A certain critic said of Stevenson that he was 'incurably literary;'
the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. There is
comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep
him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. Rather than _do_
anything Stevenson preferred to loaf and to write books. And he early
learned that considerable loafing is necessary if one expects to
become a writer. There is a sense in which it is true that only lazy
people are fit for literature. Nothing is so fruitful as a fine gift
for idleness. The most prolific writers have been people who seemed to
have nothing to do. Every one has read that description of George Sand
in her latter years, 'an old lady who came out into the garden at
mid-day in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or wandered
slowly about. So she remained for hours looking about her, musing,
contemplating. She was gathering impressions, absorbing the universe,
steeping herself in Nature; and at night she would give all this forth
as a sort of emanation.' One shudders to think what the result might
have been if instead of absorbing the universe George Sand had done
something practical during those hours. But the Scotchman was not like
George Sand in any particular that I know of save in his perfect
willingness to bask in the sunshine and steep himself in Nature. His
books did not 'emanate.' The one way in which he certainly did not
produce literature was by improvisation. George Sand never revised her
work; it might almost be said that Robert Louis Stevenson never did
anything else.
Of his method we know this much. He himself has said that when he went
for a walk he usually carried two books in his pocket, one a book to
read, the other a note-book in which to put down the ideas that came
to him. This remark has undoubtedly been seized upon and treasured in
the memory as embodying a secret of his success. Trusting young souls
have begun to walk about with note-books: only to learn that the
note-book was a detail, not an essential, in the process.
He who writes while he walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he
chooses, write very well. He may turn over the rubbish of his
vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which
to bring out his meaning. This word need not be unusual; and if it is
'exquisite' then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare
exactness to the idea. Stevenson wrote so well in part because he
wrote so deliberately. He knew the vulgarity of haste, especially in
the making of literature. He knew that finish counted for much,
perhaps for half. Has he not been reported as saying that it wasn't
worth a man's while to attempt to be a writer unless he was quite
willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single
sentence? In general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it
means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. That
scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days,
and few authors are willing to take a prophet's chances. But Stevenson
was one of the few.
He laid the foundations of his reputation with two little volumes of
travel. _An Inland Voyage_ appeared in 1878; _Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes_, in 1879. These books are not dry chronicles of drier
facts. They bear much the same relation to conventional accounts of
travel that flowers growing in a garden bear to dried plants in a
herbarium. They are the most friendly and urbane things in modern
English literature. They have been likened to Sterne's _Sentimental
Journey_. The criticism would be better if one were able to imagine
Stevenson writing the adventure of the _fille de chambre_, or could
conceive of Lawrence Sterne writing the account of the meeting with
the Plymouth Brother. 'And if ever at length, out of our separate and
sad ways, we should all come together into one common-house, I have a
hope to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will
hasten to shake hands with me again.' That was written twenty years
ago and the Brother was an old man then. And now Stevenson is gone.
How impossible it is not to wonder whether they have yet met in that
'one common-house.' 'He feared to intrude, but he would not willingly
forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking
me by the hand.'
The _Inland Voyage_ contains passages hardly to be matched for beauty.
Let him who would be convinced read the description of the forest
Mormal, that forest whose breath was perfumed with nothing less
delicate than sweet brier. 'I wish our way had always lain among
woods,' says Stevenson. 'Trees are the most civil society.'
Stevenson's traveling companion was a young English baronet. The two
adventurers paddled in canoes through the pleasant rivers and canals
of Belgium and North France. They had plenty of rain and a variety of
small misadventures; but they also had sunshine, fresh air, and
experiences among the people of the country such as they could have
got in no other way. They excited not a little wonder, and the common
opinion was that they were doing the journey for a wager; there seemed
to be no other reason why two respectable gentlemen, not poor, should
work so hard and get so wet.
This was conceived in a more adventurous vein than appears at first
sight. In an unsubdued country one contends with beasts and men who
are openly hostile. But when one is a stranger in the midst of
civilization and meets civilization at its back door, he is astonished
to find how little removed civilization is from downright savagery.
Stevenson and his companion learned as they could not have learned
otherwise how great deference the world pays to clothes. Whether your
heart is all right turns out a matter of minor importance; but--_are
your clothes all right_? If so, smiles, and good beds at respectable
inns; if not, a lodging in a cow-shed or beneath any poor roof which
suffices to keep off the rain. The voyagers had constantly to meet the
accusation of being peddlers. They denied it and were suspected afresh
while the denial was on their lips. The public mind was singularly
alert and critical on the subject of peddlers.
At La Fere, 'of Cursed Memory,' they had a rebuff which nearly spoiled
their tempers. They arrived in a rain. It was the finest kind of a
night to be indoors 'and hear the rain upon the windows.' They were
told of a famous inn. When they reached the carriage entry 'the rattle
of many dishes fell upon their ears.' They sighted a great field of
snowy table-cloth, the kitchen glowed like a forge. They made their
triumphal entry, 'a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp
India-rubber bag upon his arm.' Stevenson declares that he never had a
sound view of that kitchen. It seemed to him a culinary paradise
'crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen, who all turned round from
their sauce-pans and looked at us with surprise.' But the landlady--a
flushed, angry woman full of affairs--there was no mistaking her. They
asked for beds and were told to find beds in the suburbs: 'We are too
busy for the like of you!' They said they would dine then, and were
for putting down their luggage. The landlady made a run at them and
stamped her foot: 'Out with you--out of the door,' she screeched.
I once heard a young Englishman who had been drawn into some
altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his
own part by saying: 'Now a French cook running amuck with a carving
knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.'
There were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. Stevenson
says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were
out in the rain, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a
disappointed mendicant.'
'It's all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from
an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of
lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world
bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air;
but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil.
I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then
I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.'
Stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of Diana on fire
that night if it had been handy. 'There was no crime complete enough
to express my disapproval of human institutions.' As for the baronet,
he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again;
and he registered a vow before Heaven never to be uncivil to a
peddler. But before making that vow he particularized a complaint for
every joint in the landlady's body.
To read _An Inland Voyage_ is to be impressed anew with the thought
that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. They are
instinctively for being on the move. Like the author of that book they
travel 'not to go any where but to go.' If they behold a stage-coach
or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard.
They are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when
they are on the move. Talk to them of foreign lands and they are
seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. Stevenson met an
omnibus driver in a Belgian village who looked at him with thirsty
eyes because he was able to travel. How that omnibus driver 'longed to
be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.' 'Here I
am,' said he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back
again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My
God, is that life?' Stevenson opined that this man had in him the
making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to Africa
or to the Indies after Drake. 'But it is an evil age for the gipsily
inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool,
he it is who has the wealth and glory.'
In his _Travels with a Donkey_ the author had no companionship but
such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship
was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast
which shared his food and his trials. 'My lady-friend' he calls her.
Modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color
of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' She gave him trouble, and at
times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine
carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote
books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never
driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her
own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to
describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is
slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble
toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her
sex. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her
she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had
formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my
cruelty.'
From time to time Modestine's load would topple off. The villagers
were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. 'Judge
if I was hot!' says Stevenson. 'I remembered having laughed myself
when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a
jack-ass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in
my old light days before this trouble came upon me.'
He had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep's wool within,
and in this portable house he passed his nights afield. Not always by
choice, as witness his chapter entitled 'A Camp in the Dark.' There
are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to
perfection,--if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. I
don't know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in
which Stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking
next morning to see the 'world flooded with a blue light, the mother
of dawn.' He had been in search of an adventure all his life, 'a pure
dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,'
and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that
morning found him, an inland castaway, 'as strange to his surroundings
as the first man upon the earth.'
Passages like these indicate Stevenson's quality. He was no
carpet-knight; he had the true adventurer's blood in his veins. He and
Drake and the Belgian omnibus-driver should have gone to the Indies
together. Better still, the omnibus driver should have gone with
Drake, and Stevenson should have gone with Amyas Leigh. They say that
Stevenson traveled in search of health. Without doubt; but think how
he _would_ have traveled if he had had good health. And one has
strange mental experiences alone with the stars. That came of sleeping
in the fields 'where God keeps an open house.' 'I thought I had
rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid
from political economists.'
Much as he gloried in his solitude he 'became aware of a strange
lack;' for he was human. And he gave it as his opinion that 'to live
out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most
complete and free.' It may be so. Such a woman would need to be of
heroic physical mould, and there is danger that she would turn out of
masculine mould as well. Isopel Berners was of such sort. Isopel could
handle her clenched fists like a prizefighter. She was magnificent in
the forest, and never so perfectly in place as when she backed up
George Borrow in his fight with the Flaming Tinman. Having been in the
habit of taking her own part, she was able to give pertinent advice at
a critical moment. 'It's of no use flipping at the Flaming Tinman with
your left hand,' she said, 'why don't you use your right?' Isopel
called Borrow's right arm 'Long Melford.' And when the Flaming Tinman
got his knock-down blow from Borrow's right, Isopel exclaimed, 'Hurrah
for Long Melford; there is nothing like Long Melford for shortness all
the world over!'
But what an embarrassing personage Miss Berners would have been
transferred from the dingle to the drawing-room; nay, how impossible
it is to think of that athletic young goddess as _Miss_ Berners! The
distinctions and titles of conventional society refuse to cling even
to her name. I wonder how Stevenson would have liked Isopel Berners.
And now his philosophy. Yet somehow 'philosophy' seems a big word for
so unpretentious a theory of life as his. Stevenson didn't
philosophize much; he was content to live and to enjoy. He was
deliberate, and in general he would not suffer himself to be driven.
He resembled an admirable lady of my acquaintance who, when urged to
get something done by a given time, usually replied that 'time was
made for slaves.' Stevenson had the same feeling. He says: 'Hurry is
the resource of the faithless. When a man can trust his own heart and
those of his friends to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in
the mean while, why, then, there he dies, and the question is solved.'
You think this a poor philosophy? But there must be all kinds of
philosophy; the people in the world are not run into one mould like so
much candle-grease. And because of this, his doctrine of Inaction and
Postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon
Stevenson. In their opinion instead of being up and doing he
consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. They feel
towards him as Hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge
would have felt towards _him_. Hawthorne imagines that ghostly and
terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite
scorn, 'A writer of storybooks. What kind of employment is that for an
immortal soul?'
To many people nothing is more hateful than this willingness to hold
aloof and let things drift. That any human being should acquiesce with
the present order of the world appears monstrous to these earnest
souls. An Indian critic once called Stevenson 'a faddling Hedonist.'
Stevenson quotes the phrase with obvious amusement and without
attempting to gainsay its accuracy.
But if he allowed the world to take its course he expected the same
privilege. He wished neither to interfere nor to be interfered with.
And he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. He says: 'To know
what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells
you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.' Independence
and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated
cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one's own good estate.
He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, 'so long
as he boasts of what he really has.' If people but knew this they
would boast 'more freely and with a better grace.'
Stevenson was humorously alive to the old-fashioned quality of his
doctrine of happiness and content. He says in the preface to an
_Inland Voyage_ that although the book 'runs to considerably over a
hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of
God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a
better one myself--I really do not know where my head can have been.'
But while this omission will, he fears, render his book
'philosophically unimportant' he hopes that 'the eccentricity may
please in frivolous circles.'
Stevenson could be militant. His letter on Father Damien shows that.
But there was nothing of the professional reformer about him. He had
no hobby, and he was the artist first and then the philanthropist.
This is right; it was the law of his being. Other men are better
equipped to do the work of humanity's city missionaries than was he.
Let their more rugged health and less sensitive nerves bear the
burden; his poet's mission was not the less important.
The remaining point I have to note, among a number which might be
noted, is his firm grasp of this idea: that whether he is his
brother's keeper or not he is at all events his brother's brother. It
is 'philosophy' of a very good sort to have mastered this conception
and to have made the life square with the theory. This doctrine is
fashionable just now, and thick books have been written on the
subject, filled with wise terms and arguments. I don't know whether
Stevenson bothered his head with these matters from a scientific point
of view or not, but there are many illustrations of his interest. Was
it this that made him so gentle in his unaffected manly way? He
certainly understood how difficult it is for the well-to-do member of
society to get any idea not wholly distorted of the feelings and
motives of the lower classes. He believed that certain virtues resided
more conspicuously among the poor than among the rich. He declared
that the poor were more charitably disposed than their superiors in
wealth. 'A workman or a peddler cannot shutter himself off from his
less comfortable neighbors. If he treats himself to a luxury he must
do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what should more directly
lead to charitable thoughts?' But with the advent of prosperity a man
becomes incapable of understanding how the less fortunate live.
Stevenson likens that happy individual to a man going up in a balloon.
'He presently passes through a zone of clouds and after that merely
earthly things are hidden from his gaze. He sees nothing but the
heavenly bodies, all in admirable order and positively as good as new.
He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the
attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the
lilies and the sky-larks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but
then he looks so unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined
at one table this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.'
In the three years since Stevenson's death many additions have been
made to the body of literature by him and about him. There are
letters, finished and unfinished novels, and recollections by the
heaping handful. Critics are considerably exercised over the question
whether any, or all, or only two or three of his books are to last.
The matter has, I believe, been definitely decided so that posterity,
whatever other responsibilities it has, will at least not have that
one; and anything that we can do to relieve the future of its burdens
is altruism worthy the name.
Stevenson was one of the best tempered men that ever lived. He never
prated about goodness, but was unaffectedly good and sunny-hearted as
long as he lived. Of how many men can it be said, as it _can_ be said
of him, that he was sick all his days and never uttered a whimper?
What rare health of mind was this which went with such poor health of
body! I've known men to complain more over toothache than Stevenson
thought it worth while to do with death staring him in the face. He
did not, like Will o' the Mill, live until the snow began to thicken
on his head. He never knew that which we call middle age.
He worked harder than a man in his condition should have done. At
times he felt the need to write for money; and this was hostile to his
theory of literature. He wrote to his friend Colvin: 'I sometimes sit
and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come
in--mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind
of man. What I want is an income that really comes in of itself while
all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs.'
I wish he might have had it; I can think of no other man whose
indolence would have been so profitable to the world.