Thus gallantly he appears in my mind’s eye when I pause in rereading
one of his books and summon up a fantasm of the author,—Robert Louis
Stevenson, gentleman adventurer in life and letters, his brown eyes
shining in a swarthy face, his lean, long-enduring body adorned with a
black-velvet jacket.
This garment is no disguise but a symbol. It is short, so as not to
impede him with entangling tails. It is unconventional, as a protest
against the tyranny of fashion. But it is of velvet, mark you, to
match a certain niceness of choice and preference of beauty,—yes, and
probably a touch of bravura,—in all its wearer’s vagaries. ’Tis like the
silver spurs, broad sombrero and gay handkerchief of the thoroughbred
cowboy,—not an element of the dandiacal, but a tribute to romance.
Strange that the most genuine of men usually have a bit of this in their
composition; your only incurable _poseur_ being the fellow who affects
never to pose and betrays himself by his attitude of scorn.
Of course, Stevenson did not always wear this symbolic garment. In fact
the only time I met him in the flesh his clothes had a discouraging
resemblance to those of the rest of us at the Authors Club in New York.
And a few months ago, when I traced his “footprints on the sands of
time” at Waikiki beach, near Honolulu, the picture drawn for me by those
who knew him when he passed that way, was that of a lank, bare-footed,
bright-eyed, sun-browned man who daundered along the shore in white-duck
trousers and a shirt wide open at the neck. But the velvet jacket was in
his wardrobe, you may be sure, ready for fitting weather and occasion. He
wore it, very likely, when he went to beard the Honolulu colourman who
was trying to “do” his stepson-in-law in the matter of a bill for paints.
He put it on when he banqueted with his amiable but bibulous friend, King
Kalakaua. You can follow it through many, if not most, of the photographs
which he had taken from his twentieth to his forty-fourth, and last,
year. And in his style you can almost always feel it,—the touch of
distinction, the ease of a native elegance, the assurance of a well-born
wanderer,—in short, the velvet jacket.
[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_From a photograph, negative of which is owned by Charles Scribner’s
Sons._]
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson began the adventure of life in a decent
little house in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on November 13, 1850. He
completed it on the Samoan island of Upolu in the South Seas, December 3,
1894,—completed it, I think, for though he left his work unfinished he
had arrived at the port of honour and the haven of happy rest.
His father, and his father’s father, were engineers connected with the
Board of Northern Lights. This sounds like being related to the Aurora
Borealis; and indeed there was something of mystery and magic about
Stevenson, as if an influence from that strange midnight dawn had entered
his blood. But as a matter of fact the family occupation was nothing more
uncanny than that of building and maintaining lighthouses and beacons
along the Scottish coast, a profession in which they won considerable
renown and to which the lad himself was originally assigned. He made a
fair try at it, and even won a silver medal for an essay on improvements
in lighthouses. But the calling did not suit him, and he said afterward
that he gained little from it except “properties for some possible
romance, or words to add to my vocabulary.”
This lanky, queer, delicate, headstrong boy was a dreamer of dreams, and
from youth desperately fond of writing. He felt himself a predestinated
author, and like a true Scot toiled diligently to make his calling and
election sure.
But there was one thing for which he cared more than for writing,
and that was living. He plunged into it eagerly, with more zest than
wisdom, trying all the games that cities offer, and learning some rather
disenchanting lessons at a high price. For in truth neither his physical,
nor (as he later discovered) his moral, nature was suited to the sowing
of wild oats. His constitution was one of the frailest ever exposed to
the biting winds and soaking mists of the North British Boston. Early
death seemed to be written in his horoscope. But an indomitable spirit
laughs at dismal predictions. Robert Louis Stevenson, (as he now called
himself, velvet-jacketing his own name,) was not the man to be easily
snuffed out by weak lungs or wild weather. Mocking at “bloody Jack” he
held fast to life with grim, cheerful, grotesque courage; his mother, his
wife, his trusty friends, heartened him for the combat; and he succeeded
in having a wider experience and doing more work than falls to the lot of
many men in rudely exuberant health. To do this calls for a singular kind
of bravery, not inferior to, nor unlike, that of the good soldier who
walks with Death undismayed.
Undoubtedly Stevenson was born with a _Wanderlust_.
“My mistress was the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.”
Ill health gave occasion and direction to many voyages and experiments,
some of which bettered him, while others made him worse. As a bachelor
he roamed mountains afoot and travelled rivers in his own boat, explored
the purlieus and sublittorals of Paris, London, and Edinburgh, lodged “on
the seacoast of Bohemia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant, and made
himself vagrantly at home in California where he married the wife “the
great Artificer made for him.” They passed their honeymoon in a deserted
miner’s cabin, and then lived around, in Scotland, the Engadine, Southern
France, Bournemouth, the Adirondacks, and on a schooner among the South
Sea Islands, bringing up at last in the pleasant haven of Vailima. On
all these distant roads Death pursued him, and, till the last ten years,
Poverty was his companion. Yet he looked with keen and joyful eyes
upon the changing face of the world and into its shadowy heart without
trembling. He kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched even when
the lights burned low. He counted life
“just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on and educe the man.”
He may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, things may have looked black
to him; but he never gave up, and in spite of frailties and burdens, he
travelled a long way,—upward. Through all his travels and tribulations he
kept on writing, writing, writing,—the very type of a migratory author.
He made his first appearance in a canoe. The log of this journey,
_An Inland Voyage on French Rivers_, published in 1878, was a modest,
whimsical, charming début in literature. In 1879 he appeared again,
and this time with a quaint companion. _Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes_ is one of the most delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a
journey ever written in English. It contains no practical information but
plenty of pleasure and profit. I do not envy the reader who can finish
it without loving that obstinate little mouse-coloured Modestine, and
feeling that she is one of the best-drawn female characters, of her race,
in fiction.
From this good, quiet beginning his books followed rapidly, and (after
_Treasure Island_, that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with growing
popularity among the judicious, the “gentle readers,” who choose
books not because they are recommended by professors or advertised in
department stores, but because they are really well written and worth
reading.
It is difficult to classify Stevenson’s books, perhaps just because they
are migrants, borderers. Yet I think a rough grouping, at least of his
significant works, may be made. There are five volumes of travels; six
or seven volumes of short stories; nine longer novels or romances; three
books of verse; three books of essays; one biography; and one study of
South Sea politics. This long list lights up two vital points in the man:
his industry and his versatility.
“A virtue and a vice,” say you? Well, that may be as you choose to
take it, reader. But if you say it in a sour or a puritanical spirit,
Stevenson will gaily contradict you, making light of what you praise and
vaunting what you blame.
Industry? Nonsense! Did he not write _An Apology for Idlers_? Yet
unquestionably he was a toiler; his record proves it. Fleeing from one
land to another to shake off his implacable enemy; camping briefly in
strange places; often laid on his back by sickness and sometimes told
to “move on” by Policeman Penury; collecting his books by post and
correcting his proofs in bed; he made out to produce twenty-nine volumes
in sixteen years,—say 8,000 pages of 300 words, each,—a thing manifestly
impossible without a mort of work. But of this he thought less than of
the fact that he did it, as a rule, cheerfully and with a high heart.
Herein he came near to his own ideal of success: “To be honest, to be
kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the
whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be
necessary and not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these
without capitulation,—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep
friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude
and delicacy.” Of his work I think he would have said that he stuck to
it, first, because he needed the money that it brought in, and second,
because he enjoyed it exceedingly. With this he would have smiled away
the puritan who wished to pat him on the back for industry.
That he was versatile, turned from one subject to another, tried many
forms of his art, and succeeded in some better than in others, he would
have admitted boldly—even before those critics who speak slightingly
of versatility as if it marked some inferiority in a writer, whereas
they dislike it chiefly because it gives them extra trouble in putting
him into his precise pigeonhole of classification. Stevenson would
have referred these gentlemen to his masters Scott and Thackeray for a
justification. His versatility was not that of a weathercock whirled
about by every wind of literary fashion, but that of a well-mounted gun
which can be turned towards any mark. He did not think that because he
had struck a rich vein of prose story-telling he must follow that lead
until he had worked it or himself out. He was a prospector as well as a
miner. He wished to roam around, to explore things, books, and men, to
see life vividly as it is, and then to write what he thought of it in any
form that seemed to him fit,—essay, or story, or verse. And this he did,
thank God, without misgiving, and on the whole greatly to our benefit and
enjoyment.
I am writing now of the things which make his books companionable. That
is why I have begun with a thumb-nail sketch of the man in the velvet
jacket who lives in them and in his four volumes of letters,—the best
English letters, it seems to me, since Lamb and Thackeray. That also is
why I have not cared to interrupt this simple essay by telling which of
his works strike me as comparative failures, and giving more or less
convincing reasons why certain volumes in my “collective edition” are
less worn than others.
’Tis of these others that I wish to speak,—the volumes whose bindings
are like a comfortable suit of old clothes and on whose pages there are
pencil-marks like lovers’ initials cut upon the bark of friendly trees.
What charm keeps them alive and fresh, in an age when most books five
years old are considered out of date and everything from the unspacious
times of Queen Victoria is cordially damned? What manner of virility is
in them to evoke, and to survive, such a flood of “Stevensoniana”? What
qualities make them still welcome to so wide a range of readers, young
and old, simple and learned,—yes, even among that fair and capricious
sex whose claim to be courted his earlier writings seem so lightly (or
prudently) to neglect?
I
Over and above the attraction of his pervading personality, I think
the most obvious charm of Stevenson’s books lies in the clear, vivid,
accurate and strong English in which they are written. Reading them is
like watching a good golfer drive or putt the ball with clean strokes
in which energy is never wanting and never wasted. He does not foozle,
or lose his temper in a hazard, or brandish his brassy like a war-club.
There is a grace of freedom in his play which comes from practice and
self-control.
Stevenson describes (as far as such a thing is possible) the way in which
he got his style. “All through my boyhood and youth,” says he, “I was
known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler, and yet I was always
busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.” He traces
with gusto, and doubtless with as much accuracy as can be expected in a
map drawn from memory, the trails of early admiration which he followed
towards this goal. His list of “authors whom I have imitated” is most
entertaining: Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, Obermann. In another essay, on “Books
Which Have Influenced Me,” he names _The Bible_, _Hamlet_, _As You Like
It_, _King Lear_, _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_, _The Pilgrim’s Progress_,
_Leaves of Grass_, Herbert Spencer’s books, Lewes’s _Life of Goethe_,
the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius, the poems of Wordsworth, George
Meredith’s _The Egoist_, the essays of Thoreau and Hazlitt, Mitford’s
_Tales of Old Japan_,—a strange catalogue, but not incoherent if you
remember that he is speaking now more of their effect upon his way of
thinking than of their guidance in his manner of writing,—though in this
also I reckon he learned something from them, especially from the English
Bible.
Besides the books which he read, he carried about with him little
blank-books in which he jotted down the noteworthy in what he saw, heard,
or imagined. He learned also from penless authors, composers without a
manuscript, masters of the _viva-voce_ style, like Robert, the Scotch
gardener, and John Todd, the shepherd. When he saw a beggar on horseback,
he cared not where the horse came from, he watched the rascal ride.
If an expression struck him “for some conspicuous force, some happy
distinction,” he promptly annexed it;—because he understood it, it was
his.
In two separate essays, each of which he calls “A Gossip,” he pays
tribute to “the bracing influence of old Dumas,” and to the sweeping
power and broad charm of Walter Scott, “a great romantic—an idle child,”
the type of easy writers. But Stevenson is of a totally different type,
though of a kindred spirit. He is the best example in modern English of
a careful writer. He modelled and remodelled, touched and retouched his
work, toiled tremendously. The chapter on Honolulu in _The Wrecker_, was
rewritten ten times. His essays for _Scribner’s Magazine_ passed through
half a dozen revisions.
His end in view was to bring his language closer to life, not to use
the common language of life. That, he maintained, was too diffuse, too
indiscriminate. He wished to condense, to distil, to bring out the real
vitality of language. He was like _Sentimental Tommy_ in Barrie’s book,
willing to cogitate three hours to find the solitary word which would
make the thing he had in mind stand out distinct and unmistakable.
What matter if his delay to finish his paper lost him the prize in the
competition? Tommy’s prize was the word; when he had that his work was
crowned.
A willingness to be content with the wrong colour, to put up with the
word which does not fit, is the mark of inferior work. For example, the
author of _Trilby_, wishing to describe a certain quick, retentive look,
speaks of the painter’s “_prehensile_ eye.” The adjective startles, but
does not illuminate. The prehensile quality belongs to tails rather than
to eyes.
There is a modern school of writers fondly given to the cross-breeding of
adjectives and nouns. Their idea of a vivid style is satisfied by taking
a subject which belongs to one region of life and describing it in terms
drawn from another. Thus if they write of music, they use the language of
painting; if of painting, they employ the terminology of music. They give
us pink songs of love, purple roars of anger, and gray dirges of despair.
Or they describe the andante passages of a landscape, and the minor key
of a heroine’s face.
This is the extravagance of a would-be pointed style which mistakes the
incongruous for the brilliant. Stevenson may have had something to do
with the effort to escape from the polished commonplace of an English
which admitted no master earlier than Addison or later than Macaulay.
He may have been a leader in the hunting of the unexpected, striking,
pungent word. But for the excesses and absurdities of this school of
writing in its decadence, he had no liking. He knew that if you are going
to use striking words you must be all the more careful to make them hit
the mark.
He sets forth his theory of style in the essay called _A Humble
Remonstrance_. It amounts to this: First, you shall have an idea, a
controlling thought; then you shall set your words and sentences marching
after it as soldiers follow their captain; and if any turns back, looks
the other way, fails to keep step, you shall put him out of the ranks as
a malingerer, a deserter at heart. “The proper method of literature,”
says he, “is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration.”
But the positive exaggeration,—the forced epithet, the violent phrase,
the hysterical paragraph,—he does not allow. Hence we feel at once a
restraint and an intensity, a poignancy and a delicacy in his style,
which make it vivid without ever becoming insane even when he describes
insanity, as he does in _The Merry Men_, _Olalla_, and _Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde_. His words are focussed on the object as with a burning-glass.
They light it up; they kindle it; but they do not distort it.
Now a style like this may have its occasional fatigues: it may convey a
sense of over-carefulness, of a choice somewhat too meticulous,—to use
a word which in itself illustrates my meaning. But after all it has a
certain charm, especially in these days of slipshod, straddling English.
You like to see a man put his foot down in the right place, neither
stumbling nor swaggering. The assurance with which he treads may be the
result of forethought and concentration, but to you, reading, it gives
a feeling of ease and confidence. You follow him with pleasure because
he knows where he is going and has taken pains to study the best way of
getting there.
Take a couple of illustrations from the early sketches which Stevenson
wrote to accompany a book of etchings of Edinburgh,—hack work, you may
call them; but even hack work can be done with a nice conscience.
Here is the Edinburgh climate: “The weather is raw and boisterous in
winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological
purgatory in spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor among
bleak winds and plumping rains, have been sometimes tempted to envy them
their fate.”
Here is the Scottish love of home: (One of the tall “lands,” inhabited
by a hundred families, has crumbled and gone down.) “How many people all
over the world, in London, Canada, New Zealand, could say with truth,
‘The house I was born in fell last night’!”
Now turn to a volume of short stories. Here is a Hebridean night, in _The
Merry Men_: “Outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and
there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near
the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless
quiet.”
Here is a sirocco in Spain: “It came out of malarious lowlands, and over
several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom it blew were strung
and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their legs ached under
the burden of their body; and the touch of one hand upon another grew to
be odious.”
Now take an illustration from one of his very early essays, _Notes on the
Movements of Young Children_, printed in 1874. Here are two very little
girls learning to dance: “In these two, particularly, the rhythm was
sometimes broken by an excess of energy, _as though the pleasure of the
music in their light bodies could endure no longer the restraint of the
regulated dance_.”
These examples are purposely chosen from tranquil pages; there is nothing
far-fetched or extraordinary about them; yet I shall be sorry for you,
reader, if you do not feel something rare and precious in a style like
this, in which the object, however simple, is made alive with a touch,
and stands before you as if you saw it for the first time.