is a delight to read him, and that he renews this delight by a constant
variety of experiment. Of this anon, however; and meanwhile, it may be
noted as a curious characteristic of current fashions that the writer
whose effort is perceptibly that of the artist is very apt to find
himself thrown on the defensive. A work of literature is a form, but
the author who betrays a consciousness of the responsibilities involved
in this circumstance not rarely perceives himself to be regarded as an
uncanny personage. The usual judgment is that he may be artistic, but
that he must not be too much so; that way, apparently, lies something
worse than madness. This queer superstition has so successfully imposed
itself, that the mere fact of having been indifferent to such a danger
constitutes in itself an originality. How few they are in number and how
soon we could name them, the writers of English prose, at the present
moment, the quality of whose prose is personal, expressive, renewed at
each attempt! The state of things that one would have expected to be the
rule has become the exception, and an exception for which, most of the
time, an apology appears to be thought necessary. A mill that grinds
with regularity and with a certain commercial fineness--that is the
image suggested by the manner of a good many of the fraternity. They
turn out an article for which there is a demand, they keep a shop for a
speciality, and the business is carried on in accordance with a useful,
well-tested prescription. It is just because he has no speciality that
Mr. Stevenson is an individual, and because his curiosity is the only
receipt by which he produces. Each of his books is an independent
effort--a window opened to a different view. _Doctor Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde_ is as dissimilar as possible from _Treasure Island_; _Virginibus
Puerisque_ has nothing in common with _The New Arabian Nights_, and I
should never have supposed _A Child’s Garden of Verses_ to be from the
hand of the author of _Prince Otto_.
Though Mr. Stevenson cares greatly for his phrase, as every writer
should who respects himself and his art, it takes no very attentive
reading of his volumes to show that it is not what he cares for most,
and that he regards an expressive style only, after all, as a means. It
seems to me the fault of Mr. Archer’s interesting paper, that it
suggests too much that the author of these volumes considers the art of
expression as an end--an ingenious game of words. He finds that Mr.
Stevenson is not serious, that he neglects a whole side of life, that he
has no perception, and no consciousness, of suffering; that he speaks as
a happy but heartless pagan, living only in his senses (which the critic
admits to be exquisitely fine), and that in a world full of heaviness he
is not sufficiently aware of the philosophic limitations of mere
technical skill. In sketching these aberrations Mr. Archer himself, by
the way, displays anything but ponderosity of hand. He is not the first
reader, and he will not be the last, who shall have been irritated by
Mr. Stevenson’s jauntiness. That jauntiness is an essential part of his
genius; but to my sense it ceases to be irritating--it indeed becomes
positively touching and constitutes an appeal to sympathy and even to
tenderness--when once one has perceived what lies beneath the
dancing-tune to which he mostly moves. Much as he cares for his phrase,
he cares more for life, and for a certain transcendently lovable part
of it. He feels, as it seems to us, and that is not given to every one.
This constitutes a philosophy which Mr. Archer fails to read between his
lines--the respectable, desirable moral which many a reader doubtless
finds that he neglects to point. He does not feel everything equally, by
any manner of means; but his feelings are always his reasons. He regards
them, whatever they may be, as sufficiently honourable, does not
disguise them in other names or colours, and looks at whatever he meets
in the brilliant candle-light that they shed. As in his extreme artistic
vivacity he seems really disposed to try everything he has tried once,
by way of a change, to be inhuman, and there is a hard glitter about
_Prince Otto_ which seems to indicate that in this case too he has
succeeded, as he has done in most of the feats that he has attempted.
But _Prince Otto_ is even less like his other productions than his other
productions are like each other.
The part of life which he cares for most is youth, and the direct
expression of the love of youth is the beginning and the end of his
message. His appreciation of this delightful period amounts to a
passion, and a passion, in the age in which we live, strikes us on the
whole as a sufficient philosophy. It ought to satisfy Mr. Archer, and
there are writers who press harder than Mr. Stevenson, on whose behalf
no such moral motive can be alleged. Mingled with this almost equal love
of a literary surface, it represents a real originality. This
combination is the keynote of Mr. Stevenson’s faculty and the
explanation of his perversities. The feeling of one’s teens, and even of
an earlier period (for the delights of crawling, and almost of the
rattle, are embodied in _A Child’s Garden of Verses_), and the feeling
for happy turns--these, in the last analysis (and his sense of a happy
turn is of the subtlest), are the corresponding halves of his character.
If _Prince Otto_ and _Doctor Jekyll_ left me a clearer field for the
assertion, I would say that everything he has written is a direct
apology for boyhood; or rather (for it must be confessed that Mr.
Stevenson’s tone is seldom apologetic), a direct rhapsody on the age of
heterogeneous pockets. Even members of the very numerous class who have
held their breath over _Treasure Island_ may shrug their shoulders at
this account of the author’s religion; but it is none the less a great
pleasure--the highest reward of observation--to put one’s hand on a rare
illustration, and Mr. Stevenson is certainly rare. What makes him so is
the singular maturity of the expression that he has given to young
sentiments: he judges them, measures them, sees them from the outside,
as well as entertains them. He describes credulity with all the
resources of experience, and represents a crude stage with infinite
ripeness. In a word, he is an artist accomplished even to
sophistication, whose constant theme is the unsophisticated. Sometimes,
as in _Kidnapped_, the art is so ripe that it lifts even the subject
into the general air: the execution is so serious that the idea (the
idea of a boy’s romantic adventures), becomes a matter of universal
relations. What he prizes most in the boy’s ideal is the imaginative
side of it, the capacity for successful make-believe. The general
freshness in which this is a part of the gloss seems to him the divinest
thing in life; considerably more divine, for instance, than the passion
usually regarded as the supremely tender one. The idea of making believe
appeals to him much more than the idea of making love. That delightful
little book of rhymes, the _Child’s Garden_, commemorates from beginning
to end the picturing, personifying, dramatising faculty of infancy--the
view of life from the level of the nursery-fender. The volume is a
wonder for the extraordinary vividness with which it reproduces early
impressions: a child might have written it if a child could see
childhood from the outside, for it would seem that only a child is
really near enough to the nursery floor. And what is peculiar to Mr.
Stevenson is that it is his own childhood he appears to delight in, and
not the personal presence of little darlings. Oddly enough, there is no
strong implication that he is fond of babies; he doesn’t speak as a
parent, or an uncle, or an educator--he speaks as a contemporary
absorbed in his own game. That game is almost always a vision of dangers
and triumphs, and if emotion, with him, infallibly resolves itself into
memory, so memory is an evocation of throbs and thrills and suspense. He
has given to the world the romance of boyhood, as others have produced
that of the peerage and the police and the medical profession.
This amounts to saying that what he is most curious of in life is
heroism--personal gallantry, if need be with a manner, or a banner,
though he is also abundantly capable of enjoying it when it is artless.
The delightful exploits of Jim Hawkins, in _Treasure Island_, are
unaffectedly performed; but none the less “the finest action is the
better for a piece of purple,” as the author remarks in the paper on
“The English Admirals” in _Virginibus Puerisque_, a paper of which the
moral is, largely, that “we learn to desire a grand air in our heroes;
and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put the dots
on their own i’s, and leave us in no suspense as to when they mean to be
heroic.” The love of brave words as well as brave deeds--which is simply
Mr. Stevenson’s essential love of style--is recorded in this little
paper with a charming, slightly sophistical ingenuity. “They served
their guns merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest
ear for a bold, honourable sentiment of any class of men the world ever
produced.” The author goes on to say that most men of high destinies
have even high-sounding names. Alan Breck, in _Kidnapped_, is a
wonderful picture of the union of courage and swagger; the little
Jacobite adventurer, a figure worthy of Scott at his best, and
representing the highest point that Mr. Stevenson’s talent has reached,
shows us that a marked taste for tawdry finery--tarnished and tattered,
some of it indeed, by ticklish occasions--is quite compatible with a
perfectly high mettle. Alan Breck is at bottom a study of the love of
glory, carried out with extreme psychological truth. When the love of
glory is of an inferior order the reputation is cultivated rather than
the opportunity; but when it is a pure passion the opportunity is
cultivated for the sake of the reputation. Mr. Stevenson’s kindness for
adventurers extends even to the humblest of all, the mountebank and the
strolling player, or even the pedlar whom he declares that in his
foreign travels he is habitually taken for, as we see in the whimsical
apology for vagabonds which winds up _An Inland Voyage_. The hungry
conjurer, the gymnast whose _maillot_ is loose, have something of the
glamour of the hero, inasmuch as they too pay with their person. “To be
even one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man’s
countenance.... That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life: a
ragged, tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the manners of a gentleman
and the vanity of an artist, to keep up his self-respect!” What
reconciles Mr. Stevenson to life is the idea that in the first place it
offers the widest field that we know of for odd doings, and that in the
second these odd doings are the best of pegs to hang a sketch in three
lines or a paradox in three pages.
As it is not odd, but extremely usual, to marry, he deprecates that
course in _Virginibus Puerisque_, the collection of short essays which
is most a record of his opinions--that is, largely, of his likes and
dislikes. It all comes back to his sympathy with the juvenile and that
feeling about life which leads him to regard women as so many
superfluous girls in a boy’s game. They are almost wholly absent from
his pages (the main exception is _Prince Otto_, though there is a Clara
apiece in _The Rajah’s Diamond_ and _The Pavilion on the Links_), for
they don’t like ships and pistols and fights, they encumber the decks
and require separate apartments, and, almost worst of all, have not the
highest literary standard. Why should a person marry when he might be
swinging a cutlass or looking for a buried treasure? Why should he waste
at the nuptial altar precious hours in which he might be polishing
periods? It is one of those curious and to my sense fascinating
inconsistencies that we encounter in Mr. Stevenson’s mind, that though
he takes such an interest in the childish life he takes no interest in
the fireside. He has an indulgent glance for it in the verses of the
_Garden_, but to his view the normal child is the child who absents
himself from the family-circle, in fact when he can, in imagination when
he cannot, in the disguise of a buccaneer. Girls don’t do this, and
women are only grown-up girls, unless it be the delightful maiden, fit
daughter of an imperial race, whom he commemorates in _An Inland
Voyage_.
“A girl at school, in France, began to describe one of our
regiments on parade to her French schoolmates; and as she went on,
she told me, the recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud
to be the countrywoman of such soldiers, that her voice failed her
and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl; and I
think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
with all its niminy associations, would be to offer her an insult.
She may rest assured of one thing; although she never should marry a
heroic general, never see any great or immediate result of her
life, she will not have lived in vain for her native land.”
There is something of that in Mr. Stevenson; when he begins to describe
a British regiment on parade (or something of that sort), he too almost
breaks down for emotion: which is why I have been careful to traverse
the insinuation that he is primarily a chiseller of prose. If things had
gone differently with him (I must permit myself this allusion to his
personal situation, and I shall venture to follow it with two or three
others), he might have been an historian of famous campaigns--a great
painter of battle-pieces. Of course, however, in this capacity it would
not have done for him to break down for emotion.
Although he remarks that marriage “is a field of battle and not a bed of
roses,” he points out repeatedly that it is a terrible renunciation and
somehow, in strictness, incompatible even with honour--the sort of
roving, trumpeting honour that appeals most to his sympathy. After that
step,
“There are no more bye-path meadows where you may innocently
linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the
grave.... You may think you had a conscience and believed in God;
but what is a conscience to a wife?... To marry is to domesticate
the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left
for you, not even suicide, but to be good.... How then, in such an
atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain from
base capitulations?... The proper qualities of each sex are
eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton
races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most
liberal sympathy.... It is better to face the fact and know, when
you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal if
unlike frailties; whose weak, human heart beats no more tunefully
than yours.”
If there be a grimness in that it is as near as Mr. Stevenson ever comes
to being grim, and we have only to turn the page to find the
corrective--something delicately genial, at least, if not very much less
sad.
“The blind bow-boy who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in
old Dutch gardens laughingly hurls his bird-bolts among a fleeting
generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves
and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this
one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one
gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of
a moment.”
That is an admission that though it is soon over, the great sentimental
surrender is inevitable. And there is geniality too, still over the page
(in regard to quite another matter), geniality, at least, for the
profession of letters, in the declaration that there is
“One thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one
thing which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their
wit as a high flight of metaphysics--namely, that the business of
life is mainly carried on by the difficult art of literature, and
according to a man’s proficiency in that art shall be the freedom
and fulness of his intercourse with other men.”
Yet it is difficult not to believe that the ideal in which our author’s
spirit might most gratefully have rested would have been the character
of the paterfamilias, when the eye falls on such a charming piece of
observation as these lines about children in the admirable paper on
_Child’s Play_:
“If it were not for this perpetual imitation we should be tempted
to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the
light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly, among whom
they condescended to dwell in obedience, like a philosopher at a
barbarous court.”
II
We know very little about a talent till we know where it grew up, and it
would halt terribly at the start, any account of the author of
_Kidnapped_ which should omit to insist promptly that he is a Scot of
the Scots. Two facts, to my perception, go a great way to explain his
composition: the first of which is that his boyhood was passed in the
shadow of Edinburgh Castle, and the second that he came of a family that
had set up great lights on the coast. His grandfather, his uncle, were
famous constructors of lighthouses, and the name of the race is
associated above all with the beautiful and beneficent tower of
Skerryvore. We may exaggerate the way in which, in an imaginative youth,
the sense of the “story” of things would feed upon the impressions of
Edinburgh--though I suspect it would be difficult really to do so. The
streets are so full of history and poetry, of picture and song, of
associations springing from strong passions and strange characters,
that, for our own part, we find ourselves thinking of an urchin going
and coming there as we used to think (wonderingly, enviously), of the
small boys who figured as supernumeraries, pages or imps, in showy
scenes at the theatre: the place seems the background, the complicated
“set” of a drama, and the children the mysterious little beings who are
made free of the magic world. How must it not have beckoned on the
imagination to pass and repass, on the way to school, under the Castle
rock, conscious, acutely yet familiarly, of the gray citadel on the
summit, lighted up with the tartans and bagpipes of Highland regiments?
Mr. Stevenson’s mind, from an early age, was furnished with the concrete
Highlander, who must have had much of the effect that we nowadays call
decorative. We have encountered somewhere a fanciful paper[3] of our
author’s, in which there is a reflection of half-holiday afternoons and,
unless our own fancy plays us a trick, of lights red, in the winter
dusk, in the high-placed windows of the old town--a delightful rhapsody
on the penny sheets of figures for the puppet-shows of infancy, in
life-like position and awaiting the impatient yet careful scissors. “If
landscapes were sold,” he says in _Travels with a Donkey_, “like the
sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.”
Indeed the colour of Scotland has entered into him altogether, and
though, oddly enough, he has written but little about his native
country, his happiest work shows, I think, that she has the best of his
ability, the best of his ambition. _Kidnapped_ (whose inadequate title I
may deplore in passing) breathes in every line the feeling of moor and
loch, and is the finest of his longer stories, and _Thrawn Janet_, a
masterpiece in thirteen pages (lately republished in the volume of _The
Merry Men_), is, among the shorter, the strongest in execution. The
latter consists of a gruesome anecdote of the supernatural, related in
the Scotch dialect, and the genuineness which this medium (at the sight
of which, in general, the face of the reader grows long) wears in Mr.
Stevenson’s hands is a proof of how living the question of form always
is to him, and what a variety of answers he has for it. It would never
have occurred to us that the style of _Travels with a Donkey_ or
_Virginibus Puerisque_ and the idiom of the parish of Balweary could be
a conception of the same mind. If it be a good fortune for a genius to
have had such a country as Scotland for its primary stuff, this is
doubly the case when there has been a certain process of detachment, of
extreme secularisation. Mr. Stevenson has been emancipated: he is, as we
may say, a Scotchman of the world. None other, I think, could have drawn
with such a mixture of sympathetic and ironical observation the
character of the canny young Lowlander, David Balfour, a good boy but an
exasperating. _Treasure Island_, _The New Arabian Nights_, _Prince
Otto_, _Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, are not very directly founded on
observation; but that quality comes in with extreme fineness as soon as
the subject involves consideration of race.
I have been wondering whether there is something more than this that our
author’s pages would tell us about him, or whether that particular
something is in the mind of an admirer because he happens to have had
other lights on it. It has been possible for so acute a critic as Mr.
William Archer to read pure high spirits and the gospel of the young man
rejoicing in his strength and his matutinal cold bath between the lines
of Mr. Stevenson’s prose. And it is a fact that the note of a morbid
sensibility is so absent from his pages, they contain so little
reference to infirmity and suffering, that we feel a trick has really
been played upon us on discovering by accident the actual state of the
case with the writer who has indulged in the most enthusiastic allusion
to the joy of existence. We must permit ourselves another mention of his
personal situation, for it adds immensely to the interest of volumes
through which there draws so strong a current of life, to know that they
are not only the work of an invalid, but that they have largely been
written in bed, in dreary “health-resorts,” in the intervals of sharp
attacks. There is almost nothing in them to lead us to guess this: the
direct evidence indeed is almost all contained in the limited compass of
_The Silverado Squatters_. In such a case, however, it is the indirect
that is the most eloquent, and I know not where to look for that, unless
in the paper called “Ordered South,” and its companion “Aes Triplex,”
in _Virginibus Puerisque_. It is impossible to read “Ordered South”
attentively without feeling that it is personal: the reflections it
contains are from experience, not from fancy. The places and climates to
which the invalid is carried to recover or to die are mainly beautiful,
but
“In his heart of hearts he has to confess that [they are] not
beautiful for him.... He is like an enthusiast leading about with
him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out
of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself.... He seems to himself
to touch things with muffled hands and to see them through a
veil.... Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory,
many a comely fold of wood on the mountain side, beckons and
allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible
to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of
distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish
efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days he falls
contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness.... He feels,
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life, thus
gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the
end comes it will come quietly and fitly.... He will pray for
Medea: when she comes let her either rejuvenate or slay.”