with the essayist, that he should be able to speak often of himself
without offense, as Montaigne and Lamb did, to mention two shining
and incontestable examples. And the trick (though it is not a trick,
but an admirable quality, and almost as far as honesty from being
common) is none of your easy ones. To begin with, the venturer on such
an experiment must be interested in himself, which is by no means an
ordinary happening. Most men, we may say, count for nullities under
this head; they recognize their outward presentments in the glass,
no doubt, and are letter-perfect with their names and occupations;
but for a knowledge of their inner selves, the story of their real
lives, the “wonderful pageant of consciousness,” one might almost
as well interrogate the lamp-post on the next corner. They have
never kept company with their own thoughts, nor been in the least
degree inquisitive about them. Life, as they live it, is a matter of
externals, of eating and drinking and being clothed, of getting and
spending more or less money, of being amused, of movings up or down on
a social ladder. As for the past, the past of themselves,--which with
another man is his dearest possession,--it is mainly as if it had never
been. They must have had a boy’s dreams once, one would think, but that
was long, long ago, and the dreamer is dead, and his dreams with him.
But if a man is to tell the world about himself, and charm it into
attention, he must not only be in love with his subject; he must have
a natural frankness, an unaffected and almost unconscious delight in
self-revelation,--tempered by a decent sense of personal privacy,--such
as infallibly commends itself and makes its way, the listener cannot
tell how. In other words, and in a good sense, the man must be still a
boy, endowed with a boy’s winning attributes, and entitled, therefore,
to something of a boy’s privilege. And with all the rest, and among the
most important, he must be favored with the gracious quality of humor.
Of all talk whatsoever, talk about one’s self must not be too serious.
No man (or none but a great poet) can safely indulge in it unless it
is natural for him to see the funny side of his own foibles, and at
the right minute to make his point at his own expense. All of which is
perhaps no more than to say that the writer in the first person must be
a man of taste, knowing (a wisdom which nobody under the sun can teach
him) what to say and what not to say, and, chiefest of all, how and
when to say it.
Stevenson did not talk of himself so freely as Montaigne (how could he,
in these proper days?) nor, the present scribe being judge, so adorably
as Lamb. Nature herself is little likely to hit the white centre of
perfection twice, and we shall perhaps see another Shakespeare as soon
as another Lamb; but few have loved a personal theme better, and in the
handling of it there were none among the living to surpass him. He had
every qualification for the work. A pity he died at forty-four,--a pity
in every aspect of the case, but especially when it is considered what
treasures of youthful reminiscence he would have left behind him had
he lived even to the approaches of old age. Such a devotee of his own
past should have been spared to see it through a bluer haze. Yet even
in middle life how fair it looked to him, and how lovingly he laid its
colors as he transferred the picture to the page! Hear him speak of
his grandfather, in a passage no better than is common with him, and
dealing with nothing out of the ordinary:--
“Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I
must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am
I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear
them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have
sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am
still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read
aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare, also,
and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been
told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that
kind of work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool,
and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before
I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I,
but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach
of contract. He had chalkstones in his fingers; and these in good
time I may inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble
presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend
doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he
moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the
very knot and centre of my being.”
A man could talk of himself in that strain till the sun put the stars
out, and nobody would vote him tiresome or blame him for an egotist.
Yes, a misfortune it was that he could not have lived to write a dozen
books full of essays like “The Manse,” “Old Mortality,” “Memoirs
of an Islet,” and especially “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s.” So
appreciative a reader and so entertaining a talker could never have
wearied us with gossip of his favorite books, “the inner circle of his
intimates;” and the more first-personal and confidential he became, the
better we should have liked it.
Well, since we cannot have the finished essays, we will be the
more thankful for the letters. How good they are!--so varied, so
spontaneous, so free-spoken, so humanly wise and so deliciously
nonsensical; now bubbling over with jest, now touching the deepest
springs of thought and action; fit expression of a man who was himself
both Ariel and Prospero; “an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman,”
yet with “always some childishness on hand;” the “grandson of the
Manse,” who would rise from the grave to preach, and has “scarce broken
a commandment to mention,” yet owning it as his darling wish to be a
pirate. Whim and opinion, settled conviction and passing mood, alike
find utterance in them; and best of all, perhaps, many of them are most
engagingly rich in matter connected with his own pursuit. A selection
of these in a handy volume (why must letters always be put up in a form
too cumbersome for lovers’ convenience, as if they, more than other
books, were expected to stand forever upon a shelf?) would go far to
supply the place of that treatise on “The Art of Literature” which
their author spoke so frequently of making.
Here would be found a letter to Mr. Marcel Schwob, a letter one page
long, but weighty with the subtlest and pithiest criticism, not of Mr.
Schwob’s writings alone (that might not seem so very important), but
of writing in general, and in particular of Stevenson’s. For it is
impossible to read it without perceiving that the critic is passing
judgment (no unkind one) upon his own early books of sentimental
travel. His correspondent has sent him a volume of verses. He has read
it through twice, and is reading it again,--a handsome compliment, to
start with. It is essentially graceful, he says, but is a thing of
promise rather than a thing final in itself. “You have yet to give to
us--and I am expecting it with impatience--something of a larger gait;
something daylit, not twilit; something with the colors of life, not
the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be _said_
with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not _sung_
like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well,
but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more
worldly, more nourished, more commonplace--and not so pretty, perhaps
not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on
in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain
qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art;
even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these
exquisite pieces, ... you will perhaps never excel them.... Well, you
will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.”
Happy poet! to be caressed so affectionately and lanced so beneficently
with one stroke of the master’s hand; and happy critic, no less! having
sentences of this quality to drop without a second thought, like
small change from the hand of wealth, into the oblivion of private
correspondence.
In truth, Stevenson could afford to be generous; he had always good
things enough and to spare. His was a mind incessantly active. He was
always covering paper. If only disease would leave him strength enough
to hold the pen, he could be trusted to keep it going. Ideas thronged
upon him; books by the dozen, one may almost say, stood waiting for him
to make them. The more wonder that, with all this excess of fertility,
he could yet rewrite and rewrite, and then write again, still on the
search for perfection. Surely the artist was strong in him.
His fame was of slow growth, surprising as the fact seems now, till he
wrote novels. These, as all the world knows, since all the world reads
them, are nothing like the ordinary modern novel of carpet knights and
pairs of happy or unhappy lovers. They are romances in the heroic vein,
spun mostly of a single thread, with no lack of high lights, plenty of
blood-letting, a good spice of humor, dialogue that is closely pared
and talks of itself, character displayed in action, not dissected, and
movement to delight the lover of a story.
The lode was struck, almost by accident, when Stevenson’s schoolboy
stepson son, backed by another “schoolboy in disguise,”--namely,
Stevenson’s father,--begged him to “write something interesting.” The
response to this reasonable request was “Treasure Island,” which not
only filled the schoolboys’ bill, but captivated so stout-hearted a
disbeliever in things romantic as Mr. Henry James. As it was this story
that introduced its author to a wider public, he used to speak of it
(possibly with a shade of irony, though that does not certainly appear)
as his first book.
It may be that the gift of romance was the highest of his endowments.
Some, at least, have thought so, and have reckoned the novels as
not only the most popular, but the greatest of his works. As to the
choice among them, the question of their comparative excellence among
themselves, that is a matter not under discussion here, the writer
of the present paper having no sort of competency for dealing with
it. His own special delight is in “David Balfour” (the two parts) and
“Treasure Island.” These he hopes to read--now and then a chapter,
if no more--as long as he reads anything. He likes the men--and the
women,--and he likes the talk. Mr. James’s comment upon “Treasure
Island,” that one seems to be reading it over a schoolboy’s shoulder,
strikes him as extremely ingenious and pretty, but he is conscious
of nothing of that nature himself. He reads it, if he may be allowed
to say so, on his own hook, and for the time being is himself the
schoolboy,--which may or may not be the better fun. He likes the story
and the pictures,--for every chapter _is_ a picture,--and he likes the
writing.
Concerning this last point, so often discussed, what shall be said?
As Stevenson’s nature was complex and his themes varied, so he wrote
in many keys. His prose was never “far from variation and quick
change.” When he put pen to any work,--essay, travel, sketch, tragedy,
or comedy,--the first thing was to strike “the essential note.” He
would not begin a funeral march in A major, nor a sailor’s hornpipe
in C minor; a requiem for the friend of his youth was one thing, and
a description of his fellow passengers in the steerage was another:
and, strange to tell, here and there a wise critic, wise above what
is written, has discovered in this change of key proof of a want of
originality. “Behold,” he cries, “the man has no style of his own;
to-day he writes in one manner, and to-morrow in another.” The same
sharp-eyed reviewers are certain to be troubled because Stevenson talks
freely of style, openly professing to have cultivated one,--to have
cared not only for what he said, but almost or quite as much for the
way in which he said it. “How can a man be concerned with the niceties
of expression, and yet be true to himself?” they seem ready to ask. A
question to which, it must be admitted, there is no answer, or none
worth the offering to any who need to ask for it.
To be greatly occupied with matters of form is doubtless to subject
one’s self to peril. Careful writing may easily become mannered (as
careless writing also may, and with less excuse); but what then? Danger
is the common lot. An author, not less than other men, must face it,
whether he will or no. He may choose between one set of pitfalls and
another, but he will find no path without them. As for the risk of
mannerism, Stevenson escaped it substantially unharmed. Compared with
some of the more famous of his style-loving contemporaries, he may be
said to have come off without a scratch. Whether his style is better or
worse than theirs (and touching a point so delicate an unprofessional
critic may prudently reserve his opinion) is a different matter; at
least, it is less tagged with peculiarity. It was formed, as style
should be, by the study of many models, not of one; and it has many
virtues, including in good measure one of the highest, rarest, and most
elusive, the quality of pleasurableness, or charm,--a quality not to be
acquired by labor, nor to be exactly defined; a something added to a
thing already complete, like the bloom on the grape or the perfume of
the rose.
If the style has failings, also; if one feels now and then, in the
more closely wrought of the essays especially, a certain excess of
precision, a seeming hardness of outline, a lack, shall we say, of
flexibility; if, after a time, one experiences a sensation as of
walking in too continuously strong a light, with the sun, as it were,
standing still at high noon; if one misses those momentary glimpses
of invisible truth, those hints and adumbrations of things beyond the
writer’s and the reader’s ken (a feeling as if twilight were coming on,
and shadows were falling across the page), those touches of distance
and mystery which make the peculiar attractiveness of another order of
writing; if this, and perhaps more than this (an occasional want of
absolute success in the use of the file; a failure, that is to say,
to leave the phrase looking only the more unstudied for the labor
bestowed upon it),--if things like these are felt at times by the
sensitive reader, what does it all signify but that, in the perception
and expression of truth, as in the making of moral character, one
excellence of necessity excludes or dwarfs another, and perfection
is still to seek? As the French martyr said (“a dread confession,”
Stevenson called it, in one of his moods), “Prose is never done.”
The estimate which the author himself placed upon his style (though
this is a point of little consequence) seems not to have been exalted.
He had his gift, he knew, and had done his best to improve it; but
other men had greater ones. He was an enthusiastic reader, and while
still fresh from the enjoyment of “A Window in Thrums,” he wrote to Mr.
Barrie: “There are two of us now [two Scotchmen] that the Shirra might
have patted on the head. And please do not think, when I seem thus to
bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is
beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such
glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to
look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my
sake.”
A handsome thing for a man to write, and a pleasant thing for his
lovers to remember, but, as we say, not to be interpreted too
strictly, as if it settled anything. The more considerable a man’s
gifts, the more likely he is to speak disparagingly of them. To take
his own word for it, Stevenson was a poor letter-writer, “essentially
and originally incapable.” So he assures one of his correspondents;
and then, the mood coming on him, he proceeds to cover page after
page with the very scintillations of epistolary genius,--compliment,
gossip, humor, brilliant description, verbal felicities, sweetness of
personal feeling, everything, in short, that goes to the making of a
perfect letter. No doubt he smiled at the incongruity of the thing as
he folded the sheet (for no doubt he knew he had done well), but what
shall we conclude as to the value of an honest author’s depreciatory
judgment of his own work? If it is not a proverb, it ought to be, that
self-dispraise goes little ways.
The welcome of Stevenson to his younger Scotch contemporary was
characteristic of the man. In all his letters there is not a glimmer of
professional jealousy nor a word of belittling criticism. With all his
boyishness,--partly because of it, it might be truer to say,--he had a
manly heart. Generosity and courage were matters of course with him,
native to the blood. In his novels there is plenty--some would say a
superfluity--of battle, murder, and sudden death; Cut and Thrust were
two of his favorite heroes; he loved the breath of danger, and when,
for the first and last time, he saw armed men taking the field, “the
old aboriginal awoke” in him, and he sniffed the air like a war horse;
he could be stern as the Judgment Day itself against injustice and
cruelty; in such a cause he would break a lance, though all the world
should call him, what he was once overheard to call himself, another
Don Quixote; but withal, few men were ever more tender-hearted. At
twenty-one, as he told the story more than twenty years afterward, he
enjoyed a great day of fishing; the trout so many and so hungry that in
his eagerness he forgot to kill them one by one as he took them from
the water. In the small hours of the night his conscience smote him;
he saw the fishes “still kicking in their agony;” and he never fished
again. Whoever was in distress was sure not only of his sympathy, but
of his hand and purse. He would walk the streets of a city half the
night with a lost child in his arms, invalid though he was; and when
he comes to clear the land of his new South Sea domain, he wonders
whether any one else ever felt toward Nature just as he does. He pities
the vines and grasses that he uproots: “their struggles go to my heart
like supplications.” Since his death, says his biographer, the native
chiefs--“gentle barbarians,” truly--have forbidden the use of firearms
on the hillside where he is buried, “that the birds may live there
undisturbed.”
Stevenson believed in the supremacy of the soul. He would not be put
down by things material. Many years he lived face to face with death,
and to the last his testimony was that he found his life good. To a
critic who thought him too little appreciative of the darker side
of human existence he wrote: “If you have had trials, sickness, the
approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels,
and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them
under, you must be very differently made from me, and, I earnestly
believe, from the majority of men.” Such was his brave confession; and
his life, from all we see of it, was in full accordance with his faith.
It might be said of him what Lowell said of Chaucer: he was “so truly
pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make.”
Toward the last, it is true, he fell into a state of depression, and
for a time was alarmingly unlike his old self. His power of work seemed
to be gone, and the “complicated miseries” that surrounded him weighed
hard upon his spirits. Even then, however, he protested his belief in
“an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still
believe it.” This was his natural religion, which the early loss of his
ancestral creed--that “damnatory creed” with which his childhood was
“pestered almost to madness”--had only deepened and irradiated. And the
dark and sterile mood was no more than a mood, after all. Soon he was
writing again, more successfully than ever. And then, with everything
bright before him, his powers working at their easiest and best, his
prayer for “courage, gayety, and the quiet mind” fully answered, all at
once the end came. The brief candle, that so often had flickered and
burned low, was suddenly blown out. He had gone round more islands than
his lighthouse-building grandfather, as it amused him once to boast,
and now, like his grandfather, he had reached “the end of all his
cruising.”
“Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
Over his grave, almost before his body could be lowered into it,
there rose the inevitable buzz of critical surmise and questioning.
Human nature is impatient. It believes in ranks and orders, and must
have the labels on at once. Were Stevenson’s books really great, it
desired to know,--as great as those of such and such another man? Or
were his admirers--whose regrets and acclamations, it must be owned,
made at that minute a pretty busy chorus--setting him on too lofty a
pedestal and stirring about him too dense a “dust of praise”? A few
disinterested souls seemed surely to believe it, and were in great
perturbation accordingly. To listen to them one might have supposed
that the very foundations were being destroyed. And then what should
the righteous do?
They need not have troubled themselves. The world will last a long
time yet, and our little breath of praise or blame will speedily blow
itself out and be forgotten. As was said of Hazlitt, so it must be said
of Stevenson: Time will tell. Not that it will of necessity tell the
truth; since what we dignify as the verdict of Time is, after all, in a
certain way of looking at it, nothing but the opinion of the majority;
but at least it will have the force of a last word,--there will be
nobody to dispute it.
Meanwhile, there is no reason in the nature of things why those who
admire Stevenson, or any other contemporary, should be frightened out
of saying so. Our judgment may be wrong, of course; but also it may
be right; and right or wrong, if it be modestly held, there can be no
law against its utterance. And if we are to speak at all, we must speak
while we can,--unless, to be sure, we are to call no man happy till
after _we_ are dead.
A RELISH OF KEATS
A RELISH OF KEATS
In all the writing of genius, which is a power that possesses its
so-called possessor rather than is possessed by him, there is much that
seems like accident. Many things--all the best ones, it might not be
too much to say--are contributed by the pen rather than by the man.
The man had never thought of them; it was no more within his intention
to write them than to write another “Hamlet;” and suddenly there they
are before him on the paper. The handwriting is his, but as to where
the words came from, he can tell hardly more than his most illiterate
neighbor. From No-Man’s-Land, if you please to say so.
Keats was proudly conscious of this mystery. There is nothing,
indeed, upon which he, or any poet, could half so reasonably
felicitate himself. His divinest verses, he knew it and owned it,
were traced for him by “the magic hand of chance.” A great thing,
a power almost omnipotent, is this that we call by that convenient,
ignorance-disguising name. It made not only Keats’s verses, but
Keats himself. Otherwise how explain him?--son of a stable-keeper, a
play-loving, belligerent, unstudious boy, a surgeon’s apprentice at
fifteen, dead at twenty-six, and before that--and henceforth--one of
the chief glories of England, a poet, “with Shakespeare.”
He himself suspected nothing of his gift, so far as appears, till
he was eighteen. Then he read the “Fairy Queen,” fell under its
enchantment, and immediately, or very soon, minding an inward call,
began trying his own hand at verses. At first they were no more than
verses, “neither precocious nor particularly promising,” says Mr.
Colvin; things that a man takes a certain pleasure in doing,--
“There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know,”--
and finds, it may be, a certain kind of profit in doing, but sees to be
of no value as soon as they are done.