"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.