the sensations of the human pedestrian. If we resent certain intolerable affectations--such as the pretentious and penurious fancy of placing money by the roadside in payment for lodgings in the open air--that resentment may be partly due to the fact that we are not told the amount of the payment, as well, of course, as to the fact that we suspect the author’s motive in detailing his charities. Stevenson seems, in fact, to be asking for commendation of a fantastic generosity without giving us sufficient evidence to evoke any feeling of conviction. We see him here, not so much obeying a happy impulse as observing himself in the light of his own esteem; and that is hardly a pleasant sight to the onlooker. To counterbalance such lapses--which, very likely, are regarded by lovers of Stevenson as no lapses at all, but as delightful exhalations of personality, as glimpses of his character which they are enabled to enjoy only through this very innocent vanity which we have noted,--there are a thousand graceful touches, fit to remind us that _Travels with a Donkey_ is a much better book than _An Inland Voyage_, and, in fact, the best of his travel-books until we reach that delightfully modest one which is too little known--_The Silverado Squatters_. The _Donkey_ is the first in which the charming side of his personality really “gets going,” and it will always remain a pretty and effective sketch of a journey taken in wayward weather, with good spirits, a shrewd and observant eye, and, what is also to the point, a commendable courage.

_The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_, two long records which, although published separately, are practically a single work, for all their difference from that book are a drop to the executive level of _An Inland Voyage_. Here again Stevenson was affected by the discomforts of his lonely travelling, and no doubt by his poor health. Both records are for the most part superficial and crabbed. The descriptions of travelling-companions are conscientious, but they have, as Stevenson’s earliest admirers were the first to remark, no imagination or genuine moulding: the accounts are a good deal like uninspired letters home. If one thinks what Stevenson, in happy circumstances, might have made of the tale of his journey, one realises how lifeless are the descriptions given. They have no sense of actual contact; they have lost grip in losing charm, and might have been written by somebody with far less of an eye to the significance of the passing scene. Stevenson claimed to have been aware of the prosaic character of the records, and, indeed, in one letter to Sir Sidney Colvin he said, “It bored me hellishly to write; well, it’s going to bore others to read; that’s only fair.” So perhaps it is not worth while to analyse such confessedly inferior works. Only once in _The Amateur Emigrant_--in the anecdote of two men who lodged perilously in New York--does Stevenson’s boyish love of the picturesquely terrible bring a note of tense reality to the writing. In its own way the account of the two men looking from their bedroom, through the frame of a seeming picture, into another room where three men are crouching in darkness, is a little masterpiece of horror. It belongs to his romances rather than to his travel-books; but it is the passage that stands out most distinctly from the two which are under notice at the moment. No other scene in either _The Amateur Emigrant_ or _Across the Plains_ compares with it for interest or value.

III

Following upon his tedious journey to America, and the hardships and illness which, before his marriage, brought him nearly to his grave, Stevenson went to the mountains for health. _The Silverado Squatters_ was written-up later, and, from Stevenson’s letters of that time, it seems to have been condemned as uncharacteristic. But it may have been that, as I think was the case, Stevenson’s voyage to America and his marriage considerably affected his outlook. For one thing he really had come into contact with hard inconvenience and loneliness, with a self-inflicted exile from his family (and a hostility to his marriage on their part which existed more in his imagination than in fact), which matured him. Those of us who never take these voyages out into the unknown, who sit tight and think comfortably of such things as emigrant trains, cannot realise with what sudden effect the stubborn impact of realities can work upon those who actually venture forth. One small instance will show something of the experience Stevenson gained. On the voyage he met emigrants who were leaving Scotland because there was nothing else for them to do, because to stay meant “to starve.” Coming to these men, and hearing from them something of the lives they had left, he touched a new aspect of life which, in spite of his runnings to-and-fro in Edinburgh and elsewhere, he had never appreciated. He writes, in _The Amateur Emigrant_:

I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.