is much greater lightness of touch, and a really admirable sense of
observation is revealed. Some of the descriptions of things seen are
written with indescribable delicacy, as are the character sketches.
Just so are some of the descriptions of places contained in the
series of letters to Mrs. Sitwell. In _Travels with a Donkey_ for
the first time the reader actually makes a third with Stevenson and
the endearing Modestine upon their journey, travelling with them and
sharing the sensations of the human pedestrian. If we resent certain
intolerable affectations--such as the pretentious and penurious fancy
of placing money by the roadside in payment for lodgings in the open
air--that resentment may be partly due to the fact that we are not
told the amount of the payment, as well, of course, as to the fact
that we suspect the author’s motive in detailing his charities.
Stevenson seems, in fact, to be asking for commendation of a fantastic
generosity without giving us sufficient evidence to evoke any feeling
of conviction. We see him here, not so much obeying a happy impulse as
observing himself in the light of his own esteem; and that is hardly a
pleasant sight to the onlooker. To counterbalance such lapses--which,
very likely, are regarded by lovers of Stevenson as no lapses at
all, but as delightful exhalations of personality, as glimpses of
his character which they are enabled to enjoy only through this very
innocent vanity which we have noted,--there are a thousand graceful
touches, fit to remind us that _Travels with a Donkey_ is a much
better book than _An Inland Voyage_, and, in fact, the best of his
travel-books until we reach that delightfully modest one which is too
little known--_The Silverado Squatters_. The _Donkey_ is the first in
which the charming side of his personality really “gets going,” and it
will always remain a pretty and effective sketch of a journey taken in
wayward weather, with good spirits, a shrewd and observant eye, and,
what is also to the point, a commendable courage.
_The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_, two long records
which, although published separately, are practically a single work,
for all their difference from that book are a drop to the executive
level of _An Inland Voyage_. Here again Stevenson was affected by
the discomforts of his lonely travelling, and no doubt by his poor
health. Both records are for the most part superficial and crabbed.
The descriptions of travelling-companions are conscientious, but they
have, as Stevenson’s earliest admirers were the first to remark, no
imagination or genuine moulding: the accounts are a good deal like
uninspired letters home. If one thinks what Stevenson, in happy
circumstances, might have made of the tale of his journey, one realises
how lifeless are the descriptions given. They have no sense of actual
contact; they have lost grip in losing charm, and might have been
written by somebody with far less of an eye to the significance of
the passing scene. Stevenson claimed to have been aware of the prosaic
character of the records, and, indeed, in one letter to Sir Sidney
Colvin he said, “It bored me hellishly to write; well, it’s going to
bore others to read; that’s only fair.” So perhaps it is not worth
while to analyse such confessedly inferior works. Only once in _The
Amateur Emigrant_--in the anecdote of two men who lodged perilously in
New York--does Stevenson’s boyish love of the picturesquely terrible
bring a note of tense reality to the writing. In its own way the
account of the two men looking from their bedroom, through the frame of
a seeming picture, into another room where three men are crouching in
darkness, is a little masterpiece of horror. It belongs to his romances
rather than to his travel-books; but it is the passage that stands out
most distinctly from the two which are under notice at the moment. No
other scene in either _The Amateur Emigrant_ or _Across the Plains_
compares with it for interest or value.
III
Following upon his tedious journey to America, and the hardships and
illness which, before his marriage, brought him nearly to his grave,
Stevenson went to the mountains for health. _The Silverado Squatters_
was written-up later, and, from Stevenson’s letters of that time, it
seems to have been condemned as uncharacteristic. But it may have been
that, as I think was the case, Stevenson’s voyage to America and his
marriage considerably affected his outlook. For one thing he really
had come into contact with hard inconvenience and loneliness, with a
self-inflicted exile from his family (and a hostility to his marriage
on their part which existed more in his imagination than in fact),
which matured him. Those of us who never take these voyages out into
the unknown, who sit tight and think comfortably of such things as
emigrant trains, cannot realise with what sudden effect the stubborn
impact of realities can work upon those who actually venture forth. One
small instance will show something of the experience Stevenson gained.
On the voyage he met emigrants who were leaving Scotland because there
was nothing else for them to do, because to stay meant “to starve.”
Coming to these men, and hearing from them something of the lives
they had left, he touched a new aspect of life which, in spite of
his runnings to-and-fro in Edinburgh and elsewhere, he had never
appreciated. He writes, in _The Amateur Emigrant_:
I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
And when, in _Across the Plains_, he tells how his emigrant train,
going in one direction, crowded, was met by another, also crowded,
_returning_, must that not have reacted upon his mind? My own
impression, which of course is based upon nothing more than the
apparent change in Stevenson’s manner of writing, is that _The
Silverado Squatters_, as we now have it, very much altered from
the condemned first drafts, represents the emergence of a new
Stevenson, who, in _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_,
had been overweighted by the material realities he had in bad health
encountered, and who, in consequence, had failed to make those
accounts vivid. _The Silverado Squatters_ has more substance than its
predecessors. It is much more free, it is almost entirely free, from
affectation. The style is less full of trope, and may be considered
therefore, by some readers, as the less individual. But the matter and
manner are more strictly united than hitherto. We are not interrupted
by such trivial explosions of sententiousness as “We must all set our
pocket-watches by the clock of Fate,” and in the degree in which the
matter entirely “fills-out” the manner the book is so far remarkable.
It is not generally regarded as convenient to say that Stevenson’s
matter was often thin, and his style a mere ruffle and scent to draw
off the more frigid kind of reader; yet when we come to work so able
and so unpretentious as _The Silverado Squatters_, in which Stevenson
is honestly trying to show what he saw and knew (instead of trying
to show the effect of his address upon a strange community) we do
seem to feel that what has gone before has been less immediately the
natural work of the writer, and more the fancy sketch of the writer’s
own sense of his picturesque figure. In one aspect, in its lack of
vivacity, _The Silverado Squatters_ may compare to disadvantage with
earlier work; it may seem, and indeed is ordinarily condemned as, less
pungent, and less elastic; but that could only be to those who miss
the fact that Stevenson’s pungency and elasticity were the consequence
of the unwearying revision to which most of his work was subjected.
He was never a quick worker, never one of those careless writers
whose ear approves while the pen is in motion. He had a fine ear, but
not essentially a quick ear; he was not what is sometimes called a
“natural” writer, but with devoted labour went again and again through
what he had written, revising it until his fastidiousness was relieved.
This way of working, while it served to allay what he called the “heat
of composition”--a heat which some readers find very grateful in other,
less painstaking writers--has patent virtues. It is likely to make work
more polished and more finely balanced. Nevertheless, it probably has
the effect of reducing the vigour and resilience of a style. However
that may be, it is a method making great demands upon a writer’s deep
conscientiousness; and it is not the purpose of this book to extol
the rapid method or the quick ear. All we may do at this moment is
to suggest that Stevenson, having done well in practising year after
year the craft of the writer, had now turned very deliberately and
honourably in the first year of his marriage to that other side of
the writer’s craft, the sober description, free from the amateur’s
experimentalism, of the real world as he saw it. Even so, it is a
world made smooth by his temperament--his love of smoothness, which
one may see exemplified in his declared love of simple landscape--and
by his matured dexterity in manipulating sentences. It is a world
seen, not with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in
a fair haven, whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture
to him. Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his
descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa,
have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest
intuitions of beauty. Not his the ecstatic oneness with the lovely
things of Nature which makes Keats the purest exponent of what Keats
himself called “that delicate snail’s-horn perception of beauty”:
Stevenson’s ecstasy had to be stirred by excitement; he had not the
poet’s open-handed out-running to the emotion of place. But his sense
of the remoteness of the squatters of Silverado, his early-morning
peeps into the wonders of colour and aspect in a strange corner of the
earth, his shrewd understanding of sullen human nature, are made clear
to the reader by plain expression. The book is self-conscious in a
good sense; not, as has often hitherto been the case, in a bad one.
IV
If we notice such a change of attitude in _The Silverado Squatters_,
we shall find it even more fully revealed in the volume of his letters
for an American magazine which appeared under the title of _In the
South Seas_. Some of the letters were withheld, as too tedious; even
now, the book is frankly called dull by many staunch admirers of
Stevenson. To others, however, it must surely appear otherwise. It is,
in effect, a sort of glorified log; but a log of real enterprise and
adventure in a marvellous part of the world. Stevenson heroically tried
to penetrate to the heart of the South Seas. He was caught up by the
islands and their people, and was bent upon making them known to those
who lived afar. In the political intrigues so honestly described in his
letters, Stevenson may, indeed, appear to throw away the importance of
his own genius; but the sacrifice is made in obedience to his deepest
convictions of right. He still sees himself as the point of focus;
but we do not resent that when we find ourselves so clearly in his
train. Even while his friends were urging him to give up the Samoan
politics which threatened to become the King Charles’s head of his
correspondence, he continued to live amid the difficulties from which
he felt that he could not in honour withdraw. And although the Samoan
period had its fluctuations of talent, it was, upon the whole, the
time when his boyish love of game took on a keener zest of earnest
and made him indeed a man. The period marks a further decline in the
more strictly romantic nature of his work, as we may later on be able
to discuss in comparing _St. Ives_ with earlier and more triumphant
experiments in that field; but it opens the path for the sober realism
(if that word may here be used without sinister connotation) of the
torso known as _Weir of Hermiston_, a fragment in which it is usual
to find the greatest promise of all. This is all of a piece with the
increasing purpose of Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a
professional author forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance
may be conjured for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most
persuasive cajollery. Stevenson was the professional author in his
collaborations, and in such work as _St. Ives_; but in _In the South
Seas_ as in _Weir_ he is writing truth for the love of truth, than
which there can be no more noble kind of authorship.
V
In San Francisco, as we have seen, Stevenson chartered a
schooner-yacht, and went to the South Seas in pursuit of health. On
board ship he was always happy; and he made more than one cruise, in
different ships, among the Gilbert, Paumotuan, and Marquesan groups
of islands. He also stayed for periods of varying length in the three
groups of islands, became familiar with the manners of the natives,
realised their distinctions, and made many new friends among them.
His mind was entirely occupied with them; he saw everything he could,
and learned everything he could, his shrewd Scots habit of inquiry
filling him with a satisfied sense of labour. A big book, proving
beyond doubt the entire peculiarity of the South Sea islands and
their islanders, was planning in his mind; a book which would soundly
establish his reputation as something other than a literary man and a
teller of tales. _In the South Seas_, as I have already mentioned, was
found dull by friendly critics; yet it is full of observation and of
feeling. It is the wisest of the travel-books, and the most genuine,
for Stevenson has put picturesqueness behind him for what it is--the
hall-mark of the second-rate writer; and he has risen to a height of
understanding which adds to his stature. There is, in the portrait
of Tembinok’, a simplicity which is impressive: throughout, there is
a simple exposition of a fascinating subject, a kind of life remote
from our experience, a civilisation strict and dignified, minds and
habits interesting in themselves and by contrast with our own. The
book may not be the epitome of the South Seas for which the chapters
were planned as rough notes; other writers may have known more than
Stevenson knew of the actual life of the islands. It is true that he
frequented kings’ palaces, and that his acquaintance with common native
life was very largely a matter of observation caught up in passing,
or by hearsay, or by the contemplation of public gatherings. That is
true. What we, as readers endeavouring patiently to trace the growth
of Stevenson’s knowledge, must, however, remember above all things, is
that the book is really a finer and a more distinguished work than _An
Inland Voyage_ or _Travels with a Donkey_. It has not the grimaces of
the first, or the pleasing delicacy of the second. It is a better book
than _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_. It is fuller and
richer than _The Silverado Squatters_. What, then, do we ask of a book
of travel? Is it that we may see the author goading his donkey, or
putting money by the wayside for his night’s lodging; or is it that we
may see what he has seen? With Stevenson, the trouble is, I suppose,
that, having thought of him always as a dilettante, his admirers
cannot reconcile themselves to his wish to be a real traveller and a
real historian. Perhaps they recognise that he had not the necessary
equipment? Rather, it is very likely that, being largely uncreative
themselves, they had planned for Stevenson a future different from the
one into which gradually he drifted. All creative writers have such
friends. We may say, perhaps, that a man who was not Stevenson could
have written _In the South Seas_, though I believe that is not the
case. But if we put the books slowly in order we shall almost certainly
find that while _Travels with a Donkey_ is a pretty favourite, with
airs and graces, and a rather imaginary figure charmingly posed as its
chief attraction, _In the South Seas_ is the work of the same writer,
grown less affected, more intent upon seeing things as they are, and
less intent upon being seen in their midst. There is the problem. If
a travel-book is an exploitation of the traveller’s self, we can be
charmed with it: let us not, therefore, because we find less charm in
_In the South Seas_, find the later book dull. Stevenson is duller
because he is older: the bloom is going: he is not equal intellectually
to the task he has set himself. But there is a greater sincerity in
the later travel-books, an honest looking upon the world. It is surely
better to look straight with clear eyes than to dress life up in a
bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard mountain. Stevenson’s
admirers want the song upon the mountain, because they want to continue
the legend that he never grew up. They want him to be the little boy
with a fine night of stars in his eyes and a pack upon his back,
singing cheerily that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
That is why Stevenson’s best work is, relatively speaking, neglected
in favour of work that tarnishes with the passing of youth. And it is
all because of the insatiable desire of mediocrity for the picturesque.
We must be surprised and startled, and have our senses titillated
by savours and perfumes; we must have the strange and the new; we
must have a fashion to follow and to forget. Stevenson has been a
fashionable traveller, and his sober maturity is too dull; he has lost
his charm. Well, we must make a new fashion. Interest in a figure must
give place to interest in the work. If the work no longer interests,
then our worship of Stevenson is founded upon a shadow, is founded,
let us say, upon the applause of his friends, who sought in his work
the fascination they found in his person.
IV
ESSAYS
I
There have been some English essayists whose writing is so packed
with thought that it is almost difficult to follow the thought in
its condensation. Such was Bacon, whose essays were by way of being
“assays,” written so tightly that each little sentence was the
compression of the author’s furthest belief upon that aspect of his
subject, and so that to modern students the reading of Bacon’s essays
resembles the reading of a whole volume printed in Diamond type. There
have been English essayists whose essays are clear-cut refinements of
truth more superficial or more simple. Such was Addison, who wrote with
a deliberate and flowing elegance, and whose essays Stevenson found
himself unable to read. There have been such essayists as Hazlitt,
the shrewd sincerity of whose perceptions is expressed with so much
appropriateness that his essays are examples of what essays should
be. There has never been in England a critic or an essayist of quite
the same calibre as Hazlitt. It was of Hazlitt that Stevenson wrote,
in words so true that they summarily arrest by their significance the
reader who does not expect to find in _Walking Tours_ so vital an
appraisement: “Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot
write like Hazlitt.” And, in succession, for there would be no purpose
in continuing the list for its own sake, there have been essayists
who, intentionally resting their work upon style and upon the charm
of personality, have in a thousand ways diversified their ordinary
experience, and so have been enabled to disclose as many new aspects
and delights to the reader. Such an essayist was Lamb. Hazlitt, I
think, was the last of the great English essayists, because Hazlitt
sought truth continuously and found his incomparable manner in the
disinterested love of precision to truth. But Lamb is the favourite;
and Lamb is the English writer of whom most readers think first when
the word “essay” is mentioned. That is because Lamb brought to its
highest pitch that personal and idiosyncratic sort of excursion among
memories which has created the modern essay, and which has severed
it from the older traditions of both Bacon and Addison. It is to the
school of Lamb, in that one sense, that Stevenson belonged. He did
not “write for antiquity,” as Lamb did; he did not write deliberately
in the antique vein or in what Andrew Lang called “elderly English”;
but he wrote, with conscious and anxious literary finish, essays
which had as their object the conveyance in an alluring manner of his
own predilections. He quite early made his personality what Henley
more exactly supposed that it only afterwards became--a marketable
commodity--as all writers of strong or acquired personality are bound
to do.
Since Stevenson there have been few essayists of classic rank, largely
because the essay has lost ground, and because interest in “pure”
literature has been confined to work of established position (by which
is meant the work of defunct writers). There has been Arthur Symons,
of whose following of Pater as an epicure of sensation we have heard
so much that the original quality of his fine work--both in criticism
and in the essay--has been obscured. There has been an imitator of
Stevenson, an invalid lady using the pseudonym “Michael Fairless”; and
there have been Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Belloc, Mr.
Chesterton, Mr. Street, Mr. A. C. Benson, and Mr. Filson Young. These
writers have all been of the “personal” school, frankly accepting the
essay as the most personal form in literature, and impressing upon
their work the particular personal qualities which they enjoy. Some of
them have been more robust than others, some less distinguished; but
all of them are known to us (in relation to their essays) as writers
of personality rather than as writers of abstract excellence. An essay
upon the art of the essay, tracing its development, examining its
purpose, and distinguishing between its exponents, might be a very
fascinating work. Such an essay is manifestly out of place here; but it
is noteworthy that, apart from the distinguished writers whose names
I have given, nearly all the minor writers (that is, nearly all those
whose names I have not mentioned) who have produced essays since the
death of Stevenson, or who are nowadays producing genteel essays, have
been deeply under his influence. It is further noteworthy that most of
those who have been so powerfully influenced have been women.
II