Stevenson had many sides, but there were two especially that reappear
again and again, and were the controlling forces in his nature. One was
the Romantic element, the other the Artistic. It may be thought that
these twain have much in common; but it is not so. In poetry the first
gives us a Blake, a Shelley; the second a Keats, a Tennyson. Variety,
fresh points of view, these are the breath of life to the Romantic. But
for the Artist there is one constant, unchanging ideal. The Romantic
ventures out of sheer love of the venture, the other out of sheer love
for some definite end in view. It is not usual to find them coexisting
as they did in Stevenson, and their dual existence gives an added
piquancy and interest to his work. It is the Vagabond Romantic in him
that leads him into so many byways and secret places, that sends him
airily dancing over the wide fields of literature; ever on the move,
making no tabernacle for himself in any one grove. And it is the Artist
who gives that delicacy of finish, that exquisitive nicety of touch, to
the veriest trifle that he essays. The matter may be beggarly, the
manner is princely.
Mark the high ideal he sets before him: "The Artist works entirely upon
honour. The Public knows little or nothing of those merits in its quest
of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits
of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap
accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires; these
they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite
refinements of proficiency and finish, which the Artist so ardently
desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)
he must toil 'like a miner buried in a landslip,' for which day after day
he recasts and revises and rejects, the gross mass of the Public must be
ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest point of
merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable,
that you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain they
shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought alone in
his studio the Artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the
ideal." {124a}
An exacting ideal, but one to which Stevenson was as faithful as a
Calvinist to his theology. The question arises, however; is the
fastidiousness, the patient care of the Artist, consistent with
Vagabondage? Should one not say the greater the stylist, the lesser the
Vagabond?
This may be admitted. And thus it is that in the letters alone do we
find the Vagabond temperament of Stevenson fully asserting itself.
Elsewhere 'tis held in check. As Mr. Sidney Colvin justly says: {124b}
"In his letters--excepting a few written in youth, and having more or
less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were
intended for the public eye--Stevenson, the deliberate artist is scarcely
forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order, or logical
sequence, or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping
it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human
beings. He will write with the most distinguished eloquence on one day,
with simple good sense and good feeling on a second, with flat triviality
on another, and with the most slashing, often ultra-colloquial vehemency
on a fourth, or will vary through all these moods, and more, in one and
the same letter."
Fresh and spontaneous his letters invariably appear; with a touch of the
invalid's nervous haste, but never lacking in courage, and with nothing
of the querulousness which we connect with chronic ill-health. Weak and
ailing, shadowed by death for many years before the end, Stevenson showed
a fine fortitude, which will remain in the memory of his friends as his
most admirable character. With the consistency of Mark Tapley (and with
less talk about it) he determined to be jolly in all possible
circumstances. Right to the end his wonderful spirits, his courageous
gaiety attended him; the frail body grew frailer, but the buoyant
intellect never failed him, or if it did so the failure was momentary,
and in a moment he was recovered.
No little of his popularity is due to the desperate valour with which he
contested the ground with death, inch by inch, and died, as Buckle and
John Richard Green had done, in the midst of the work that he would not
quit. Romance was by him to the last, gladdening his tired body with her
presence; and if towards the end weariness and heart-sickness seized him
for a spell, yet the mind soon resumed its mastery over weakness. In a
prayer which he had written shortly before his death he had petitioned:
"Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun
lightens the world, so let our lovingkindness make bright this house of
our habitation." Assuredly in his case this characteristic petition had
been realized; the prevalent sunniness of his disposition attended him to
the last.