"Cockshot is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is
dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The
point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can
propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or
will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its
timbers and launch it on the minute. 'Let me see,' he will say,
'give me a moment, I should have some theory for that.'"
But for serious matters this manner would never do, and accordingly we
find that, when the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into English as
early as the time of James I.
Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his smaller works to his
physicians:--
"There are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd:
the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently; the
artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as
a rule.... I forget as many as I remember and I ask both to pardon
me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech."
After finishing off this dedication to his satisfaction, Stevenson turns
over the page and writes a NOTE in the language of two and one-half
centuries later. He is now the elegant _littérateur_ of the last
generation--one would say James Russell Lowell:--
"The human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of
conduct for what I should have supposed to be the less congenial
field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special
severity in all that touches dialect, so that in every novel the
letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to
commemorate shades of mispronunciation."
But in this last extract we are still three degrees away from what can
be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of style. Take
the following, which is the very peach-blow of courtesy:--
"But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not
frugal he has no business in the arts. If he be not frugal he steers
directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux saltimbanque_; if
he be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some
day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he
may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the
obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is
even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more
necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he
should attain to--or preserve--distinction in the arts," etc.
Now the very next essay to this is a sort of intoned voluntary played
upon the more sombre emotions.
"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged in
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of
himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move
and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet
looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising
are his attributes."
There is a tincture of Carlyle in this mixture. There are a good many
pages of Gothic type in the later essays, for Stevenson thought it the
proper tone in which to speak of death, duty, immortality, and such
subjects as that. He derived this impression from the works of Sir
Thomas Browne. But the solemnity of Sir Thomas Browne is like a
melodious thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing.
"Time sadly overcometh all things and is now dominant and sitteth
upon a sphinx and looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while his
sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously
triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old
glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The
traveller as he passeth through these deserts asketh of her 'who
builded them?' And she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth
not."
The frenzy to produce something like this sadly overcomes Stevenson, in
his later essays. But perhaps it were to reason too curiously to pin
Stevenson down to Browne. All the old masters stalk like spectres
through his pages, and among them are the shades of the moderns, even
men that we have dined with.
According to Stevenson, a certain kind of subject requires a certain
"treatment," and the choice of his tone follows his title. These
"treatments" are always traditional, and even his titles tread closely
on the heels of former titles. He can write the style of Charles Lamb
better than Lamb could do it himself, and his Hazlitt is very nearly as
good. He fences with his left hand as well as with his right, and can
manage two styles at once like Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from
the 7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined about it.
It is with a pang of disappointment that we now and then come across a
style which we recognize, yet cannot place.
People who take enjoyment in the reminiscences awakened by conjuring of
this kind can nowhere in the world find a master like Stevenson. Those
persons belong to the bookish classes. Their numbers are insignificant,
but they are important because they give countenance to the admiration
of others who love Stevenson with their hearts and souls.
The reason why Stevenson represents a backward movement in literature,
is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from
speech, and new thoughts from life, and Stevenson used all his powers to
exclude both from his work. He lived and wrote in the past. That this
Scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period
of English literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours'
traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that
literature. He is the Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is impossible
to assign him rank in any line of writing. If you shut your eyes to try
and place him, you find that you cannot do it. The effect he produces
while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can
recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected
that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning
are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the
mistletoe of English literature whose roots are not in the soil but in
the tree.
But enough of the nature and training of Stevenson which fitted him to
play the part he did. The cyclonic force which turned him from a
secondary London novelist into something of importance and enabled him
to give full play to his really unprecedented talents will be recognized
on glancing about us.
We are now passing through the age of the Distribution of Knowledge. The
spread of the English-speaking race since 1850, and the cheapness of
printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. All the
books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in
popular editions. The magazines fulfil the same function; every one of
them is a penny cyclopedia. Andrew Lang heads an army of organized
workers who mine in the old literature and coin it into booklets and
cash.
The American market rules the supply of light literature in Great
Britain. While Lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse
or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends
of his own--something just as good. The two men serve the same public.
Stevenson's reputation in England was that of a comparatively light
weight, but his success here was immediate. We hailed him as a
classic--or something just as good. Everything he did had the very stamp
and trademark of Letters, and he was as strong in one department as
another. We loved this man; and thenceforward he purveyed "literature"
to us at a rate to feed sixty millions of people and keep them clamoring
for more.
Does any one believe that the passion of the American people for
learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? Does any
one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? It
creates an eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is a power like
Niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people
for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact
there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this
importation of culture by the carload. The state of mind it shows is a
definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through,
and which precedes the discovery that real things are better than sham.
When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hundred thousand dollars' worth of
Louis XV. furniture to be made--and most well made--in Buffalo, and when
the American public gives Stevenson an order for Pulvis et Umbra--the
same forces are at work in each case. It is Chicago making culture hum.
And what kind of a man was Stevenson? Whatever may be said about his
imitativeness, his good spirits were real. They are at the bottom of his
success, the strong note in his work. They account for all that is
paradoxical in his effect. He often displays a sentimentalism which has
not the ring of reality. And yet we do not reproach him. He has by
stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the
scepticism inherent in them. And yet we know that he was not a sceptic;
on the contrary, we like him, and he was regarded by his friends as
little lower than the angels.
Why is it that we refuse to judge him by his own utterances? The reason
is that all of his writing is playful, and we know it. The instinct at
the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and
questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence our blind struggle to bind
this Proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water
under our hands. The truth is that as a literary force, there was no
such man as Stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out
the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of Europe,
there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a pale boy.
But the courage of this boy, the heroism of his life, illumine all his
works with a personal interest. The last ten years of his life present a
long battle with death.
We read of his illnesses, his spirit; we hear how he never gave up, but
continued his works by dictation and in dumb show when he was too weak
to hold the pen, too weak to speak. This courage and the lovable nature
of Stevenson won the world's heart. He was regarded with a peculiar
tenderness such as is usually given only to the young. Honor, and
admiration mingled with affection followed him to his grave. Whatever
his artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual nature in his work. It
was this nature which made him thus beloved.