A certain Oxford lecturer, whose audience demurred to some trivial
mistranslation from the Greek, remarked: "I perceive, gentlemen, that
you have been taking a mean advantage of me. You have been looking it
out in the Lexicon."
The pleasant art of reasoning about literature on internal evidence
suffers constant discouragement from the presence and activity of
those little people who insist upon "looking it out in the Lexicon."
Their brutal methods will upset in two minutes the nice calculations
of months. Your logic, your taste, your palpitating sense of style,
your exquisite ear for rhythm and cadence--what do these avail against
the man who goes straight to Stationers' Hall or the Parish Register?
"Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail,"
as Mr. Kipling sings. The answer, of course, is that the beauty of
reasoning upon internal evidence lies in the process rather than the
results. You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some
conclusion which is entirely wrong: within a week you are set right by
some fellow with a Parish Register. Well, but meanwhile you have been
reading poetry, and he has not. Only the uninstructed judge criticism
by its results alone.
If, then, after studying Messrs. Stevenson and Osbourne's _The
Ebb-Tide_ (London: Heinemann) I hazard a guess or two upon its
authorship; and if somebody take it into his head to write out to
Samoa and thereby elicit the information that my guesses are entirely
wrong--why then we shall have been performing each of us his proper
function in life; and there's an end of the matter.
Let me begin though--after reading a number of reviews of the
book--by offering my sympathy to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Very possibly he
does not want it. I guess him to be a gentleman of uncommonly cheerful
heart. I hope so, at any rate: for it were sad to think that
indignation had clouded even for a minute the gay spirit that gave us
_The Wrong Box_--surely the funniest book written in the last ten
years. But he has been most shamefully served. Writing with him, Mr.
Stevenson has given us _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb-Tide_. Faults
may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in
the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are
splendid tales: nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a
singular and original pattern. Yet no reviewer praises them on their
own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in
relation to Mr. Stevenson's previous work, and the reviewers
concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr.
Stevenson's development--that he is not continuing as the public
expected him to continue.
Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn
comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them. But
of Mr. Stevenson's genius--always something wayward--freaks might have
been predicted from the first. A genius so consciously artistic, so
quick in sympathy with other men's writings, however diverse, was
bound from the first to make many experiments. Before the public took
his career in hand and mapped it out for him, he made such an
experiment with _The Black Arrow_; and it was forgiven easily enough.
But because he now takes Mr. Osbourne into partnership for a new set
of experiments, the reviewers--not considering that these, whatever
their faults, are vast improvements on _The Black Arrow_--ascribe all
those faults to the new partner.
But that is rough criticism. Moreover it is almost demonstrably false.
For the weakness of _The Wrecker_, such as it was, lay in the Paris
and Barbizon business and the author's failure to make this of one
piece with the main theme, with the romantic histories of the
_Currency Lass_ and the _Flying Scud_. But which of the two partners
stands responsible for this Pais-Barbizon business? Mr. Stevenson
beyond a doubt. If you shut your eyes to Mr. Stevenson's confessed
familiarity with the Paris and the Barbizon of a certain era; if you
choose to deny that he wrote that chapter on Fontainebleau in _Across
the Plains_; if you go on to deny that he wrote the opening of Chapter
XXI. of _The Wrecker_; why then you are obliged to maintain that it
was Mr. Osbourne, and not Mr. Stevenson, who wrote that famous chapter
on the Roussillon Wine--which is absurd. And if, in spite of its
absurdity, you stick to this also, why, then you are only
demonstrating that Mr. Lloyd Osbourne is one of the greatest living
writers of fiction: and your conception of him as a mere imp of
mischief jogging the master's elbow is wider of the truth than ever.
No; the vital defect of _The Wrecker_ must be set down to Mr.
Stevenson's account. Fine story as that was, it failed to assimilate
the Paris-Barbizon business. _The Ebb-Tide_, on the other hand, is all
of one piece. It has at any rate one atmosphere, and one only. And who
can demand a finer atmosphere of romance than that of the South
Pacific?
_The Ebb-Tide_, so far as atmosphere goes, is all of one piece. And
the story, too, is all of one piece--until we come to Attwater: I own
Attwater beats me. As Mr. Osbourne might say, "I have no use for" that
monstrous person. I wish, indeed, Mr. Osbourne _had_ said so: for
again I cannot help feeling that the offence of Attwater lies at Mr.
Stevenson's door. He strikes me as a bad dream of Mr. Stevenson's--a
General Gordon out of the _Arabian Nights_. Do you remember a drawing
of Mr. du Maurier's in _Punch_, wherein, seizing upon a locution of
Miss Rhoda Broughton's, he gave us a group of "magnificently ugly"
men? I seem to see Attwater in that group.
But if Mr. Stevenson is responsible for Attwater, surely also he
contributed the two splendid surprises of the story. I am the more
certain because they occur in the same chapter, and within three pages
of each other. I mean, of course, Captain Davis's sudden confession
about his "little Adar," and the equally startling discovery that the
cargo of the _Farallone_ schooner, supposed to be champagne, is mostly
water. These are the two triumphant surprises of the book: and I shall
continue to believe that only one living man could have contrived
them, until somebody writes to Samoa and obtains the assurance that
they are among Mr. Osbourne's contributions to the tale.
Two small complaints I have to make. The first is of the rather
inartistically high level of profanity maintained by the speech of
Davis and Huish. It is natural enough, of course; but that is no
excuse if the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper
impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed
on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may
call an ordinary negro "Julius Cæsar": for out of such extremes you
get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer
of the lovely _Hesperides_, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter
of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid
the association of ideas.
* * * * *
Dec. 22, 1894. R.L.S. In Memorium.
The Editor asks me to speak of Stevenson this week: because, since the
foundation of THE SPEAKER, as each new book of Stevenson's appeared, I
have had the privilege of writing about it here. So this column, too,
shall be filled; at what cost ripe journalists will understand, and
any fellow-cadet of letters may guess.
For when the telegram came, early on Monday morning, what was our
first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow passed and
the selfish instinct began to reassert itself (as it always does) and
whisper "What have _I_ lost? What is the difference to _me_?" Was it
not something like this--"Put away books and paper and pen. Stevenson
is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write
for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but
we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they
will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from
Britain--though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely
heard our names--we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each
writer amongst us--small or more than small--had been proud to have
carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was
not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to
put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never
meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of
letters--that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great
Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as
to its magnetic pole.
Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have
poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never
seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in
the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.
One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no
great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an
artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty
with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of
joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal
fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the
beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness--a
"soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his
books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of
duty: that he labored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for
the time, other and stronger men did not.
Had there been another Scott, another Dumas--if I may change the
image--to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if
Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he
would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of
new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for--let it be said again--no man
had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too,
of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the
world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the
constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him,
as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa--to die "far from Argos, dear
land of home."
And then consider the brave spirit that carried him--the last of a
great race--along this far and difficult path; for it is the man we
must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's
voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of
Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very
penumbra of death. Yet Stevenson spoke always as gallantly as his
great predecessor. Their "cheerful stoicism," which allies his books
with the best British breeding, will keep them classical as long as
our nation shall value breeding. It shines to our dim eyes now, as we
turn over the familiar pages of _Virginibus Puerisque_, and from page
after page--in sentences and fragments of sentences--"It is not
altogether ill with the invalid after all" ... "Who would project a
serial novel after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in
mid-course." [_He_ had two books at least in hand and uncompleted, the
papers say.] "Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he
dallied with the consideration of death?" ... "What sorry and pitiful
quibbling all this is!" ... "It is better to live and be done with it,
than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio;
even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over
a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a
week.... For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to
die young.... The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched,
the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds
of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the
spiritual land."
As it was in _Virginibus Puerisque_, so is it in the last essay in his
last book of essays:--
"And the Kingdom of Heaven is of the childlike, of those who are
easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of
their hands, the smiters, and the builders, and the judges, have
lived long and done sternly, and yet preserved this lovely
character; and among our carpet interests and two-penny concerns,
the shame were indelible if _we_ should lose it. _Gentleness and
cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the
perfect duties_...."
I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that,
when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head
(Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his
favorite, Sir Thomas Browne: a passage beginning "He was fruitlessly
put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure
Aerial Nitre of those Parts; and therefore, being so far spent, he
quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air of little
effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow...." A statelier sentence
of the same author occurs to me now--
"To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a
hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St.
Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything
in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the
_moles_ of Adrianus."
This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the
Pacific. At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency
than to accept Stevenson's loss. "O captain, my captain!" ... One
needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be
thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this
time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount
Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by
Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the
thick bush which covers the side of the hill from the base to the
peak." For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the
high sea-lights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of
their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still
shine upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore; and--though in alien
seas, upon a rock of exile--this other light shall continue,
unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene.
* * * * *