Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

And when, in _Across the Plains_, he tells how his emigrant train, going in one direction, crowded, was met by another, also crowded, _returning_, must that not have reacted upon his mind? My own impression, which of course is based upon nothing more than the apparent change in Stevenson’s manner of writing, is that _The Silverado Squatters_, as we now have it, very much altered from the condemned first drafts, represents the emergence of a new Stevenson, who, in _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_, had been overweighted by the material realities he had in bad health encountered, and who, in consequence, had failed to make those accounts vivid. _The Silverado Squatters_ has more substance than its predecessors. It is much more free, it is almost entirely free, from affectation. The style is less full of trope, and may be considered therefore, by some readers, as the less individual. But the matter and manner are more strictly united than hitherto. We are not interrupted by such trivial explosions of sententiousness as “We must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of Fate,” and in the degree in which the matter entirely “fills-out” the manner the book is so far remarkable. It is not generally regarded as convenient to say that Stevenson’s matter was often thin, and his style a mere ruffle and scent to draw off the more frigid kind of reader; yet when we come to work so able and so unpretentious as _The Silverado Squatters_, in which Stevenson is honestly trying to show what he saw and knew (instead of trying to show the effect of his address upon a strange community) we do seem to feel that what has gone before has been less immediately the natural work of the writer, and more the fancy sketch of the writer’s own sense of his picturesque figure. In one aspect, in its lack of vivacity, _The Silverado Squatters_ may compare to disadvantage with earlier work; it may seem, and indeed is ordinarily condemned as, less pungent, and less elastic; but that could only be to those who miss the fact that Stevenson’s pungency and elasticity were the consequence of the unwearying revision to which most of his work was subjected. He was never a quick worker, never one of those careless writers whose ear approves while the pen is in motion. He had a fine ear, but not essentially a quick ear; he was not what is sometimes called a “natural” writer, but with devoted labour went again and again through what he had written, revising it until his fastidiousness was relieved. This way of working, while it served to allay what he called the “heat of composition”--a heat which some readers find very grateful in other, less painstaking writers--has patent virtues. It is likely to make work more polished and more finely balanced. Nevertheless, it probably has the effect of reducing the vigour and resilience of a style. However that may be, it is a method making great demands upon a writer’s deep conscientiousness; and it is not the purpose of this book to extol the rapid method or the quick ear. All we may do at this moment is to suggest that Stevenson, having done well in practising year after year the craft of the writer, had now turned very deliberately and honourably in the first year of his marriage to that other side of the writer’s craft, the sober description, free from the amateur’s experimentalism, of the real world as he saw it. Even so, it is a world made smooth by his temperament--his love of smoothness, which one may see exemplified in his declared love of simple landscape--and by his matured dexterity in manipulating sentences. It is a world seen, not with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in a fair haven, whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture to him. Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa, have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest intuitions of beauty. Not his the ecstatic oneness with the lovely things of Nature which makes Keats the purest exponent of what Keats himself called “that delicate snail’s-horn perception of beauty”: Stevenson’s ecstasy had to be stirred by excitement; he had not the poet’s open-handed out-running to the emotion of place. But his sense of the remoteness of the squatters of Silverado, his early-morning peeps into the wonders of colour and aspect in a strange corner of the earth, his shrewd understanding of sullen human nature, are made clear to the reader by plain expression. The book is self-conscious in a good sense; not, as has often hitherto been the case, in a bad one.

IV

If we notice such a change of attitude in _The Silverado Squatters_, we shall find it even more fully revealed in the volume of his letters for an American magazine which appeared under the title of _In the South Seas_. Some of the letters were withheld, as too tedious; even now, the book is frankly called dull by many staunch admirers of Stevenson. To others, however, it must surely appear otherwise. It is, in effect, a sort of glorified log; but a log of real enterprise and adventure in a marvellous part of the world. Stevenson heroically tried to penetrate to the heart of the South Seas. He was caught up by the islands and their people, and was bent upon making them known to those who lived afar. In the political intrigues so honestly described in his letters, Stevenson may, indeed, appear to throw away the importance of his own genius; but the sacrifice is made in obedience to his deepest convictions of right. He still sees himself as the point of focus; but we do not resent that when we find ourselves so clearly in his train. Even while his friends were urging him to give up the Samoan politics which threatened to become the King Charles’s head of his correspondence, he continued to live amid the difficulties from which he felt that he could not in honour withdraw. And although the Samoan period had its fluctuations of talent, it was, upon the whole, the time when his boyish love of game took on a keener zest of earnest and made him indeed a man. The period marks a further decline in the more strictly romantic nature of his work, as we may later on be able to discuss in comparing _St. Ives_ with earlier and more triumphant experiments in that field; but it opens the path for the sober realism (if that word may here be used without sinister connotation) of the torso known as _Weir of Hermiston_, a fragment in which it is usual to find the greatest promise of all. This is all of a piece with the increasing purpose of Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a professional author forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance may be conjured for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most persuasive cajollery. Stevenson was the professional author in his collaborations, and in such work as _St. Ives_; but in _In the South Seas_ as in _Weir_ he is writing truth for the love of truth, than which there can be no more noble kind of authorship.

V

In San Francisco, as we have seen, Stevenson chartered a schooner-yacht, and went to the South Seas in pursuit of health. On board ship he was always happy; and he made more than one cruise, in different ships, among the Gilbert, Paumotuan, and Marquesan groups of islands. He also stayed for periods of varying length in the three groups of islands, became familiar with the manners of the natives, realised their distinctions, and made many new friends among them. His mind was entirely occupied with them; he saw everything he could, and learned everything he could, his shrewd Scots habit of inquiry filling him with a satisfied sense of labour. A big book, proving beyond doubt the entire peculiarity of the South Sea islands and their islanders, was planning in his mind; a book which would soundly establish his reputation as something other than a literary man and a teller of tales. _In the South Seas_, as I have already mentioned, was found dull by friendly critics; yet it is full of observation and of feeling. It is the wisest of the travel-books, and the most genuine, for Stevenson has put picturesqueness behind him for what it is--the hall-mark of the second-rate writer; and he has risen to a height of understanding which adds to his stature. There is, in the portrait of Tembinok’, a simplicity which is impressive: throughout, there is a simple exposition of a fascinating subject, a kind of life remote from our experience, a civilisation strict and dignified, minds and habits interesting in themselves and by contrast with our own. The book may not be the epitome of the South Seas for which the chapters were planned as rough notes; other writers may have known more than Stevenson knew of the actual life of the islands. It is true that he frequented kings’ palaces, and that his acquaintance with common native life was very largely a matter of observation caught up in passing, or by hearsay, or by the contemplation of public gatherings. That is true. What we, as readers endeavouring patiently to trace the growth of Stevenson’s knowledge, must, however, remember above all things, is that the book is really a finer and a more distinguished work than _An Inland Voyage_ or _Travels with a Donkey_. It has not the grimaces of the first, or the pleasing delicacy of the second. It is a better book than _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_. It is fuller and richer than _The Silverado Squatters_. What, then, do we ask of a book of travel? Is it that we may see the author goading his donkey, or putting money by the wayside for his night’s lodging; or is it that we may see what he has seen? With Stevenson, the trouble is, I suppose, that, having thought of him always as a dilettante, his admirers cannot reconcile themselves to his wish to be a real traveller and a real historian. Perhaps they recognise that he had not the necessary equipment? Rather, it is very likely that, being largely uncreative themselves, they had planned for Stevenson a future different from the one into which gradually he drifted. All creative writers have such friends. We may say, perhaps, that a man who was not Stevenson could have written _In the South Seas_, though I believe that is not the case. But if we put the books slowly in order we shall almost certainly find that while _Travels with a Donkey_ is a pretty favourite, with airs and graces, and a rather imaginary figure charmingly posed as its chief attraction, _In the South Seas_ is the work of the same writer, grown less affected, more intent upon seeing things as they are, and less intent upon being seen in their midst. There is the problem. If a travel-book is an exploitation of the traveller’s self, we can be charmed with it: let us not, therefore, because we find less charm in _In the South Seas_, find the later book dull. Stevenson is duller because he is older: the bloom is going: he is not equal intellectually to the task he has set himself. But there is a greater sincerity in the later travel-books, an honest looking upon the world. It is surely better to look straight with clear eyes than to dress life up in a bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard mountain. Stevenson’s admirers want the song upon the mountain, because they want to continue the legend that he never grew up. They want him to be the little boy with a fine night of stars in his eyes and a pack upon his back, singing cheerily that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. That is why Stevenson’s best work is, relatively speaking, neglected in favour of work that tarnishes with the passing of youth. And it is all because of the insatiable desire of mediocrity for the picturesque. We must be surprised and startled, and have our senses titillated by savours and perfumes; we must have the strange and the new; we must have a fashion to follow and to forget. Stevenson has been a fashionable traveller, and his sober maturity is too dull; he has lost his charm. Well, we must make a new fashion. Interest in a figure must give place to interest in the work. If the work no longer interests, then our worship of Stevenson is founded upon a shadow, is founded, let us say, upon the applause of his friends, who sought in his work the fascination they found in his person.

IV

ESSAYS

I

There have been some English essayists whose writing is so packed with thought that it is almost difficult to follow the thought in its condensation. Such was Bacon, whose essays were by way of being “assays,” written so tightly that each little sentence was the compression of the author’s furthest belief upon that aspect of his subject, and so that to modern students the reading of Bacon’s essays resembles the reading of a whole volume printed in Diamond type. There have been English essayists whose essays are clear-cut refinements of truth more superficial or more simple. Such was Addison, who wrote with a deliberate and flowing elegance, and whose essays Stevenson found himself unable to read. There have been such essayists as Hazlitt, the shrewd sincerity of whose perceptions is expressed with so much appropriateness that his essays are examples of what essays should be. There has never been in England a critic or an essayist of quite the same calibre as Hazlitt. It was of Hazlitt that Stevenson wrote, in words so true that they summarily arrest by their significance the reader who does not expect to find in _Walking Tours_ so vital an appraisement: “Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.” And, in succession, for there would be no purpose in continuing the list for its own sake, there have been essayists who, intentionally resting their work upon style and upon the charm of personality, have in a thousand ways diversified their ordinary experience, and so have been enabled to disclose as many new aspects and delights to the reader. Such an essayist was Lamb. Hazlitt, I think, was the last of the great English essayists, because Hazlitt sought truth continuously and found his incomparable manner in the disinterested love of precision to truth. But Lamb is the favourite; and Lamb is the English writer of whom most readers think first when the word “essay” is mentioned. That is because Lamb brought to its highest pitch that personal and idiosyncratic sort of excursion among memories which has created the modern essay, and which has severed it from the older traditions of both Bacon and Addison. It is to the school of Lamb, in that one sense, that Stevenson belonged. He did not “write for antiquity,” as Lamb did; he did not write deliberately in the antique vein or in what Andrew Lang called “elderly English”; but he wrote, with conscious and anxious literary finish, essays which had as their object the conveyance in an alluring manner of his own predilections. He quite early made his personality what Henley more exactly supposed that it only afterwards became--a marketable commodity--as all writers of strong or acquired personality are bound to do.

Since Stevenson there have been few essayists of classic rank, largely because the essay has lost ground, and because interest in “pure” literature has been confined to work of established position (by which is meant the work of defunct writers). There has been Arthur Symons, of whose following of Pater as an epicure of sensation we have heard so much that the original quality of his fine work--both in criticism and in the essay--has been obscured. There has been an imitator of Stevenson, an invalid lady using the pseudonym “Michael Fairless”; and there have been Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Street, Mr. A. C. Benson, and Mr. Filson Young. These writers have all been of the “personal” school, frankly accepting the essay as the most personal form in literature, and impressing upon their work the particular personal qualities which they enjoy. Some of them have been more robust than others, some less distinguished; but all of them are known to us (in relation to their essays) as writers of personality rather than as writers of abstract excellence. An essay upon the art of the essay, tracing its development, examining its purpose, and distinguishing between its exponents, might be a very fascinating work. Such an essay is manifestly out of place here; but it is noteworthy that, apart from the distinguished writers whose names I have given, nearly all the minor writers (that is, nearly all those whose names I have not mentioned) who have produced essays since the death of Stevenson, or who are nowadays producing genteel essays, have been deeply under his influence. It is further noteworthy that most of those who have been so powerfully influenced have been women.

II

From the grimly earnest abstracts of knowledge contributed by Bacon to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few fancies, or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily composed a single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson, as I have said, belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England Charles Lamb is most representative, and of whom Montaigne was most probably his more direct model--the writer who conveyed information about his personal tastes and friends and ancient practices in a form made prepossessing by a flavoured style. To those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added a strong didactic strain, as much marked in his early essays as in the later ones; and it is this strain which differentiates Stevenson’s work from that of Lamb and Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the delicious vintage of a ripe mind both credulous and sceptical, grown old enough to examine with great candour and curiousness the details of its own vagaries: many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays are the work of his youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of the pseudo-candour of vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s shrewd naïveté. He was thirty or thirty-one when the collection entitled _Virginibus Puerisque_ was published. A year later there followed _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. He was only thirty-seven (Montaigne was thirty-eight when he “retired” from active life and began to produce his essays) when his third collection, _Memories and Portraits_, obviously more sedate and less open to the charge of literary affectation, completed the familiar trilogy. Although _Across the Plains_ did not appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to form that book had earlier received periodical publication (the dated essays range from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously collected in _The Art of Writing_ belong to 1881. So it is not unfair to say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by which personality is so much matured as to yield readily to condensation. Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays, for the judgments of maturity, although we may find in _Virginibus Puerisque_ a rather middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek the significance of these essays in the degree in which they reveal consciously the graces and the faultless negligé of an attractive temperament. We may look to find at its highest point the illustration of those principles of style which Stevenson endeavoured to formulate in one very careful essay upon the subject (to the chagrin, I seem to remember, at the time of its republication, of so many critics who misunderstood the aim of the essay). And we shall assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson possessed of quoting happily from other writers. Quotation with effect is a matter of great skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was peculiar rather than wide, drew from this very fact much of the inimitable effect obtained by references so apt.

III

One note which we shall find persistently struck and re-struck in Stevenson’s essays is the memory of childhood. From _Child’s Play_ to _The Lantern-Bearers_ we are confronted by a mass of material regarding one childhood, by which is supported a series of generalisations about all children and their early years. So we proceed to youth, to the story of _A College Magazine_; and so to _Ordered South_. Then we return again to _An Old Scotch Gardener_ and _The Manse_, where again that single childhood, so well-stored with memories, provides the picture. Now it is one thing for Stevenson to re-vivify his own childhood, for that is a very legitimate satisfaction which nobody would deny him; but it is another thing for Stevenson, from that single experience and with no other apparent observation or inquiry, to generalise about all children. While he tells us what he did, in what books and adventures and happenings he found his delight, we may read with amusement. When, upon the other hand, he says, “children are thus or thus,” it is open to any candid reader to disagree with Stevenson. Whether it is that he has set the example, or whether it is that he merely exemplifies the practice, I cannot say; but Stevenson is one of those very numerous people who talk wisely and shrewdly about children in the bulk without seeming to know anything about them. These wiseacres alternately under-rate and make too ingenious the intelligence and the calculations of childhood, so that children in their hands seem to become either sentimental barbarians or callous schemers, but are never, in the main, children at all. Stevenson has a few excellent words upon children: he admirably says, “It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text”: but I am sorry to say that, upon the whole, I can find little else that is of value in his general observations.

It is open to anybody to reconstruct a single real childhood from Stevenson’s essays, and no doubt that is a matter of considerable interest, as anything which enables us to understand a man is of value. Curiously enough, however, Stevenson’s essays upon the habits and notions of children seem to suggest a great deal too much thought about play, and too little actual play. They seem to show him, as a little boy, so precocious and lacking in heart, that he is watching himself play rather than playing. It is not the preliminary planning of play that delights children, not the academic invention of games and deceits; it is the immediate and enjoyable act of play. Our author shows us a rather elderly child who, in deceiving himself, has savoured not so much the game as the supreme cleverness of his own self-deception. That, to any person who truly remembers the state of childhood, may be accepted as a perfectly legitimate recollection; and it is so far coherent. That his own habit should be, in these essays, extended to all other children whatsoever--in fact, to “children”--is to make all children delicate little Scots boys, greatly loved, very self-conscious, and, in the long run, rather tiresome, as lonely, delicate little boys incline to become towards the end of the day. Unfortunately the readers of Stevenson’s essays about little boys have mostly been little girls; and they are not themselves children, but grown-up people who are looking back at their own childhood through the falsifying medium of culture and indulgent, dishonest memory. Culture, in dwelling upon interpretations and upon purposes, and in seeing childhood always through the refraction of consequence, destroys interest in play itself; and if play is once called in question it very quickly becomes tedious rigmarole.

Stevenson’s essays must thus be divided into two parts, the first descriptive, the second generalised. The first division, sometimes delightful, is also sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes is exaggerative of the originality of certain examples of play. The second is about as questionable as any writing on children has ever been, because it is based too strictly upon expanded recollections of a single abnormal model. You do not, by such means, obtain good generalisations.

IV

Something of the same objection might be urged against Stevenson’s rather unpleasant descriptions of adolescence. These again are not typical. Stevenson himself was the only youth he ever knew--he never had the detachment to examine disinterestedly the qualities of any person but himself--and we might gain from his descriptions an impression of youth which actually will not bear the stereoscopic test to which we are bound to submit all generalisations. To read the essays with the ingenuous mind of youth is to feel wisdom, grown old and immaculate, passing from author to reader. It is to marvel at this debonair philosopher, who finds himself never in a quandary, and who has the strategies of childhood and of youth balanced in his extended hand. It is to proceed from childhood to youth, and from youth to the married state; and our adviser describes to us in turn, with astonishing confidence, the simplified relations, which otherwise we might have supposed so intricate, of the lover, the husband, and the wife. Nothing comes amiss to him: love, jealousy, the blind bow-boy, truth of intercourse--these and many other aspects of married life are discoursed upon with grace and the wistful sagaciousness of a decayed inexperience. But when we consider the various arguments, and when we bring the essays _Virginibus Puerisque_ back to their starting-point, we shall find that they rest upon the boyish discovery that marriages occur between unlikely persons. Stevenson has not been able to resist the desire to institute an inquiry into the reasons. He cannot suppose that these persons love one another; and yet why else should they marry? Well, he is writing an essay, and not a sociological study, so that--as the result of his inquiry--we must not expect to receive a very distinct contribution to our knowledge. We may prepare only to be edified, to be, perhaps, greatly amused by a young man who may at least shock us, or stir us, if he is unable to show this fruitful source of comedy in action. We are even, possibly, alert to render our author the compliment of preliminary enjoyment, before we have come to his inquiry. What Stevenson has to tell us about marriage, however, is a commonplace; even if it is a commonplace dressed and flavoured. It is that “marriage is a field of battle--not a bed of roses”; and it is that “to marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.” “Alas!” as Stevenson says of another matter, “If that were all!”

I wonder what it is that makes such phrases (for they are no more than phrases, phrases which are not true to experience, and which therefore can have no value as propositions or as explanations) give so much pleasure to such a number of readers. How can we explain it, unless it be simply by the explanation that Stevenson has been idolised? This book, _Virginibus Puerisque_, has been a favourite for many years, sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense unoriginal. It is the most quoted; it is the one which most certainly may be regarded as the typical book of Stevenson’s early period. Surely it is because a half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a phrase and remembered only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a whole truth, upon which the reader must engage his attention? It must, I mean, be the trope that lures readers of _Virginibus Puerisque_ into acceptance of thought so threadbare and ill-nourished. Such an essay as _Æs Triplex_ seems by its air to hold all the wisdom of the ages, brought steadfastly to the contemplation of the end to which all must come. If it is read sentimentally, with the mind swooning, it may give the reader the feeling that he has looked upon the bright face of danger and seen death as no such bad thing. For a moment, as it might be by a drug, he has received some stimulation which is purely temporary. The essay has not changed his thought of death; it has not transformed his fear of death into an heroic love; it slides imperceptibly, unheeded, from his memory, and remains dishevelled forever as “that rather fine thing of Stevenson’s,” for which he never knows where to look. Only its phrases remain for quotation, for use in calendars, common thoughts turned into remembrances and mottoes ready for the rubricator. When an ordinary person says, “It’s nice to have something to look forward to,” Stevenson is ready with, “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” There is all the difference between this and that advice of Browning’s that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” Stevenson has not sought to invigorate the toiler, he has not caught up with optimism the spirit of mankind: what he has done is to make a phrase for the boudoir. There is no philosophic optimism in Stevenson’s essays: there is sometimes high spirits, and sometimes there is a cheerful saying; but at heart the “teaching” of these things is as prosaic as is the instruction of any lay preacher.

When the more solemn sort of subject, such as death, comes to be dealt with, we find Stevenson, the actor, falling into the feeling of his own intonations, gravely reassuring, like a politician explaining a defeat. When he is describing acts of bravery, as in _The English Admirals_, his love of courage rises and his feelings seem to glow; but the phrases with which he adorns the tale and with which eventually he points the moral are phrases made to be read, not phrases that break from his full heart. They are not the phrases made, will he nill he, by his enthusiasm; they are such phrases as are publicly conveyed from one king or statesman or commander to another upon the occasion of some notable event. I do not mean that they are as baldly expressed, though I think they are often as baldly conceived. They are very handsomely expressed, too handsomely for the occasion, if one agrees with Bob Acres that “the sound should be an echo of the sense.” Although it may be true that, as Stevenson says, “people nowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues,” for a self-respecting author to give them the picturesque for that reason seems to me a most immoral and, in the end, a most ill-judged proceeding. Cultivation of the picturesque, fondness for phrase, is inevitably productive of falseness; it is literary gesture, a cultivable habit, such as the habit of any vain person who flickers his hands or persistently turns the “better side” of his face or character to the beholder. The first instinctive vanity develops rapidly into a pose, and pose can never be much more than amusing. Appropriateness of phrase to meaning is lost in the sense of phrase, honesty of intention does not suffice to cover inexactitude of expression. Unconsciously, Stevenson often approved a phrase that expressed something not in exact accordance with his belief; he was misled by its splendour or its picturesqueness or its heroic virtue. So it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and held us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken this wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer. They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook for a thrill of nature.

To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater pleasure. We are displeased in _Virginibus Puerisque_ by the excess of manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case of such essays as _The Foreigner at Home_ and _Pastoral_, where the matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. His essay on the English, to take the first of the two we have named, is partial and incomplete--faults due to lack of sympathy. Its incompleteness seems to me more serious than its partiality; and by “incompleteness” I do not mean that it should have been more exhaustive, but that it does not appear quite to work out its own thesis, but presents an air of having been finished on a smaller scale than is attempted in other parts. In exactly the same way, the _Pastoral_ engages our interest completely, and then, for the reason, it would seem, that the author’s memory runs short, the portrait is left suddenly. It is not left in such a state that the reader’s imagination fills in every detail: the effect is again one of truncation.

The best of these essays are probably those two, which are written in the vein of Hazlitt, on _Talk and Talkers_. Here the matter is ample; and the manner is studiously moderate. I note, by the way, that Sir Sidney Colvin mentions the composition of this essay at about the time of Stevenson’s proposal for writing a life of Hazlitt; so that it would not be very reckless to say that the manner of _Talk and Talkers_ may be due to a contemporary familiarity with Hazlitt’s essays. However that may be, these two essays in particular have distinguished qualities. They have point, character, and thought.

V

The two essays which conclude _Memories and Portraits_, respectively entitled _A Gossip on Romance_ and _A Humble Remonstrance_, are by way of being essays in constructive criticism, showing why the novel of incident (i.e. the romance) is superior to the domestic novel. The former belongs to 1882, the latter to 1884. _A Gossip on Romance_ expresses for “Robinson Crusoe” a greater liking than that held for “Clarissa Harlowe,” and concludes with great praise of Scott; _A Humble Remonstrance_ shows Stevenson entering, with something of the _Father Damien_ manner, into a debate which was at that time taking place between Sir Walter Besant, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. W. D. Howells. Besant’s arguments were contained in an essay on “The Art of Fiction,” which may still be had as a negligible little book; Mr. Henry James’s reply, a wholly delightful performance, is reprinted in “Partial Portraits.” The point was that Besant wanted to express his amiable and workmanlike notions, that Mr. Henry James preferred to talk about the art of fiction, and that Stevenson, who seems never to have felt entire approval of the subject-matter of Mr. James’s books, felt called upon to rally to the defence of his own practices. Unfortunately he could not do this without savaging Mr. James and Mr. Howells, and this, while it makes the essay a rather honest, unaffected piece of work, does not increase its lucidity.

But we may very well turn at this point to notice that Stevenson’s one legitimate book of essays on specifically literary subjects--_Familiar Studies of Men and Books_--illustrates very well his attitude to the writers in whom he was interested to the point of personal study. The nine subjects of the essays in this book do not seem to us at this time a specially interesting selection; and indeed the essays themselves are not remarkable for originality or insight. It does show, however, some range of understanding to wish to write upon subjects so varied as Hugo, Burns, Whitman, Thoreau, Villon, Charles of Orleans, Pepys, and John Knox. It is true that Stevenson (the Hugo essay is perhaps an exception to this) never gets very far away from his “authorities” or from quotations from the works of his subject; and that his criticism is “safe” rather than personal; but these facts, while they interfere with the value of the essays as essays, give them the interest of being single and without parallel in Stevenson’s output. They show that he was a good enough journeyman critic to stand beside those who write essays on literary subjects for the reviews. They conform, as far as I can tell, to the standard of such work; they are useful and plain, and some of them, but not all, are interesting. In each case the interest is chiefly a moral interest; it is the “teaching” of the various writers, the moral vagaries of the different delinquents, that engage the critic’s attention.

It must be borne in mind that Stevenson was not primarily a literary critic. His flashes of insight were more remarkable than his considered judgments, because, as I have suggested elsewhere in this book, he had not the kind of mind that takes delight in pursuing a subject to its logical conclusion. He had the inventive, but not the constructive mind, and he had the nervous and delicate man’s intolerance of anything requiring sustained intellectual effort. I imagine that in reading books he “read for the story,” and that his perception of qualities in the telling (apart from the excellence of the story) was spasmodic. It may be noticed as a defect in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ that no _character_, apart from traditional character, as in the case of Pepys, emerges from any of the essays: we are given accounts and criticisms of, for example, Burns; but we do not have them flashed out at us as real men. Stevenson, I think, had a very poor sense of character. In all these essays there is the same defect, an air of flatness, of colourlessness, such as we may find in any case where character has not been imagined.

Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character, which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a personality all was different; then, every touch told, as we may see in the picture of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the character he could see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for quiet, unpicturesque men baffled his powers of reproduction. He could admire, but he could not draw them. There is a very curious instance of this in the _Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_, which is worth commenting on here. That memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a whole it belongs to the same uncharacterised class of portrait-studies as these _Men and Books_. Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he might be anybody. But there are passages in the _Memoir_ which are the most moving passages that Stevenson ever wrote. They do not relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is all out of focus: they relate to the parents of Jenkin and his wife. Jenkin’s personality, it would seem, was never grasped by Stevenson; these vignettes, on the other hand, are quite poignantly real and quite pathetically beautiful.

VI

The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter. Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed--there are many, which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and which will continue to give pleasure because they are a little whimsical in conception and very finished in performance. These essays owe their charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing about himself, for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He was charmed by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not the courage or possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you that Stevenson took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing and not at all distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was deliciously joined together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His essays, the most personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the same vanity which brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It was not the unhappy vanity that drives friends away, that is suspicious of all kindness: Stevenson had been too much petted as a child to permit of such wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was confident, but not vulgarly confident; vain, to the extent of being more interested in himself than in anything else; but he was not dependent upon his earnings, and success came early enough to keep sweet his happy complacency. His essays show these things as clearly as do his letters. His essays “are like milestones upon the wayside of his life,” and they are so obviously milestones, that all readers who are fascinated by autobiography, particularly if it be veiled, have been drawn to Stevenson as they are drawn to an attractive, laughing child. My own opinion is that Stevenson has sent his lovers away no richer than they came; but there are many who could not share that view, because there are many who are thankful to him for telling them that “it is better to be a fool than to be dead.” I think Stevenson did not know what it was to be either a fool or dead. That state of nervous high spirits which is a part of his natural equipment for the battle, which lent even his most artificial writing a semblance of vivacity, prevented him from ever being dead (in the sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant it); and I cannot persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.

It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please some readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That they were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure, had the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as anyone may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers: it is a part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure some obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the gimcrack relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that he fell naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality--as we may realise from the lengthy fragment called _Lay Morals_--preoccupied him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged head of sententious dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by whatever means, by whatever labour the art was attained, Stevenson was, above everything else, a writer. “There is no wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography, “there is no wonder that Stevenson wrote his best in the shadow of the Shade; for writing his best was very life to him.”

VII

As a writer, then, let Stevenson be regarded in the conclusion of this chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his deliberate example in that one essay _On some technical elements of Style in Literature_; and his theories have aroused bitter comment. Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants recurrent in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he lived in a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of course, was a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because Stevenson was a prolific writer, and could never have afforded the time to be a mere hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first to realise that a prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that an evil use of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he realised that a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive cunning by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with ever-growing interest into the most remote passages of his work. He was a careful writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some sentences of Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their consonants and syllables and “knots,” to their destined conclusion, are still, and I suppose always will be capable of yielding, a pure delight to the ear. Those who do not take Stevenson’s pains will qualify his denunciation of the “natural” writer, because a natural writer is one whose ear is quick and fairly true: he is not necessarily producing “the disjointed babble of the chronicler,” but he is incapable of the fine point of exquisite rhythm which we may find in Stevenson’s best writing. That writing, various though it is (various, I mean, in “styles”), remains true to its musical principles. It is the result of trained ear and recognition of language as a conscious instrument. It has innumerable, most insidious appeals, to disregard which is a task for the barbarian. It is patterned, it is built of sounds,--“one sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another,”--all in accordance with the expressed theory of Stevenson. We will grant it the delights, because they are incontestable. Let us now question whether it has not one grave defect.

All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its music, its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that old dance music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband, stately as they are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear resolution with immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven figured style, than which we could hardly have an illustration more fit. They are examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but in Stevenson’s writing there is no violence to old airs and the old order. His writing is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and in its differentiation from the old way of writing is to be found, not a revolution, not anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style, graceful, sustained though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but it has no vigour. The passages to which one turns are passages of delicious, stealthy accomplishment. They are passages which suggest the slow encroaching fingers of the in-coming tide, creeping and whispering further and further up the sand; and our watchful delight in the attainment of each sentence is the delight we feel in seeing the waves come very gently, pushed on by an incalculable necessity, until their length is reached and their substance is withdrawn. There is no tempestuous certainty in Stevenson’s writing; there is not the magnificent wine of Shakespeare’s prose, which has marvellous strength as well as its delicate precision. Stevenson’s style, clearly invalidish in his imitators, has in itself the germs of their consumption. It is quiet, pretty, picturesque, graceful; it has figure and trope in plenty; but it has no vehemence. You may find in it an amazing variety of pitch and cadence; but at length the care that has made it betrays the artificer; at length the reader will look in vain for the rough word. That is the pity of Stevenson’s style--not that he should have sought it, and exercised it, and made language quite the most important thing in his writing; but that his very artfulness should have yielded him no protection against the demand of nature for something which no care or cunning can ever put into style that does not carry its own impetus.

V

POEMS

I

The Scottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance. Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality, in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons. It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very appreciative of good actions contributed by other persons to that advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the voice of a singer--especially when the singer happens to be the person who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities, although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned. It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show affection or weep: how hard it is that we should weigh in the balance of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!

This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous “grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman. Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans, whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems to me important that we should be slow to charge a race that is impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be a great poet is another matter.

II

Stevenson’s poems are contained in four small volumes--_Underwoods_, _Ballads_, _Songs of Travel_ (a collection made by himself, but published posthumously), and _A Child’s Garden of Verses_. Of the four volumes the one that has enjoyed most popularity, as well as most critical esteem, is _A Child’s Garden of Verses_, which book, although, by Stevenson’s account, very easily produced, has the value of being unique in scheme and contents. The other volumes have less in them of wide interest, and so they are less generally read. Certain poems, such as the _Requiem_ (“Under the wide and starry sky”) and _The Vagabond_ (“Give to me the life I love”) arise whenever the name of Stevenson is fondly mentioned; they are, as it were, the stock-in-trade of the conversational anthologist, who, in the same spirit, will have suggested to him by the name of Meredith the words, “Enter these enchanted woods, Ye who dare.” These two poems are not the best poems Stevenson wrote; but they are handy for remembrance. That explains their frequent employment; that, and their appropriateness to the conventional idea of Stevenson, which is based upon a sentimental and mediocre marvel at the unconventionality of the open road.

The best poems Stevenson wrote are his ballads. With a story to tell, he was keener to represent truly the subject-matter upon which he was engaged; and this engendered the “heat of composition,” if it did not always spring from the native heat or intensity of inspiration. The ballads, especially _Ticonderoga_, have a swift effectiveness and an adherence to theme which is not so marked in the poems provoked by occasional events. In these the rhyme and form sometimes lead the way, and the poems become exercises in friendly versification, without much feeling, and with only that Scottish affectionateness to which reference has already been made. Examples of impoverished emotion may be found in the two poems expressing gladness at visits from Mr. Henry James. As cheerful little outbursts of pleasure, such poems, in manuscript, would be interesting, even delightful: as poems they fall short of complete success, even in their own class, for the reason that they are as conversational and as fluent as Stevenson’s letters, and are diffuse as his prose rarely is.