The circumstances which have made me responsible for selecting and
editing the correspondence of Robert Louis Stevenson are the following.
He was for many years my closest friend. We first met in 1873, when he
was in his twenty-third year and I in my twenty-ninth, at the place and
in the manner mentioned at page 54 of this volume. It was my good
fortune then to be of use to him, partly by such technical hints as even
the most brilliant beginner may take from an older hand, partly by
recommending him to editors--first, if I remember right, to Mr. Hamerton
and Mr. Richmond Seeley, of the Portfolio, then in succession to Mr.
George Grove (Macmillan's Magazine), Mr. Leslie Stephen (Cornhill), and
Dr. Appleton (the Academy); and somewhat, lastly, by helping to raise
him in the estimation of parents who loved but for the moment failed to
understand him. It belonged to the richness of his nature to repay in
all things much for little, [Greek: hekatomboi enneaboion], and from
these early relations sprang the affection and confidence, to me
inestimable, of which the following correspondence bears evidence.
One day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an
illness which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the
hands of his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with a request
that it might be opened after his death. He recovered, and had strength
enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in the Pacific
Islands. When the end came, the paper was opened and found to contain,
among other things, the expression of his wish that I should prepare for
publication "a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life." I had
already, in 1892, when he was anxious--needlessly, as it turned out--as
to the provision he might be able to leave for his family, received from
him a suggestion that "some kind of a book" might be made out of the
monthly journal-letters which he had been in the habit of writing me
from Samoa: letters begun at first with no thought of publication and
simply in order to maintain our intimacy, so far as might be,
undiminished by separation. This part of his wishes I was able to carry
out promptly, and the result appeared under the title _Vailima Letters_
in the autumn following his death (1895). Lack of leisure delayed the
execution of the remaining part. For one thing, the body of
correspondence which came in from various quarters turned out much
larger than had been anticipated. He did not love writing letters, and
will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as
one "essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary." That
he was a bad correspondent had come to be an accepted view among his
friends; but in truth it was only during one period of his life that he
at all deserved such a reproach.[1] At other times, as became apparent
after his death, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in
letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and his occupations.
It was indeed he and not his friends, as will abundantly appear in the
course of these volumes, who oftenest had cause to complain of answers
neglected or delayed. His letters, it is true, were often the most
informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit
which is the despair of editors: but after his own whim and fashion he
wrote a vast number, so that the work of sifting, copying, and arranging
was long and laborious. It was not until the autumn of 1899 that the
_Letters to his Family and Friends_ were ready for publication, and in
the meantime the task of writing the _Life_ had been taken over by his
cousin and my friend, Mr. Graham Balfour, who completed it two years
later.
"In considering the scale and plan on which my friend's instruction
should be carried out" (I quote, with the change of a word or two, from
my Introduction of 1899), "it seemed necessary to take into account, not
his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which he seemed
likely to take ultimately in the world's regard. The four or five years
following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are
generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is
going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson's name
seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary
reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another
sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales
and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose
beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a
greater immediate place in public attention; but none has exercised
Stevenson's peculiar and personal power to charm, to attach, and to
inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style--qualities for
which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little--he might
seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the
artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work
is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to
universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative
excitement and entertainment in the race.
"The voice of the _advocatus diaboli_ has been heard against him, as it
is right and proper that it should be heard against any man before his
reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this
country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of 'externality.'
But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon
Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house
of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest
dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island
lagoon a last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the
appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber--such a reader can only
smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other
passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they
reveal themselves to true masters only: they are instinct at once with
the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of
nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the
Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was
feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means,
preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not
express adequately; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse
himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his
art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the
_Suicide Club_, or the airy sentimental comedy of _Providence and the
Guitar_, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and
the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality cannot help striking
notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of things deeper than
will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with
never a smile either of his own or of his reader's, upon the most solemn
enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician's
touch and insight.
"Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much
of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him
among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this
is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson's own, in
which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the
'sedulous ape' to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing
this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of
the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly
he was always much of a reader: but it was life, not books, that always
in the first degree allured and taught him.
'He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep'--
so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he
most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed--to
quote again a phrase of his own--to have been 'eavesdropping at the door
of his heart': those which told of experiences or cravings after
experience, pains, pleasures, or conflicts of the spirit, which in the
eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No
man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand.
The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme
natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An
instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform
to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life
or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would
not follow a general rule--least of all if it was a prudential rule--of
conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private
conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social
amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not
amuse _him_; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be
himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or
inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his
thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current
phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his
nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling
that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various indeed
and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another
might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true
expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and
individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many
characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does
the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree,
but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he
could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own
doings and feelings: these themselves came from springs of character and
impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a
child's or actor's gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life:
but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in
him to pose for anything but what he truly was.
"When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he
might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and
just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner
of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He
has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode
of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any
time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a
familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he
only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament,
the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case personal to
himself. He may try his hand in youth at a _Sentimental Journey_, but R.
L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and
feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other,
he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing
in style and temper much wider apart than _Markheim_ and _Jekyll and
Hyde_ are from the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_ or _William Wilson_. He
may set out to tell a pirate story for boys 'exactly in the ancient
way,' and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but
re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a
private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an
energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly
his own. Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and
Ballantyne for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few
stronger contrasts than between any scene of _Waverley_ or _Redgauntlet_
and any scene of the _Master of Ballantrae_ or _Catriona_, whether in
their strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older
master who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the
younger, so much less opulently gifted as is probable--though we must
remember that Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote _Waverley_--so
infinitely more careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the
pipe of Burns and yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters the
heart and mind of a Scots maker who has his own outlook on life, his own
special and profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.
"Not by reason, then, of 'externality,' for sure, nor yet of
imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and
regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is
settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial
essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the
stronger in him--whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in
his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements--a question
indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue.
Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs
to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which
are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in
romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole
fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting
single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on
the reader's mind? And whether his figures are sustained continuously by
the true spontaneous breath of creation, or are but transitorily
animated at happy moments by flashes of spiritual and dramatic insight,
aided by the conscious devices of his singularly adroit and spirited
art? These are questions which no criticism but that of time can solve.
To contend, as some do, that strong creative impulse and so keen an
artistic self-consciousness as Stevenson's was cannot exist together, is
quite idle. The truth, of course, is that the deep-seated energies of
imaginative creation are found sometimes in combination, and sometimes
not in combination, with an artistic intelligence thus keenly conscious
of its own purpose and watchful of its own working.
"Once more, it may be questioned whether, among the many varieties of
work which Stevenson has left, all distinguished by a grace and
precision of workmanship which are the rarest qualities in English art,
there are any which can be pointed to as absolute masterpieces, such as
the future cannot be expected to let die. Let the future decide. What is
certain is that posterity must either be very well or very ill occupied
if it can consent to give up so much sound entertainment, and better
than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries. In the
meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic,
Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of
English prose; scarcely surpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity
with suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence
and the well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting
to words the vital quality of things, and making them convey the
precise--sometimes, let it be granted, the too curiously
precise--expression of the very shade and colour of the thought,
feeling, or vision in his mind. He stands, moreover, as the writer who,
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has handled with the most
of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established
literary forms--the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels
sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and
modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure,
memoirs--nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish,
and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be
forgotten. To some of these forms Stevenson gave quite new life; through
all alike he expressed vividly an extremely personal way of seeing and
being, a sense of nature and romance, of the aspects of human existence
and problems of human conduct, which was essentially his own. And in so
doing he contrived to make friends and even lovers of his readers. Those
whom he attracts at all (and there is no writer who attracts every one)
are drawn to him over and over again, finding familiarity not lessen but
increase the charm of his work, and desiring ever closer intimacy with
the spirit and personality which they divine behind it.
"As to the fitting scale, then, on which to treat the memory of a man
who fills five years after his death such a place as this in the general
regard, and who has desired that a selection from his letters shall be
made public, the word 'selection' has evidently to be given a pretty
liberal interpretation. Readers, it must be supposed, will scarce be
content without the opportunity of a fairly ample intercourse with such
a man as he was accustomed to reveal himself in writing to his
familiars. In choosing from among the material before me" (I still quote
from the Introduction of 1899), "I have used the best discretion that I
could. Stevenson's feelings and relations throughout life were in almost
all directions so warm and kindly, that very little had to be suppressed
from fear of giving pain.[2] On the other hand, he drew people towards
him with so much confidence and affection, and met their openness with
so much of his own, that an editor could not but feel the frequent risk
of inviting readers to trespass too far on purely private affairs and
feelings, including those of the living. This was a point upon which in
his lifetime he felt strongly. That excellent critic, Mr. Walter
Raleigh, has noticed, as one of the merits of Stevenson's personal
essays and accounts of travel, that few men have written more or more
attractively of themselves without ever taking the public unduly into
familiarity or overstepping proper bounds of reticence. Public prying
into private lives, the propagation of gossip by the press, and printing
of private letters during the writer's lifetime, were things he hated.
Once, indeed, he very superfluously gave himself a dangerous cold, by
dancing before a bonfire in his garden at the news of a 'society' editor
having been committed to prison; and the only approach to a difference
he ever had with one of his lifelong friends arose from the publication,
without permission, of one of his letters written during his first
Pacific voyage.
"How far, then, must I regard his instructions about publication as
authorising me to go after his death beyond the limits which he had been
so careful in observing and desiring others to observe in life? How much
may now fairly become public of that which had been held sacred and
hitherto private among his friends? To cut out all that is strictly
personal and intimate were to leave his story untold and half the charm
of his character unrevealed: to put in too much were to break all bonds
of that privacy which he so carefully regarded while he lived. I know
not if I have at all been able to hit the mean, and to succeed in making
these letters, as it has been my object to make them, present, without
offence or intrusion, a just, a living, and proportionate picture of the
man as far as they will yield it. There is one respect in which his own
practice and principle has had to be in some degree violated, if the
work was to be done at all. Except in the single case of the essay
_Ordered South_, he would never in writing for the public adopt the
invalid point of view, or invite any attention to his infirmities. 'To
me,' he says, 'the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my
handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life; and I
should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world
to these unimportant privacies.' But from his letters to his family and
friends these matters could not possibly be left out. The tale of his
life, in the years when he was most of a correspondent, was in truth a
tale of daily and nightly battle against weakness and physical distress
and danger. To those who loved him, the incidents of this battle were
communicated, sometimes gravely, sometimes laughingly. I have greatly
cut down such bulletins, but could not possibly omit them altogether."
In 1911, twelve years after the above words were written, the estimate
expressed in them of Stevenson's qualities as a writer, and of the place
he seemed likely to maintain in the affections of English readers all
the world over, had been amply confirmed by the lapse of time. The sale
of his works kept increasing rather than diminishing. Editions kept
multiplying. A new generation of readers had found life and letters,
nature and human nature, touched by him at so many points with so
vivifying and illuminating a charm that it had become scarcely possible
to take up any newspaper or magazine and not find some reference to his
work and name. Both series of letters--even one mainly concerned, as the
_Vailima Letters_ are, with matters of interest both remote and
transitory--had been read in edition after edition: and readers had been
and were continually asking for more. The time was thought to have come
for a new and definitive edition, in which the two series of letters
already published should be thrown into one, and as much new material
added as could be found suitable. The task of carrying out this scheme
fell again upon me. The new edition constituted in effect a nearly
complete epistolary autobiography. It contained not less than a hundred
and fifty of Stevenson's letters hitherto unpublished. They dated from
all periods of his life, those written in the brilliant and troubled
days of his youth predominating, and giving a picture, perhaps unique in
its kind, of a character and talent in the making. The present edition
is a reprint of the edition of 1911, with a few errors of transcription
and one or two of date corrected, and with a very few new letters added.
Much, of course, remains and ought to remain unprinted. Some of the
outpourings of the early time are too sacred and intimate for publicity.
Many of the letters of his maturer years are dry business letters of no
general interest: many others are mere scraps tossed in jest to his
familiars and full of catchwords and code-words current in their talk
but meaningless to outsiders. Above all, many have to be omitted because
they deal with the intimate affairs of private persons. Stevenson has
been sometimes called an egoist, as though he had been one in the
practical sense as well as in the sense of taking a lively interest in
his own moods and doings. Nothing can be more untrue. The letters
printed in these volumes are indeed for the most part about himself: but
it was of himself that his correspondents of all things most cared to
hear. If the letters concerned with the private affairs of other people
could be printed, as of course they cannot, the balance would come more
than even. We should see him throwing himself with sympathetic ardour
and without thought of self into the cares and interests of his
correspondents, and should learn to recognise him as having been truly
the helper in many a relation where he might naturally have been taken
for the person helped.
As to the form in which the Letters are now presented, they fill three
volumes instead of the four of the 1911 edition, the division into
fourteen sections according to date being retained. As to the text, it
is faithful to the original except in so far as I have freely used the
editorial privilege of omission when I thought it desirable, and as I
have not felt myself bound to reproduce slips and oddities, however
characteristic, of spelling. In formal matters like the use of
quote-marks, italics, and so forth, I have adopted a more uniform
practice than his, which was very casual and variable.
To some readers, perhaps--(from this point I again resume my
Introduction of 1899, but with more correction and abridgment)--to some,
perhaps, the very lack of art as a correspondent to which Stevenson, as
above quoted, pleads guilty may give the reading an added charm and
flavour. What he could do as an artist in letters we know. I remember
Sir John Millais, a shrewd and very independent judge of books, calling
across to me at a dinner-table, "You know Stevenson, don't you?" and
then going on, "Well, I wish you would tell him from me, if he cares to
know, that to my mind he is the very first of living artists. I don't
mean writers merely, but painters and all of us. Nobody living can see
with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his
tools." But in his letters, excepting a few written in youth and having
more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which
were intended for the public eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is
scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order or logical
sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping
it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human
beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and
Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French,
and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression
or affection, the mood or freak of the moment; pouring himself out in
all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay,
notes of observation and criticism, snatches of remembrance and
autobiography, moralisings on matters uppermost for the hour in his
mind, comments on his own work or other people's, or mere idle fun and
foolery.
By this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson's letters at their best
come nearer than anything else to the full-blooded charm and variety of
his conversation. Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only
that his genial spirit rose to his very best. Few men probably have had
in them such a richness and variety of human nature; and few can ever
have been better gifted than he was to express the play of being that
was in him by means of the apt, expressive word and the animated look
and gesture. _Divers et ondoyant_, in the words of Montaigne, beyond
other men, he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of
singularly assorted characters. Though prose was his chosen medium of
expression, he was by temperament a born poet, to whom the world was
full of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape
and substance in the forms of art. It was his birthright--
"to hear
The great bell beating far and near--
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures the vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground."
He had not only the poet's mind but the poet's senses: in youth ginger
was only too hot in his mouth, and the chimes at midnight only too
favourite a music. At the same time he was not less a born preacher and
moralist and son of the Covenanters after his fashion. He had about him,
as has been said, little spirit of social or other conformity; but an
active and searching private conscience kept him for ever calling in
question both the grounds of his own conduct and the validity of the
accepted codes and compromises of society. He must try to work out a
scheme of morality suitable to his own case and temperament, which found
the prohibitory law of Moses chill and uninspiring, but in the Sermon on
the Mount a strong incentive to all those impulses of pity and charity
to which his heart was prone. In early days his sense of social
injustice and the inequalities of human opportunity made him inwardly
much of a rebel, who would have embraced and acted on theories of
socialism or communism, could he have found any that did not seem to him
at variance with ineradicable instincts of human nature. All his life
the artist and the moralist in him alike were in rebellion against the
bourgeois spirit,--against timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes
for active and courageous well-doing,--and declined to worship at the
shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort and
Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing with
the force of a highly sensitive conscience his instinctive love of
perfection in his work. The artist qualified the moralist by
discountenancing any preference for the harsh, the sour, or the
self-mortifying forms of virtue, and encouraging the love for all tender
or heroic, glowing, generous, and cheerful forms.
Above all things, perhaps, Stevenson was by instinct an adventurer and
practical experimentalist in life. Many poets are content to dream, and
many, perhaps most, moralists to preach: Stevenson must ever be doing
and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to pay himself with fine
feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an insatiable
zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but including the
more harsh and biting--those that bring home to a man the pinch and
sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of the world,
and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional, the
dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist and man
of adventure in him would enter into special partnership with the
moralist and man of conscience: he was prone to plunge into difficult
social passes and ethical dilemmas, which he might sometimes more wisely
have avoided, for the sake of trying to behave in them to the utmost
according to his own personal sense of the obligations of honour, duty,
and kindness. In yet another part of his being he cherished, as his
great countryman Scott had done before him, an intense underlying
longing for the life of action, danger and command. "Action, Colvin,
action," I remember his crying eagerly to me with his hand on my arm as
we lay basking for his health's sake in a boat off the scented shores of
the Cap Martin. Another time--this was on his way to a winter cure at
Davos--some friend had given him General Hamley's _Operations of
War_:--"in which," he writes to his father, "I am drowned a thousand
fathoms deep, and O that I had been a soldier is still my cry."
Fortunately, with all these ardent and divers instincts, there were
present two invaluable gifts besides: that of humour, which for all his
stress of being and vivid consciousness of self saved him from ever
seeing himself for long together out of a just proportion, and kept
wholesome laughter always ready at his lips; and that of a most tender
and loyal heart, which through all his experiments and agitations made
the law of kindness the one ruling law of his life. In the end, lack of
health determined his career, giving the chief part in his life to the
artist and man of imagination, and keeping the man of action a prisoner
in the sickroom until, by a singular turn of destiny, he was able to
wring a real prolonged and romantically successful adventure out of that
voyage to the Pacific which had been, in its origin, the last despairing
resource of the invalid.
Again, it was characteristic of this multiple personality that he never
seemed to be cramped like the rest of us, at any given time of life,
within the limits of his proper age, but to be child, boy, young man,
and old man all at once. There was never a time in his life when
Stevenson had to say with St. Augustine, "Behold! my childhood is dead,
but I am alive." The child lived on always in him, not in memory only,
but in real survival, with all its freshness of perception unimpaired,
and none of its play instincts in the least degree extinguished or made
ashamed. As for the perennial boy in Stevenson, that is too apparent to
need remark. It was as a boy for boys that he wrote the best known of
his books, _Treasure Island_, and with all boys that he met, provided
they were really boys and not prigs nor puppies, he was instantly and
delightedly at home. At the same time, even when I first knew him, he
showed already surprising occasional traits and glimpses of old
sagacity, of premature life-wisdom and experience.
Once more, it is said that in every poet there must be something of the
woman. If to be quick in sympathy and feeling, ardent in attachment, and
full of pity for the weak and suffering, is to be womanly, Stevenson was
certainly all those; he was even like a woman in being [Greek:
artidakrus], easily moved to tears at the touch of pity or affection, or
even at any specially poignant impression of art or beauty. But yet, if
any one word were to be chosen for the predominant quality of his
character and example, I suppose that word would be manly. In his gentle
and complying nature there were strains of iron tenacity and will:
occasionally even, let it be admitted, of perversity and Scottish
"thrawnness." He had both kinds of physical courage--the active,
delighting in danger, and the passive, unshaken in endurance. In the
moral courage of facing situations and consequences, of readiness to pay
for faults committed, of outspokenness, admitting no ambiguous relations
and clearing away the clouds from human intercourse, I have not known
his equal. The great Sir Walter himself, as this book will prove, was
not more manfully free from artistic jealousy or irritability under
criticism, or more unfeignedly inclined to exaggerate the qualities of
other people's work and to underrate those of his own. Of the humorous
and engaging parts of vanity and egoism, which led him to make infinite
talk and fun about himself, and use his own experiences as a key for
unlocking the confidences of others, Stevenson had plenty; but of the
morose and fretful parts never a shade. "A little Irish girl," he wrote
once during a painful crisis of his life, "is now reading my book aloud
to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered.--Yours,
R. L. S. _P.S._--Now they yawn, and I am indifferent. Such a wisely
conceived thing is vanity." If only vanity so conceived were commoner!
And whatever might be the abstract and philosophical value of that
somewhat grimly stoical conception of the universe, of conduct and duty,
at which in mature years he had arrived, want of manliness is certainly
not its fault. Take the kind of maxims which he was accustomed to forge
for his own guidance:--"Acts may be forgiven; not even God can forgive
the hanger-back." "Choose the best, if you can; or choose the worst;
that which hangs in the wind dangles from a gibbet." "'Shall I?' said
Feeble-mind; and the echo said, 'Fie!'" "'Do I love?' said Loveless; and
the echo laughed." "A fault known is a fault cured to the strong; but to
the weak it is a fetter riveted." "The mean man doubts, the
great-hearted is deceived." "Great-heart was deceived. 'Very well,' said
Great-heart." "'I have not forgotten my umbrella,' said the careful man;
but the lightning struck him." "Shame had a fine bed, but where was
slumber? Once he was in jail he slept." With this moralist maxims meant
actions; and where shall we easily find a much manlier spirit of wisdom
than this?
There was yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck
others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the freakish or
elvish, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him.
It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested
occasionally a "spirit of air and fire" rather than one of earth; that
he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and laughter; and that
there was no jest (saving the unkind) he would not make and relish. The
late Mr. J. A. Symonds always called him Sprite; qualifying the name,
however, by the epithets "most fantastic, but most human." To me the
essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well
nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and
of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was
at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm
their hands, while they admired and were entertained by the shifting
lights.
It was only in company, as I have said, that all these many lights and
colours could be seen in full play. He would begin no matter
how--perhaps with a jest at some absurd adventure of his own, perhaps
with the recitation, in his vibrating voice and full Scotch accent, of
some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, perhaps with a rhapsody of
analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or expressiveness
that had struck him in man, woman, child, or external nature. And
forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on
in endless, never importunate, flood and variety. A hundred fictitious
characters would be invented and launched on their imaginary careers; a
hundred ingenious problems of conduct and cases of honour would be set
and solved; romantic voyages would be planned and followed out in
vision, with a thousand incidents; the possibilities of life and art
would be illuminated with search-lights of bewildering range and
penetration, sober argument and high poetic eloquence alternating with
coruscations of insanely apposite slang--the earthiest jape anon
shooting up into the empyrean and changing into the most ethereal
fantasy--the stalest and most vulgarised forms of speech gaining
brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto undreamt-of
application--and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill diffusing
itself from the speaker, a glow of eager benignity and affectionate
laughter emanating from his presence, till every one about him seemed to
catch something of his own gift and inspiration. This sympathetic power
of inspiring others was the special and distinguishing note of
Stevenson's conversation. He would keep a houseful or a single companion
entertained all day, and day after day and half the nights, yet never
seemed to monopolise the talk or absorb it; rather he helped every one
about him to discover and to exercise unexpected powers of their own.
Imagine all this helped by the most speaking of presences: a steady,
penetrating fire in the brown, wide-set eyes, a compelling power and
richness in the smile; courteous, waving gestures of the arms and long,
nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the fingers;
continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he conversed: rapid,
but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in his attenuated
but well-carried figure, and his movements were light, deft, and full of
spring. There was something for strangers, and even for friends, to get
over in the queer garments which in youth it was his whim to wear--the
badge, as they always seemed to me, partly of a genuine carelessness,
certainly of a genuine lack of cash (the little he had was always
absolutely at the disposal of his friends), partly of a deliberate
detachment from any particular social class or caste, partly of his love
of pickles and adventures, which he thought befel a man thus attired
more readily than another. But this slender, slovenly, nondescript
apparition, long-visaged and long-haired, had only to speak in order to
be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman,
and within the first five for a master spirit and man of genius. There
were, indeed, certain stolidly conventional and superciliously official
kinds of persons, both at home and abroad, who were incapable of looking
beyond the clothes, and eyed him always with frozen suspicion. This
attitude used sometimes in youth to drive him into fits of flaming
anger, which put him helplessly at a disadvantage unless, or until, he
could call the sense of humour to his help. Apart from these his human
charm was the same for all kinds of people, without distinction of class
or caste; for worldly-wise old great ladies, whom he reminded of famous
poets in their youth; for his brother artists and men of letters,
perhaps, above all; for the ordinary clubman; for his physicians, who
could never do enough for him; for domestic servants, who adored him;
for the English policeman even, on whom he often tried, quite in vain,
to pass himself as one of the criminal classes; for the shepherd, the
street arab, or the tramp, the common seaman, the beach-comber, or the
Polynesian high-chief. Even in the imposed silence and restraint of
extreme sickness the power and attraction of the man made themselves
felt, and there seemed to be more vitality and fire of the spirit in
him as he lay exhausted and speechless in bed than in an ordinary
roomful of people in health.
But I have strayed from my purpose, which was only to indicate that in
the best of these letters of Stevenson's you have some echo, far away
indeed, but yet the nearest, of his talk--talk which could not possibly
be taken down, and of which nothing remains save in the memory of his
friends an impression magical and never to be effaced.