was the prize set before him; this he required of ferns and clouds,
of birds and swamps and deserted roads,--that they should stir him
inwardly, that they should do something to redeem his life, or, as
he said elsewhere, to affect the quality of the day. For this he
cultivated the “fellowship of the seasons,” a fellowship on which no
man ever made larger drafts. Even when nature seemed to be getting
“thumbed like an old spelling-book,” even in the month that tempted
him sometimes to “eat his heart,” he still “sat the bench with perfect
contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be
unrolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined.” A new
November was a novelty more tempting than any voyage to Europe or even
to another world. “Young men have not learned the phases of nature:” so
he comforted himself, when the fervors and inspirations of youth seemed
at times to be waning: “I would know when in the year to expect certain
thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.”
Here, as everywhere with Thoreau, nature, in his ultimate conception of
it, was nothing of itself. Everything is for man. This belief underlies
all his writing upon natural themes, and, as well, all his personal
dealings with the natural world. His idlest wanderings, whether in the
Maine forests or in Well Meadow field, were made serious by it. To
judge him by his own testimony, he seems to have known comparatively
little of a careless, purposeless, childish delight in nature for
its own sake. Nature was a better kind of book; and books were for
improvement. In this respect he was sophisticated from his youth, like
some model of “early piety.” Nature was not his playground, but his
study, his Bible, his closet, his means of grace. As we have said, and
as Channing long ago implied, his was a Puritan conscience. He must
get at the heart of things, sparing no pains nor time, holding through
thick and thin to the devotee’s faith: “To him that knocketh it shall
be opened.” In this spirit he waited upon nature and the motions of
his own genius. Patience, solitude, stillness, sincerity, and a quiet
mind,--these were the instruments of his art. With them, not with
prying sharp-sightedness, was the secret to be won. In his own phrase,
characteristic in its homely expressiveness, if you would appreciate a
phenomenon, though it be only a fern, you must “camp down beside it.”
And you must invent no distinctions of great and small. The humming of
a gnat must be as significant as the music of the spheres.
Was he too serious for his own good, whether as man or as writer? And
did he sometimes feel himself so? Was he whipping his own fault when he
spoke against conscientious, duty-ridden people, and praised
“simple laboring folk
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is a song”?
It is not impossible, of course. But he, too, loved his work,--loved
it so well as perhaps to need no playtime. Some have said that he
made too much of his “thoughts and moods,” that he was unwholesomely
beset with the idea of self-improvement. Others have thought that he
would have written better books had he stuck closer to science, and
paid less court to poetry and Buddhistic philosophy. Such objections
and speculations are futile. He did his work, and with it enriched
the world. In the strictest sense it was his _own_ work. If his ideal
escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Stevenson was one of the happy few: he knew his life’s business from
childhood. He was to write books. Happier still, and one of even
a smaller minority, he early discovered that authorship is an art
requiring a long and rigorous apprenticeship; that, if a man is to
write, he must first study how, putting himself under tuition and
devoting himself to practice; that an author no more than a pianist can
begin with “pieces” and a public performance. In short, Stevenson had
from the beginning an idea of literary composition as a fine art,--an
art not to be picked up some pleasant day by the roadside (as later
in life he essayed, for whim’s sake, to pick up the art of writing
music), nor carried away, as a matter of course, along with other more
or less useful odds and ends of knowledge, from the grammar school or
university, but to be acquired, if at all, by years on years of drill.
Another man may write “well enough,” and perhaps successfully, so far
as material rewards go, by nature and the rule of thumb; but the artist
aims at perfection,--perfection for its own sake. That aim, the pursuit
of that ideal, is what _makes_ him an artist. And such was Stevenson.
“All through my boyhood and youth,” he says, “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. I kept always two books in
my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy
fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside,
I would either read, or a pencil and a penny-version book would be in
my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some
halting stanzas.”
So he “lived with words.” And the point of the confession is that
these “childish tasks,” as he calls them in another place, were done
“consciously for practice.” “I had vowed that I would learn to write.
That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it,
as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.”
But he did more than to practice. A man does not learn to whittle, or
to paint, or to play the flute, by the primitive process of merely
trying his hand, be it ever so patiently. The fine arts are no longer
things to be invented, every man for himself. Others have whittled and
painted; one generation has bequeathed its increment of skill to the
next; here and there a master has arisen, and the masters have set up a
standard; and now, the standard being established, the essential matter
is, not to paint or write to the satisfaction of village critics, but
to prove one’s self a workman beside the best of the craft. For this
there needs acquaintance with the masters’ work,--such acquaintance,
or so young Stevenson was persuaded, as could come from nothing but
an imitative study of it. And he set himself to imitate. He had never
heard the dictum, or he disbelieved it, that a boy should read the best
writers, but pattern after nobody. Wherever he saw excellence of a kind
that appealed to him, he took it for the time being as his model, a
mark to aim at. This he did consciously and unashamed.
Such a course would never give him originality; but no matter. For the
present it was not originality he was seeking; he was not yet writing
books: he was learning his trade. Whether, having learned it, he
should turn out to have original genius to go with his knowledge and
put it to use, was a question that the event alone could determine.
Originality is a gift of the gods; it is born with a man, or it is not
born with him. The technique of a prose style, on the other hand, could
be learned, and Stevenson’s present business was to learn it, in the
only way of which he had any knowledge, the way in which his masters
themselves had learned it,--practice based on imitation.[7]
How could the boy have done better? He was called to write; he had “the
love of words” which, as he says, marks the writer’s vocation; and for
such a boy “to work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think
of his material and nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king’s
highway of progress.” Yes, “for a while;” and after the while, if he is
not merely one of the many that are called, but one of the few that are
chosen, he will have found his own line, and such originality as nature
endowed him with at birth (or before) will declare itself in the way
appointed.
Stevenson had the name of an idler, he tells us, and it must be said
that he wore it jauntily,--as he wore his old clothes. Whatever he
did or failed to do, it would have been hard to catch him without
defense. He wrote “An Apology for Idlers,” which, as he confided to
a correspondent, was “an apology for R. L. S.;” and to this day it
sounds like a good one. It would do many a hard-working man and useful
member of society a service to read it. He believed that, for the young
especially, a certain kind and measure of idleness is a profitable kind
of industry; while they are seemingly unemployed they may perchance be
learning something that is really worth while: “to play the fiddle,
to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all
varieties of men.”
For himself, like many another man of genius, he was very little of
a scholar in the traditional sense of the word. What the schools had
taken upon themselves to teach were mostly not the things that he had
taken upon himself to learn. At the university he devised “an extensive
and highly rational system of truantry,” and no one “ever had more
certificates (of attendance) for less education.” Like his antitype in
Mr. Barrie’s novel, he could always find a way. No doubt his personal
attractiveness counted for much here, as it did everywhere. One of
his earlier teachers had pronounced him “without exception the most
delightful boy he ever knew;” and his mother’s testimony is that his
masters found it pleasanter to talk with him than to teach him. How
his wits and his fine gift of plausibility helped him over a hard
place in one of the last of his examinations--for admission to the
bar--is related as from himself, by Mr. Balfour. The subject in hand
was “Ethical and Metaphysical Philosophy,” and a certain book had been
prescribed. “The examiner asked me a question,” Stevenson says, “and
I had to say to him, ‘I beg your pardon, but I do not understand your
phraseology.’ ‘It’s the text-book,’ he said. ‘Yes; but you couldn’t
possibly expect me to read so poor a book as that.’ He laughed like
a hunchback, and then put the question in another form. I had been
reading Mayne, and answered him by the historical method. They were
probably the most curious answers ever given in the subject. I don’t
know what he thought of them, but they got me through.”
It is a good story, and thoroughly characteristic. There was nothing
academic in Stevenson’s turn of mind, whether in youth or manhood.
“I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke,” he remarks, in
his “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin,” and the words may be taken as fairly
expressive of his attitude toward the whole business of what is called
education. The last thing he meant to be was a conventional man,--“a
consistent first-class passenger in life,”--and why should he disquiet
himself over a conventional training? Allow him his own subject and his
own method, and he would be studious with anybody.
So throughout his early years, as we have seen, he studied the art
of authorship. Then, as happens to all artists, came the critical
point of production or non-production. Would the plant so sedulously
watered and tended, so promising in the leaf, prove to be fertile or
sterile? Having so lofty an idea of his art, so exalted a standard of
excellence in it, would he go on indefinitely putting himself off with
preparations, “prelusory gymnastic,” as he saw so many painters doing
at Barbizon (“snoozers” instead of painters, covering their walls with
studies, and never coming to the picture), and as is so easy for art
students of all kinds to do, or, having learned the handling of his
tools, would he set himself to use them in the performance of a man’s
work?
Such a question is by no means one that answers itself. In any
particular case there is perhaps more than an even chance that the
student will never have the industry, the courage, and the intellectual
and moral stuff to accomplish, or even seriously put his hand to,
any of the great things for which he has so long been making ready.
Stevenson himself, from all that appears, may have had at the beginning
a period when the issue hung more or less in doubt. “I remember a
time,” he wrote afterward, “when I was very idle, and lived and
profited by that humor.” Now, he says, the case is different with him,
he knows not why. Perhaps it is “a change of age.” He made many slight
efforts at reform, “had a thousand skirmishes to keep himself at work
upon particular mornings;” the life of Goethe affected him, as did also
some noble remarks of Balzac, but he was never conscious of a struggle,
“never registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personally to
do with the matter.” “I came about like a well-handled ship,” he
concludes. “There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we
call God.”
In his twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, at all events, he was really
getting under way, though for the present, as was becoming, with small
ventures; and from that time, except for the frequent occasions when
illness and the likelihood of speedy death constrained him to “twiddle
his fingers and play patience,” he kept his pen busy as few men of
anything like his physical disabilities and his roving disposition
have ever done. For it is important to note that he was by inheritance
a wanderer. Even had his health allowed it, he could never have sat
month after month at the same desk, turning off so many hundred words
as his daily stint. Once, when he has lived for six months at Davos,
he writes to his friend Colvin that he is in a bad way,--a result, he
believes, of having been too long in one place. “That tells on my old
gypsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there
was in me.” And when his mother complained that he was little at home,
he bade her not be vexed at his nomadic habits. “I _must_ be a bit of a
vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have
had a tramp for a son.”
For a man who had studied authorship, and wished to write not mainly
from books, but from the experience of his own mind and body, this
ineradicable gypsy strain was of the highest value. How much it
imported to Stevenson should be evident even to those who know his
books only by the backs of them. Bodily health excepted, he had
all the qualifications of a traveler. Happy man that he was, he
was always a boy, rich to the last in some of the best of youthful
virtues,--buoyancy, curiosity, “interest in the whole page of
experience,” and the capacity for surprise. The world for him was never
an old story. When he saw a ship or a train of cars, he wished himself
aboard. Discomforts and dangers were nothing; nay, they could be turned
into excellent fun, and after that into almost as excellent copy. His
spirit was habitually strung up to out-of-door pitch, to borrow his own
expression. He felt “the incommunicable thrill of things.” Not for him
a staid life in drawing-rooms or city clubs. He would be out in the
open, “where men still live a man’s life.” At forty he wrote his own
formula thus: “0.55 artist, 0.45 adventurer.” Near the same time, being
just from the island of Molokai, where he had played croquet with
seven leper girls (and would not wear gloves, though cautioned to that
effect, lest it should make the girls unhappy to be reminded of their
condition), he writes to a friend: “This climate; these voyagings;
these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new
forested harbors; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests
of gentle natives,--the whole tale of my life is better to me than any
poem.” A lucky combination it was, both for the man himself and for the
world of readers,--fifty-five per cent artist, and forty-five per cent
adventurer.
And the adventures, of course, need not be so extraordinarily
venturesome, with an artist’s pen to put them on the paper. In 1887
Stevenson had been once more at the gates of death with hemorrhages,
this time so often repeated that they had ceased almost to be exciting,
and were rather grown tiresome; and when the doctors prescribed another
change of climate, he sailed for America. The steamer turned out to be
loaded with cattle,--“a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors
to talk to;” and this is how the consumptive patient describes the
voyage: “I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed
it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but
the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could
cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss
all manner of things, and really be a little at sea.... My heart
literally sang.... It is worth having lived these last years, partly
because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but
chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage.”
Later, in the South Seas, he ran more than once upon the very edge
of shipwreck, but always with the same brave heart and the same
gayety. “We had a near squeak,” he writes to a friend, after one such
experience. “The reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The
pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a
lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about
the boats, remarked to my mother, ‘Isn’t that nice? We shall soon be
ashore!’ Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge
of eternity.” And thus, be it added, does the artistic masculine mind
turn even the face of death itself “to favor and to prettiness.”
By this time Stevenson had almost settled it with himself that he
should never again leave the sea. “My poor grandfather, it is from him
that I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his
day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is
sounded.... Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep
among the chimney-stacks and telegraph wires.” One feels like saying
again, What a blessing it was for the world that a man so perennially
boyish, so endowed with the capacity for enjoyment, so conscious of his
life, so incurably in love with the romantic side of things, was also
the master of a style and an industrious lover of the art of writing!
His remark, quoted above, about the “plenty of sailors to talk to”
suggests another thing: his exceeding fondness for rubbing elbows
with what are called, inappropriately enough, common people,--people
who have lived free from the leveling, uniformity-producing,
character-dulling, commonizing influences of too many books and an
excess of social sophistication. This, too, was a real fairy’s gift
to a man destined for literature. “He was of a conversible temper”
(he is speaking of himself in his youth), “and insatiably curious
in the aspects of life.” Like Will o’ the Mill, “he had a taste for
other people, and other people had a taste for him.” As we read of his
journeyings hither and thither, and the friends he made almost as often
as he opened his mouth, we are reminded of what David Balfour’s father
said of his offspring: “He is a steady lad and a canny goer; and I
doubt not he will come safe, and be well liked where he goes.” Perhaps
it was from his own experience that Stevenson was writing when he said
that a boy might learn in his truant hours “to know a good cigar, or to
speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.”
Stevenson’s books, the narratives of travel and the essays not less
than the novels,--perhaps even more,--are galleries of portraits.
Wherever he went, he found men: not caricatures, mere burlesques
and oddities, cheap material for print, creatures of a single crying
peculiarity, so easily drawn and, for one reading, so “effective;” nor
lay figures simply, wire frames (literature is populated with them)
on which to hang “the trappings of composition;” but breathing men,
full, like the rest of us, of complexity and paradox, nobly designed,
perhaps, but--still like the rest of us--more or less spoiled in the
making; men who had known, each for himself, the war in the members
(happy for them if they knew it still!), and had drunk, every one, of
the mingled cup of tragedy and comedy. He loved the sight of them;
their talk, wise or foolish, was music to his ears; and the queerest
and ugliest of them, under his capable and affectionate hand, wear
something of a human grace upon the canvas.
It is a great gallery. Who that has ever walked there will forget the
old soldier turned beggar, the borrower of poets’ books?--“the wreck
of an athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption,
with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken in his face; but
still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the ready
military salute.” We can see him, “striding forward uphill, his staff
now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in
the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all
the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking
out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big,
crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.” His honest head may have
been “very nearly empty, his intellect like a child’s,” but he loved
the unexpected words and the moving cadence of good verse. We know
his talk; a little more, and we should hear it: “Keats,--John Keats,
sir,--he was a very fine poet.”
A book like “The Amateur Emigrant” is full of such sketches, every one
done from life, and hit off with a perfection that might well render
it and the volume, as foolish mortals say, “immortal.” It would be
long to enumerate them, though it is a short book. There is Jones the
Welshman, for example,--“my excellent friend Mr. Jones,” owner and
dispenser of the Golden Oil; “hovering round inventions like a bee
over a flower, and living in a dream of patents.” He had been rich,
and now was poor, but, like all dabblers in patents, he had “a nature
that looked forward.” “If the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look
to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights.” What _we_ should have cared most to see was Mr.
Jones and Mr. Stevenson walking the deck by the hour and dissecting
their neighbors; for Jones was first of all a student of character.
“Whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you
might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly
go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the
day’s experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a
day’s kill.” And there is the fiddler, “carrying happiness about with
him in his fiddle-case,” a “white-faced Orpheus cheerily playing to an
audience of white-faced women,” with his fiery bit of a brother, who
“made a god of the fiddler,” and was determined that everybody else
should do the same; and Mackay, the cynic and debater, who professed
to believe in nothing but what had to do with food (“that’s the bottom
and the top”), but who once grew so eager in maintaining this noble
thesis that he slipped the meal hour, and was compelled, with a smile
of shamefacedness, to go without his tea; and Barney the Irishman,
the universal favorite, so natural and happy, with his “tight little
figure, unquenchable gayety, and indefatigable good will,” who could
sing most acceptably and play all manner of innocent pranks, but whose
“drab clothes were immediately missing from the group” when, after the
ladies had retired, some one struck up an indecent song; and the sick
man (poor soul), who thought it was “by” with him, and who had a good
house at home, and “no call to be here;” and the two stowaways, so fond
of each other, yet so strikingly contrasted,--one so ready to work for
his passage, the other “a skulker in the grain,” and like the devil
himself for lying.
And besides these there are numbers more nearly or quite as telling;
but they must be let pass, though it is pleasant to pick good things
out of a book that, comparatively speaking, seems to have been little
made of, either by the author or by his admirers. To one of these, at
least, “The Amateur Emigrant” seems, not one of Stevenson’s greatest
books, indeed, but certainly one of the most enjoyable, say on the
sixth or eighth reading.