Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  So when he spoke, he spoke direct from his own reflection and experience, and when he prayed, he did not hesitate to pass beyond the decorous ring-fence supposed to include all permissible objects of prayer; he gave thanks for “ the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful,” and honestly and reverently made his petition that he might be granted gaiety and laughter. These instances are on the surface, but in spiritual matters he had a rare power of leaving on one side the non-essential and going straight to the heart of the difficulty, that was hardly realised by the world at large. Taine’s charge against Scott that “ he pauses on the threshold of the soul” has been renewed against Stevenson. For one thing, in spite of his apparent frankness, he had a deep reserve on the things that touched him most profoundly, and never wore his heart upon his sleeve. So far as the criticism applies to his writings, it is little less untrue than that which called him “a faddling hedonist,” and its injustice has been shown by Mr. Colvin;1 so far as it ap-

  1 Letters, i. 18. plies to himself, it must be met by a contradiction. He was a man who had walked in the darkest depths of the spirit, and had known the bitterness of humiliation. But in that valley — of which he never spoke — he too, like the friend whom he commemorates,1 “ had met with angels “; he too had “ found the words of life.”

  To return to his plain speaking, in literature he was equally sincere. Sir Walter Scott was for him “ out and away the king of the romantics.” But if a discerning estimate of Scott’s shortcomings, as well as his merits, is desired, it can hardly be found more justly expressed in few words than on the last page but one of “A Gossip on Romance.”

  In composition also no one who produced so much has probably ever been so little the victim of the stereotyped phrase as Stevenson. A few mannerisms he had, no doubt — ”it was a beautiful clear night of stars” — but they were from his own mint, and it was oftenest he himself who first called attention to them.

  For the most part the effect on his writing of the ardour of which I am speaking is to be seen in two ways — in his diligence and in the intellectual intensity of the work produced. If ever capacity for taking pains be accounted genius in literature, no one can deny the possession of the supreme gift to Stevenson. To Mr. lies he wrote, in 1887: “ I imagine nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world.” In 1876 he reckoned that his final copy involved ten times the 1 Memories and Portraits, p. 121. actual quantity of writing; in 1888 the articles for Scrib- nefs Magazine were written seven or eight times; the year before his death he told Mr. Crockett that it had taken him three weeks to write four-and-twenty pages. His prose works, exclusive of his published letters, run to nearly eight thousand pages of the Edinburgh Edition — three hundred words to a page. Nine-tenths of this was written within less than twenty years; and there were, besides, more or less completely conceived, many novels, stories, essays, histories, biographies, and plays, which occupied no inconsiderable amount of his attention within that time.

  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-consciou
s 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. p. 190. 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 have 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, p. 77. 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.”