Chapter V

To turn now to another side of Stevenson--Stevenson the Artist, the artificer of phrases, the limner of pictures. His power here is shown in a threefold manner--in deft and happy phrasing, in skilful characterization, in delicately suggestive scenic descriptions.

This, for instance, as an instance of the first:--

"The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated atmosphere, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important
body or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer
world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the
regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equally forward over
blood and ruin" (_New Arabian Nights_).

Or this:--

"Whitman, like a large, shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the
beaches of the world, and baying at the moon" (_Men and Books_).

Or this:--

"To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold
an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for
yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for
people to rap out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They
have a currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable
persons pay their way with nothing else" (_Virginibus Puerisque_).

In his characterization he is at his best--like Scott and Borrow--when dealing with the picaresque elements in life. His rogues are depicted with infinite gusto and admirable art, and although even they, in common with most of his characters, lack occasionally in substance and objective reality, yet when he has to illustrate a characteristic he will do so with a sure touch.

Take, for instance, this sketch of Herrick in _The Ebb Tide_--the weak, irresolute rascal, with just force enough to hate himself. He essays to end his ignominious career in the swift waters:--

. . . "Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the
house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming;
there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?

"And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of
an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to
life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by
sinew; something that was at once he and not he--at once within and
without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain,
which a single manly thought would suffice to open--and the grasp of
an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come
at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the
articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that
his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he
would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a
revelation--there was no escape possible. The open door was closed
in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men
without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his
responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow--a merciful chance
blow--or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his
infamy.

"There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could
not; and he was one who could not. His smile was tragic. He could
have spat upon himself."

Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson--a love of the grotesque, a passion for the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of roughness, and in Browning's case the relish imparts itself to his style. Not so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious treasure; but not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of finished beauty will he allow you to get a glimpse of it.

This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with all the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson's is always the better way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real attractiveness of certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness, their downright ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting would have shown off the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one has nothing but welcome for such memorable figures as John Silver, the Admiral in _The Story of a Lie_, Master Francis Villon, and a goodly company beside.

It is impossible even in such a cursory estimate of Stevenson as this to pass over his vignettes of Nature. And it is the more necessary to emphasize these, inasmuch as the Vagabond's passion for the Earth is clearly discernible in these pictures. They are no Nature sketches as imagined by a mere "ink-bottle feller"--to use a phrase of one of Mr. Hardy's rustics. One of Stevenson's happiest recollections was an "open air" experience when he slept on the earth. He loved the largeness of the open air, and his intense joy in natural sights and sounds bespeaks the man of fine, even hectic sensibility, whose nerves quiver for the benison of the winds and sunshine.

Ever since the days of Mrs. Radcliffe, who used the stormier aspects of Nature with such effect in her stories, down to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose massive scenic effects are so remarkable, Nature has been regarded as a kind of "stage property" by the novelist.

To the great writers the Song of the Earth has proved an inspiration only second to the "Song of Songs," and the lesser writer has imitated as best he could so effective a decoration. But there is no mistaking the genuine lover of the Earth. He does not--as Oscar Wilde wittily said of a certain popular novelist--"frighten the evening sky into violent chromo-lithographic effects"; he paints the sunrises and sunsets with a loving fidelity which there is no mistaking. Nor are all the times and seasons of equal interest in his eyes. If we look back at the masters of fiction (ay, and mistresses too) in the past age, we shall note how each one has his favourite aspect, how each responds more readily to one special mood of the ancient Earth.

Mention has been made of Mrs. Radcliffe. Extravagant and absurd as her stories are in many ways, she was a genuine lover of Nature, especially of its grand and sublime aspects. Her influence may be traced in Scott, still more in Byron. The mystic side of Nature finds its lovers chiefly in the poets, in Coleridge and in Shelley. But at a later date Nathaniel Hawthorne found in the mysticism of the Earth his finest inspiration; while throughout the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte wail the bleak winds of the North, and the grey storm-clouds are always hurrying past. Even in Dickens there is more snow than sunshine, and we hear more of "the winds that would be howling at all hours" than of the brooding peace and quiet of summer days. Charles Kingsley is less partial towards the seasons, and cares less about the mysticism than the physical influences of Nature.

In our own day Mr. George Meredith has reminded us of the big geniality of the Earth; and the close relationship of the Earth and her moods with those who live nearest to her has found a faithful observer in Mr. Hardy.

Stevenson differs from Meredith and Hardy in this. He looks at her primarily with the eye of the artist. They look at her primarily with the eye of the scientific philosopher.

Here is a twilight effect from _The Return of the Native_:--

"The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the
evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as
rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full
of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to
sleep, the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night
its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus
unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many
things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis--the
final overthrow. . . . Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon
Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without
showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity."

Contrast with this a twilight piece from Stevenson:--

"The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour,
dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The stars by innumerable
millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright,
like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light
was dyed in every sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel;
green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth
in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat,
star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of
heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries--a hurly-burly of
stars. Against this the hill and rugged tree-tops stood out redly
dark."

Each passage has a fresh beauty that removes it from the perfunctory tributes of the ordinary writer. But the difference between the Artist and the Philosopher is obvious. Not that Mr. Hardy has no claims as an artist. Different as their styles are, and although Stevenson has a more fastidious taste for words, the large, deliberate, massive art of Hardy is equally effective in its fashion. That, however, by the way. The point is that Mr. Hardy never rests _as_ an artist--he is quite as concerned with the philosophic as with the pictorial aspects of the scene. Stevenson rejoices as a Romantic; admires like an Artist.