Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  Moreover, besides the matter there was the form, and this from first to last continually engaged him. In the early seventies there were not many writers in this country to whom style was a matter of life or death, or if it were so, their aspirations were mostly hidden and unrealised. But to Stevenson from the beginning the technical problem was always present; with less fire the work of art had been less completely welded into an expression of the whole nature of the man; with less diligence the file-marks would seldom have been so completely removed. His style matured in simplicity and breadth as the years of labour brought their reward: it varied, of course, with the subject in hand; but not the least excellence of the instrument thus evolved is that it never failed of adaptation to whatever new class of writing its creator essayed.

  The present point, however, is the energy and perseverance which prepared and secured the mastery, and in reviewing the amount of Stevenson’s finished work, neither the quantity sacrificed in the process must be forgotten, nor the extreme compression of the remainder. His was not the pen that covers page after page without an effort, unblotted and uncondensed, but the tool of the man who, in Mr. Kipling’s phrase, “ makes most delicate inlay-work in black and white, and files out to the fraction of a hair.” In his own words, the only test of writing that he knew was this: “If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it’s amateur work.” And the main thing in which he thought his own stories failed was this: “ I am always cutting the flesh off their bones.”

  Of such material he produced nearly four hundred pages a year for twenty years, and of the conditions under which most of it was done he wrote to Mr. George Meredith in 1893: —

  “For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on — ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.”

  But besides the energy spent on the work there is also the intensity of his intelligence. He had no vast memory like Scott’s, but he remembered to a most unusual extent his own emotions and sensations, and the events of his past life, and what remained in his mind preserved its freshness and a lifelike sharpness of outline.

  If Stevenson’s claim to genius is to be based upon any single gift, it is this quality that most deserves such recognition, nor can it well be refused, if Baudelaire’s definition be regarded as adequate: Le ginie n’est que Venfance retrouvte d volonte. The paper on “ Child’s Play,” the Child’s Garden of Verses, and certain passages quoted in the earlier pages of this book display a power of returning to the ideas and feelings of childhood which has seldom if ever been shown in a higher degree, or has existed except along with intellectual powers of a very considerable calibre.

  It related also to the ordinary sensations of maturity. We have all been active and all been tired, but who has given us such pictures of activity and of fatigue as Stevenson? Consider the account of his tobogganing, place beside it the calm of weariness following exercise described in “ Walking Tours,” or the drowsy labour of the end of the Inland Voyage, and then recall David Balfour. “ By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly. I had no care of my life, neither past nor future, and I scarce remembered there was such a lad as David Balfour; I did not think of myself, but just of each fresh step, which 1 was sure would be my last, with despair, and of Alan, who was the cause of it, with hatred.”1

  1 Kidnapped, chap. xxii. R. L. S.

  It was not only, however, in the recalling of his past life that Stevenson showed this concentration of mind, for the effect of such works as Jekyll and Hyde is due to the intense realisation of the situations evoked, by which new life was breathed into worn-out themes.

  As in books so in correspondence. Letters were at times to Stevenson an irksome duty, at others a welcome opportunity for the outpouring of himself to his friends, but in haste or in delight it was entirely without calculation that he dictated or wrote. It occurred suddenly to him one day that his letters to Mr. Colvin from Samoa “would make good pickings” after his death, “ and a man could make some kind of a book out of it without much trouble.”1 So little have people understood his character and moods that after this point they have found in the Vailima Letters a self-conscious tone and a continual appeal to the gallery.

  To see him was utterly to disbelieve in any regard of ulterior motives. He was his father’s son, and with him, also, “ his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races.” If he were talking, he was seldom for a moment still, but generally paced restlessly up and down the room, using his hands continually to emphasize what he was saying, but with gestures that seemed purely necessary and natural.

  It is very difficult to give the impression of his demeanour and the brilliancy of his talk without falling 1 Vailima Utters, June, 1892. into the contrary error, and suggesting a self-consciousness full of acting and exaggeration. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is easily shown. His singleness of mind always, in later days at any rate, impressed friends and foes alike with his sincerity of purpose. He was no sportsman and no athlete — fragile and long-haired yet nobody ever hinted he was unmanly: he was given to preaching, and himself not beyond reproach, yet no one for an instant suspected him of hypocrisy. Whatever he did he did with his whole heart, and it was hard for any one to think otherwise. All the foibles of mysteriousness and secrecy which formed a part of his life in student days fell away from him before the end. The burden of responsibility had diminished, it may be, the gaiety of his temper; but his character shone out the more clearly as the years showed the man.

  If Stevenson delivered himself over, heart and soul, as I have said, to the absorbing interest or the ruling passion of the moment, it was assuredly not for the want of other interests or other passions. Of the many-sidedness of his mind the variety of his works is surely sufficient evidence, and even these by no means exhausted the whole of his resources. He wrote novels — the novel of adventure, the novel of character, the novel of incident; he wrote short stories and essays of all kinds — their variety it is impossible even to characterise; he wrote history and biography, fables and moralities, and treatises on ethics; he wrote poems- blank verse, lyrics and ballads, songs and poetry for 1 See, however, vol. ii. . children; he wrote plays, ranging from melodrama to genteel comedy; books of travel reflective and descriptive; he composed prayers and lay sermons, and even ventured on political speculation.

  All were not of equal merit — that is not now to the point — but it would not be difficult to pick out at least ten works differing widely from each other, but all definitely belonging to the highest class of their kind. Only one verdict is possible, and for that it is necessary to lay hands upon a commonplace, and appropriate it to the benefit of the man who has best right to the distinction. It is curious that the saying was first made for Goldsmith, the best loved among our authors of the eighteenth century, the one who, in Professor Raleigh’s phrase, shares with Stevenson “ the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers.” But of Stevenson it is even more true to say with Dr. Johnson: Nullum fere scribendigenus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.

  For this diversity of power and achievement I hav
e relied on the evidence of his published writings, because it would otherwise appear incredible. But account must also be taken of at least a part of his unfinished and unpublished work, differing again in kind; and to that in turn must be added the indications in his letters of other veins of character or reflection that were never worked at all. Over and above all there was the talk of the man himself, in which the alternations were even more rapid and more striking.1 Wit, humour, and pathos; the romantic, the tragic, the picturesque; 1 For the admirable description by Mr. Colvin and Mr. Henley, see Letters, vol. i. pp. xxxvii, xxxviii.

  stern judgment, wise counsel, wild fooling, all fell into their natural places, followed each other in rapid and easy succession, and made a marvellous whole, not the least of the wonder being the congruity and spontaneity which gave to it the just effect of being a perfectly natural utterance.

  The quality was, of course, not without its defects, the chief of which were an apparent detachment and a sort of fickleness, or want of persistence. It was probably the former of these which led several persons quite independently of each other to give Stevenson the name of “Sprite,” a being exempt from the ordinary limitations of mankind, an Ariel free to wander through the realms of imagination, turning hither and thither as his fancies prompted him.

  Of the abandonment of his inventions I have already spoken. “ He was always full of schemes, and plans, and fancies,” says Mr. Henley. “You left him hot on one, and the next time you saw him, you found to your distress (having gone all the way with him) that he had forgotten all about it.”

  Thus if he saw life on each of its many sides in turn with an intensity denied to a wider range of vision, he was liable at times to see it neither steadily nor whole. For the latter he was somewhat compensated by the fact that he saw so many aspects of it in rapid succession that he speedily corrected any narrowness of consideration, his nature further helping him in this — that he never saw it with any narrowness of temper.

  Taken together with the kindliness of his nature it also, to a great extent, explains his extraordinary gift of sympathy. He seemed to divine from his own ex- perience how other people felt, and how best they might be encouraged or consoled. I doubt if any one ever remained for long in his company either reticent or ill at ease. Mr. Gosse reminds us of Stevenson’s talks at Sydney with a man formerly engaged in the “ blackbirding” trade, who was with great difficulty induced to speak of his experiences. “ He was very shy at first,” said Stevenson, “and it was not till I told him of a good many of my escapades that I could get him to thaw, and then he poured it all out. I have always found that the best way of getting people to be confidential.” We have seen with what success he approached the natives in this manner; in like fashion, no doubt, he inquired of Highlanders about the Appin murder.

  But even where he had some set purpose in view, his talk seemed to be a natural and purely spontaneous outpouring of himself. It never seemed to me to be vanity — if it were, it was the most genial that ever existed — but rather a reference to instances within his own knowledge to illustrate the point in hand. He never monopolised the conversation, however eager he might be, but was faithful to his preference for talk which is in its nature a debate, “ the amicable counter- assertion of personality,” and “the Protean quality which is in man “ enabled him, without ceasing to be himself, to meet the temper of his company.

  With this multiplicity one might expect to find room in his character for many contradictory qualities or the presence in excess and defect of the very same virtues, and this in truth was so. To reconcile opposites was a task he thought of but little importance, and a fa- vourite phrase with him was Whitman’s: * Do I contradict myself? Very well, then 1 contradict myself.” Consistency was a virtue for which it was easy to pay too high a price, and often it had to be surrendered for matters of greater import. Aspiration and humour, shrewdness and romance, profusion and self-denial, self-revelation and reserve, in him were curiously matched. On his frankness and his reticence 1 have already dwelt. He speaks of himself, as Professor Raleigh says,1 “ with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity”; he tells you everything, as you think at first, and so simply and so frankly that it is only gradually you realise that he has not been revealing the things nearest his heart, that you learn no secrets of his home or his religion, nor of anything that was not for you to know. Self-denial, again, he showed in many ways; in his youth especially, when money was scarce with him, if any one had to go without, he was the first to surrender his claim and sacrifice himself. On the other hand, with “ that virtue of frugality which is the armour of the artist” he was but ill-equipped.

  Of his self-restraint in literature there can be no better instance than the very sparing use he makes of the pathetic. In the early essay on “ Nurses “ it is perhaps a trifle forced; there are hardly two more beautiful or dignified examples of it in English literature than in the essay on “ Old Mortality,” and the death of the fugitive French colonel in St. Ives. But it was only in conversation that one realised the extraordinary degree to 1 Robert Louis Stevenson, by Walter Raleigh, . Edward Arnold, 1896.

  which he possessed the power of moving the heartstrings. It was not that he made frequent or unmanly use of it, but being less upon his guard, the pathetic aspect of some person or incident would appeal to him, and in a moment he would have the least tender-hearted of his hearers hardly less deeply moved than himself. Ordinarily even in conversation he used it chiefly as a weapon of chivalry in defence of the neglected and the old; but as Swift “could write beautifully about a broomstick,” so Stevenson one day described a chair, enlarging upon the hard lot of the legs that had to support the idle seat, until the boy to whom he was talking was almost in tears. On the other side must be set his description of “ Home, Sweet Home “ in Across the Plains, as “belonging to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be redeemed by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of’ Home, Sweet Home,’ you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion.”

  But the supreme instance of diverse elements in him was patience and its opposite. Never have I heard of any one in whom these contradictories were both shown in so high a degree. His endurance in illness and in work v/e have seen: no pain was too great to bear, no malady too long: he never murmured until it was over. No task was too irksome, no revision too exacting — laboriously, and like an eager apprentice, he went through with it to the end.

  But on the other hand, when impatience came to the surface, it blazed up like the anger of a man who had never known a check. It was generally caused by ii 209

  some breach of faith or act of dishonesty or unjustifiable delay. The only time I know of its being displayed in public was in a Paris restaurant, where Stevenson had ordered a change of wine, and the very bottle he had rejected was brought back to him with a different label. There was a sudden explosion of wrath; the bottle was violently broken; in an instant the restaurant was emptied, and — so much for long- suffering — the proprietor and his staff were devoting the whole of their attention and art to appease and reconcile the angry man.

  Sternness and tenderness in him were very equally matched, though the former was kept mainly for himself and those nearest to him, of whom he asked nearly as much as of himself: tenderness, on the other hand, was for the failings of others. For like many chivalrous people, he expected but little of what he gave with so much freedom. His tenderness had something feminine, yet without lacking the peculiar strength that distinguishes it in a man. The Roman quality of sternness he so much admired came to himself, no doubt, with his Scottish blood. It is a virtue that for the most part requires exclusive dominion over a character for its proper display, and in Stevenson it had many rivals. But that it was genuine his appreciation of Lord Braxfield and his rendering of it in Lord Hermiston place beyond all doubt.1

  Sternness and pity it is quite possible to harmonise
, and the secret in Stevenson’s case is perhaps solved in the following letter: “ I wish you to read Taine’s Ori- gines de la France Contemporaine . . . and to try and 1 Cf. Vailima Letters, . understand what I have in my mind (ay, and in my heart!) when I preach law and police to you in season and out of season. What else do we care for, what else is anything but secondary, in that embroiled, confounded ravelment of politics, but to protect the old, and the weak, and the quiet, from that bloody wild beast that slumbers in man?

  “True to my character, 1 have to preach. But just read the book. It is not absolutely fair, for Taine does not feel, with a warm heart, the touching side of their poor soul’s illusions; he does not feel the infinite pathos of the Federations, poor pantomime and orgie, that (to its actors) seemed upon the very margin of heaven; nor the unspeakable, almost unthinkable tragedy of such a poor, virtuous, wooden-headed lot as the methodistic Jacobins. But he tells, as no one else, the dreadful end of sentimental politics.”