to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few fancies,
or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily composed a
single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson, as I have said,
belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England Charles Lamb is
most representative, and of whom Montaigne was most probably his more
direct model--the writer who conveyed information about his personal
tastes and friends and ancient practices in a form made prepossessing
by a flavoured style. To those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added
a strong didactic strain, as much marked in his early essays as in the
later ones; and it is this strain which differentiates Stevenson’s
work from that of Lamb and Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the
delicious vintage of a ripe mind both credulous and sceptical, grown
old enough to examine with great candour and curiousness the details
of its own vagaries: many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays
are the work of his youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of
the pseudo-candour of vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s
shrewd naïveté. He was thirty or thirty-one when the collection
entitled _Virginibus Puerisque_ was published. A year later there
followed _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. He was only thirty-seven
(Montaigne was thirty-eight when he “retired” from active life and
began to produce his essays) when his third collection, _Memories
and Portraits_, obviously more sedate and less open to the charge of
literary affectation, completed the familiar trilogy. Although _Across
the Plains_ did not appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to
form that book had earlier received periodical publication (the dated
essays range from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously
collected in _The Art of Writing_ belong to 1881. So it is not unfair
to say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he
reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age
by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by which
personality is so much matured as to yield readily to condensation.
Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays, for the judgments
of maturity, although we may find in _Virginibus Puerisque_ a rather
middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek the significance of these
essays in the degree in which they reveal consciously the graces and
the faultless negligé of an attractive temperament. We may look to find
at its highest point the illustration of those principles of style
which Stevenson endeavoured to formulate in one very careful essay
upon the subject (to the chagrin, I seem to remember, at the time of
its republication, of so many critics who misunderstood the aim of
the essay). And we shall assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson
possessed of quoting happily from other writers. Quotation with effect
is a matter of great skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was
peculiar rather than wide, drew from this very fact much of the
inimitable effect obtained by references so apt.
III
One note which we shall find persistently struck and re-struck in
Stevenson’s essays is the memory of childhood. From _Child’s Play_ to
_The Lantern-Bearers_ we are confronted by a mass of material regarding
one childhood, by which is supported a series of generalisations
about all children and their early years. So we proceed to youth, to
the story of _A College Magazine_; and so to _Ordered South_. Then
we return again to _An Old Scotch Gardener_ and _The Manse_, where
again that single childhood, so well-stored with memories, provides
the picture. Now it is one thing for Stevenson to re-vivify his own
childhood, for that is a very legitimate satisfaction which nobody
would deny him; but it is another thing for Stevenson, from that
single experience and with no other apparent observation or inquiry,
to generalise about all children. While he tells us what he did, in
what books and adventures and happenings he found his delight, we may
read with amusement. When, upon the other hand, he says, “children
are thus or thus,” it is open to any candid reader to disagree with
Stevenson. Whether it is that he has set the example, or whether it is
that he merely exemplifies the practice, I cannot say; but Stevenson
is one of those very numerous people who talk wisely and shrewdly
about children in the bulk without seeming to know anything about
them. These wiseacres alternately under-rate and make too ingenious
the intelligence and the calculations of childhood, so that children
in their hands seem to become either sentimental barbarians or callous
schemers, but are never, in the main, children at all. Stevenson has a
few excellent words upon children: he admirably says, “It is the grown
people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously
to preserve the text”: but I am sorry to say that, upon the whole, I
can find little else that is of value in his general observations.
It is open to anybody to reconstruct a single real childhood from
Stevenson’s essays, and no doubt that is a matter of considerable
interest, as anything which enables us to understand a man is of
value. Curiously enough, however, Stevenson’s essays upon the habits
and notions of children seem to suggest a great deal too much thought
about play, and too little actual play. They seem to show him, as a
little boy, so precocious and lacking in heart, that he is watching
himself play rather than playing. It is not the preliminary planning
of play that delights children, not the academic invention of games
and deceits; it is the immediate and enjoyable act of play. Our
author shows us a rather elderly child who, in deceiving himself, has
savoured not so much the game as the supreme cleverness of his own
self-deception. That, to any person who truly remembers the state of
childhood, may be accepted as a perfectly legitimate recollection; and
it is so far coherent. That his own habit should be, in these essays,
extended to all other children whatsoever--in fact, to “children”--is
to make all children delicate little Scots boys, greatly loved, very
self-conscious, and, in the long run, rather tiresome, as lonely,
delicate little boys incline to become towards the end of the day.
Unfortunately the readers of Stevenson’s essays about little boys have
mostly been little girls; and they are not themselves children, but
grown-up people who are looking back at their own childhood through
the falsifying medium of culture and indulgent, dishonest memory.
Culture, in dwelling upon interpretations and upon purposes, and in
seeing childhood always through the refraction of consequence, destroys
interest in play itself; and if play is once called in question it very
quickly becomes tedious rigmarole.
Stevenson’s essays must thus be divided into two parts, the first
descriptive, the second generalised. The first division, sometimes
delightful, is also sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes is
exaggerative of the originality of certain examples of play. The
second is about as questionable as any writing on children has ever
been, because it is based too strictly upon expanded recollections
of a single abnormal model. You do not, by such means, obtain good
generalisations.
IV
Something of the same objection might be urged against Stevenson’s
rather unpleasant descriptions of adolescence. These again are not
typical. Stevenson himself was the only youth he ever knew--he never
had the detachment to examine disinterestedly the qualities of any
person but himself--and we might gain from his descriptions an
impression of youth which actually will not bear the stereoscopic
test to which we are bound to submit all generalisations. To read
the essays with the ingenuous mind of youth is to feel wisdom, grown
old and immaculate, passing from author to reader. It is to marvel
at this debonair philosopher, who finds himself never in a quandary,
and who has the strategies of childhood and of youth balanced in his
extended hand. It is to proceed from childhood to youth, and from youth
to the married state; and our adviser describes to us in turn, with
astonishing confidence, the simplified relations, which otherwise we
might have supposed so intricate, of the lover, the husband, and the
wife. Nothing comes amiss to him: love, jealousy, the blind bow-boy,
truth of intercourse--these and many other aspects of married life are
discoursed upon with grace and the wistful sagaciousness of a decayed
inexperience. But when we consider the various arguments, and when we
bring the essays _Virginibus Puerisque_ back to their starting-point,
we shall find that they rest upon the boyish discovery that marriages
occur between unlikely persons. Stevenson has not been able to resist
the desire to institute an inquiry into the reasons. He cannot suppose
that these persons love one another; and yet why else should they
marry? Well, he is writing an essay, and not a sociological study,
so that--as the result of his inquiry--we must not expect to receive
a very distinct contribution to our knowledge. We may prepare only
to be edified, to be, perhaps, greatly amused by a young man who may
at least shock us, or stir us, if he is unable to show this fruitful
source of comedy in action. We are even, possibly, alert to render our
author the compliment of preliminary enjoyment, before we have come to
his inquiry. What Stevenson has to tell us about marriage, however, is
a commonplace; even if it is a commonplace dressed and flavoured. It
is that “marriage is a field of battle--not a bed of roses”; and it
is that “to marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.” “Alas!” as
Stevenson says of another matter, “If that were all!”
I wonder what it is that makes such phrases (for they are no more than
phrases, phrases which are not true to experience, and which therefore
can have no value as propositions or as explanations) give so much
pleasure to such a number of readers. How can we explain it, unless it
be simply by the explanation that Stevenson has been idolised? This
book, _Virginibus Puerisque_, has been a favourite for many years,
sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense unoriginal. It is the
most quoted; it is the one which most certainly may be regarded as
the typical book of Stevenson’s early period. Surely it is because a
half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a phrase and remembered
only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a whole truth, upon which
the reader must engage his attention? It must, I mean, be the trope
that lures readers of _Virginibus Puerisque_ into acceptance of thought
so threadbare and ill-nourished. Such an essay as _Æs Triplex_ seems
by its air to hold all the wisdom of the ages, brought steadfastly to
the contemplation of the end to which all must come. If it is read
sentimentally, with the mind swooning, it may give the reader the
feeling that he has looked upon the bright face of danger and seen
death as no such bad thing. For a moment, as it might be by a drug,
he has received some stimulation which is purely temporary. The essay
has not changed his thought of death; it has not transformed his fear
of death into an heroic love; it slides imperceptibly, unheeded, from
his memory, and remains dishevelled forever as “that rather fine thing
of Stevenson’s,” for which he never knows where to look. Only its
phrases remain for quotation, for use in calendars, common thoughts
turned into remembrances and mottoes ready for the rubricator. When
an ordinary person says, “It’s nice to have something to look forward
to,” Stevenson is ready with, “It is better to travel hopefully than to
arrive, and the true success is to labour.” There is all the difference
between this and that advice of Browning’s that “a man’s reach should
exceed his grasp.” Stevenson has not sought to invigorate the toiler,
he has not caught up with optimism the spirit of mankind: what he has
done is to make a phrase for the boudoir. There is no philosophic
optimism in Stevenson’s essays: there is sometimes high spirits, and
sometimes there is a cheerful saying; but at heart the “teaching” of
these things is as prosaic as is the instruction of any lay preacher.
When the more solemn sort of subject, such as death, comes to be dealt
with, we find Stevenson, the actor, falling into the feeling of his
own intonations, gravely reassuring, like a politician explaining a
defeat. When he is describing acts of bravery, as in _The English
Admirals_, his love of courage rises and his feelings seem to glow; but
the phrases with which he adorns the tale and with which eventually he
points the moral are phrases made to be read, not phrases that break
from his full heart. They are not the phrases made, will he nill he, by
his enthusiasm; they are such phrases as are publicly conveyed from
one king or statesman or commander to another upon the occasion of some
notable event. I do not mean that they are as baldly expressed, though
I think they are often as baldly conceived. They are very handsomely
expressed, too handsomely for the occasion, if one agrees with Bob
Acres that “the sound should be an echo of the sense.” Although it may
be true that, as Stevenson says, “people nowhere demand the picturesque
so much as in their virtues,” for a self-respecting author to give them
the picturesque for that reason seems to me a most immoral and, in the
end, a most ill-judged proceeding. Cultivation of the picturesque,
fondness for phrase, is inevitably productive of falseness; it is
literary gesture, a cultivable habit, such as the habit of any vain
person who flickers his hands or persistently turns the “better side”
of his face or character to the beholder. The first instinctive vanity
develops rapidly into a pose, and pose can never be much more than
amusing. Appropriateness of phrase to meaning is lost in the sense of
phrase, honesty of intention does not suffice to cover inexactitude
of expression. Unconsciously, Stevenson often approved a phrase that
expressed something not in exact accordance with his belief; he was
misled by its splendour or its picturesqueness or its heroic virtue.
So it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and
held us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken
this wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as
though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer.
They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no
longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook for a
thrill of nature.
To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater
pleasure. We are displeased in _Virginibus Puerisque_ by the excess
of manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is
invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case
of such essays as _The Foreigner at Home_ and _Pastoral_, where the
matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that
Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. His essay on the
English, to take the first of the two we have named, is partial and
incomplete--faults due to lack of sympathy. Its incompleteness seems
to me more serious than its partiality; and by “incompleteness” I do
not mean that it should have been more exhaustive, but that it does not
appear quite to work out its own thesis, but presents an air of having
been finished on a smaller scale than is attempted in other parts. In
exactly the same way, the _Pastoral_ engages our interest completely,
and then, for the reason, it would seem, that the author’s memory runs
short, the portrait is left suddenly. It is not left in such a state
that the reader’s imagination fills in every detail: the effect is
again one of truncation.
The best of these essays are probably those two, which are written in
the vein of Hazlitt, on _Talk and Talkers_. Here the matter is ample;
and the manner is studiously moderate. I note, by the way, that Sir
Sidney Colvin mentions the composition of this essay at about the time
of Stevenson’s proposal for writing a life of Hazlitt; so that it would
not be very reckless to say that the manner of _Talk and Talkers_ may
be due to a contemporary familiarity with Hazlitt’s essays. However
that may be, these two essays in particular have distinguished
qualities. They have point, character, and thought.
V
The two essays which conclude _Memories and Portraits_, respectively
entitled _A Gossip on Romance_ and _A Humble Remonstrance_, are by
way of being essays in constructive criticism, showing why the novel
of incident (i.e. the romance) is superior to the domestic novel. The
former belongs to 1882, the latter to 1884. _A Gossip on Romance_
expresses for “Robinson Crusoe” a greater liking than that held for
“Clarissa Harlowe,” and concludes with great praise of Scott; _A Humble
Remonstrance_ shows Stevenson entering, with something of the _Father
Damien_ manner, into a debate which was at that time taking place
between Sir Walter Besant, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. W. D. Howells.
Besant’s arguments were contained in an essay on “The Art of Fiction,”
which may still be had as a negligible little book; Mr. Henry James’s
reply, a wholly delightful performance, is reprinted in “Partial
Portraits.” The point was that Besant wanted to express his amiable and
workmanlike notions, that Mr. Henry James preferred to talk about the
art of fiction, and that Stevenson, who seems never to have felt entire
approval of the subject-matter of Mr. James’s books, felt called upon
to rally to the defence of his own practices. Unfortunately he could
not do this without savaging Mr. James and Mr. Howells, and this, while
it makes the essay a rather honest, unaffected piece of work, does not
increase its lucidity.
But we may very well turn at this point to notice that Stevenson’s one
legitimate book of essays on specifically literary subjects--_Familiar
Studies of Men and Books_--illustrates very well his attitude to the
writers in whom he was interested to the point of personal study. The
nine subjects of the essays in this book do not seem to us at this time
a specially interesting selection; and indeed the essays themselves
are not remarkable for originality or insight. It does show, however,
some range of understanding to wish to write upon subjects so varied
as Hugo, Burns, Whitman, Thoreau, Villon, Charles of Orleans, Pepys,
and John Knox. It is true that Stevenson (the Hugo essay is perhaps an
exception to this) never gets very far away from his “authorities” or
from quotations from the works of his subject; and that his criticism
is “safe” rather than personal; but these facts, while they interfere
with the value of the essays as essays, give them the interest of being
single and without parallel in Stevenson’s output. They show that he
was a good enough journeyman critic to stand beside those who write
essays on literary subjects for the reviews. They conform, as far as I
can tell, to the standard of such work; they are useful and plain, and
some of them, but not all, are interesting. In each case the interest
is chiefly a moral interest; it is the “teaching” of the various
writers, the moral vagaries of the different delinquents, that engage
the critic’s attention.
It must be borne in mind that Stevenson was not primarily a literary
critic. His flashes of insight were more remarkable than his considered
judgments, because, as I have suggested elsewhere in this book, he had
not the kind of mind that takes delight in pursuing a subject to its
logical conclusion. He had the inventive, but not the constructive
mind, and he had the nervous and delicate man’s intolerance of anything
requiring sustained intellectual effort. I imagine that in reading
books he “read for the story,” and that his perception of qualities in
the telling (apart from the excellence of the story) was spasmodic.
It may be noticed as a defect in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_
that no _character_, apart from traditional character, as in the case
of Pepys, emerges from any of the essays: we are given accounts and
criticisms of, for example, Burns; but we do not have them flashed
out at us as real men. Stevenson, I think, had a very poor sense of
character. In all these essays there is the same defect, an air of
flatness, of colourlessness, such as we may find in any case where
character has not been imagined.
Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could
grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character,
which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a personality all
was different; then, every touch told, as we may see in the picture
of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the character he could
see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for quiet, unpicturesque
men baffled his powers of reproduction. He could admire, but he
could not draw them. There is a very curious instance of this in the
_Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_, which is worth commenting on here. That
memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a whole it belongs to the same
uncharacterised class of portrait-studies as these _Men and Books_.
Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he might be anybody. But there are
passages in the _Memoir_ which are the most moving passages that
Stevenson ever wrote. They do not relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is
all out of focus: they relate to the parents of Jenkin and his wife.
Jenkin’s personality, it would seem, was never grasped by Stevenson;
these vignettes, on the other hand, are quite poignantly real and quite
pathetically beautiful.
VI
The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have
tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter.
Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed--there are many,
which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and which will
continue to give pleasure because they are a little whimsical in
conception and very finished in performance. These essays owe their
charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing about himself,
for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He was charmed
by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not the courage or
possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you that Stevenson
took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing and not at all
distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was deliciously joined
together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His essays, the most
personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the same vanity which
brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It was not the unhappy
vanity that drives friends away, that is suspicious of all kindness:
Stevenson had been too much petted as a child to permit of such
wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was confident, but not vulgarly
confident; vain, to the extent of being more interested in himself
than in anything else; but he was not dependent upon his earnings,
and success came early enough to keep sweet his happy complacency.
His essays show these things as clearly as do his letters. His
essays “are like milestones upon the wayside of his life,” and they
are so obviously milestones, that all readers who are fascinated
by autobiography, particularly if it be veiled, have been drawn to
Stevenson as they are drawn to an attractive, laughing child. My own
opinion is that Stevenson has sent his lovers away no richer than they
came; but there are many who could not share that view, because there
are many who are thankful to him for telling them that “it is better to
be a fool than to be dead.” I think Stevenson did not know what it was
to be either a fool or dead. That state of nervous high spirits which
is a part of his natural equipment for the battle, which lent even his
most artificial writing a semblance of vivacity, prevented him from
ever being dead (in the sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant
it); and I cannot persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.
It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s
essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please some
readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That they
were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure, had
the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as anyone
may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers: it is a
part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure some
obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the gimcrack
relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that he fell
naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality--as we
may realise from the lengthy fragment called _Lay Morals_--preoccupied
him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged head of sententious
dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by whatever means, by
whatever labour the art was attained, Stevenson was, above everything
else, a writer. “There is no wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious
review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography, “there is no wonder that
Stevenson wrote his best in the shadow of the Shade; for writing his
best was very life to him.”
VII