In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well
as the most varied in theme and style. When I use the word "powerful," I
do not mean merely the producing of the most striking or sensational
results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling
plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve--a
secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond the
printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader a strange
but fascinating _personality_. Other authors have done that in measure.
There was Hawthorne, behind whose writings there is always the wistful,
cold, far-withdrawn spectator of human nature--eerie, inquisitive, and, I
had almost said, inquisitorial--a little bloodless, eerie, weird, and
cobwebby. There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of heredity, of
race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in _Elsie Venner_ and _The
Guardian Angel_, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead. Stevenson, in
a few of his writings--in one of the _Merry Men_ chapters and in _Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, and, to some extent, in _The Master of
Ballantrae_--showed that he could enter on the obscure and, in a sense,
weird and metaphysical elements in human life; though always there was,
too, a touch at least of gloomy suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he
could not there wholly escape. But always, too, there was a touch that
suggests the universal.
Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and
adventure merely, _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and the rest, there is
a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches
something of possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative
from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature--its motives
tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once
of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen
insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as
the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is
precisely what we have--always with a vein of the finest autobiography--a
kind of select and indirect self-revelation--often with a touch of
quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be
allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a
friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies
there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with
a smile, as you ask for _more_. Look how he sets, half slyly, these
words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with Catriona
in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street of Edinburgh:
"There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you
why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted."
Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a
youth--"that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge" (when
he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something with human
nature in it. His style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own
person, is most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks
through others, as in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_, it is still fine
and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with
cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too. He
makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said. One could
almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels--the one
would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour,
humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the
history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits
and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of
progenitors. How characteristic it is of him--a man who for so many
years suffered as an invalid--that he should lay it down that the two
great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in
labour.
One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:
"Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but
their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its
success on high animal spirits. They have written histories, essays,
contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be
regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a
frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable
elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not
merely to collect and arrange, but to project and body forth? Has any
true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as
he himself said apropos of the _Child's Garden_, he could 'speak with
less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."'
There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health
was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art
('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he
was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just
reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease,
fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not only did he
live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to
carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring
on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and
months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the
best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously. Add to
all this that he was a slow and laborious writer, who would take more
pains with a phrase than Scott with a chapter--then look at the
stately shelf of his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the
joy of life, and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his
tenacity and fortitude unique!"
Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life--we had fain hoped that
in that air he found so favourable he might have lived for many years, to
add to the precious stock of innocent delight he has given to the
world--to do yet more and greater. It was not to be. They buried him,
with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300
feet high--a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on
the slopes of the hill. There he has a resting-place not all unfit--for
he sought the pure and clearer air on the heights from whence there are
widest prospects; yet not in the spot he would have chosen--for his heart
was at home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with
pathetic reference now:
"Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl,
Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers,
Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,
Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours;
Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood--
Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney--
But I go for ever and come again no more."