Chapter 12

Our ability to follow Stevenson in his fantasias depends very largely upon how far our imaginations and our sentimental interests are dissociated from our interest in real life. Commonplace and common-sense people, whose emotional natures are not strongly at play in the conduct of their daily lives, have a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a very low degree of energy, which delights to be occupied with the unreal and the impossible. More than this, any mind which is daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some of the true relations governing things as they are, finds its natural relaxation in the contemplation of things as they are not,--things as they cannot be. There is probably no one who will not find himself thoroughly enjoying the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued enough. Hence the justification of a whole branch of Stevenson's work.

After every detraction has been allowed for, there remain certain books of Stevenson's of an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books which can hardly be classed as imitations or arabesques,--Kidnapped, Weir of Hermiston, The Merry Men. These books seem at first blush to have every element of greatness, except spontaneity. The only trouble is, they are too perfect.

If, after finishing Kidnapped, or The Merry Men, we take up Guy Mannering, or The Antiquary, or any of Scott's books which treat of the peasantry, the first impression we gain is, that we are happy. The tension is gone; we are in contact with a great, sunny, benign human being who pours a flood of life out before us and floats us as the sea floats a chip. He is full of old-fashioned and absurd passages. Sometimes he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed. He is so careless of his English that his sentences are not always grammatical; but we get a total impression of glorious and wholesome life.

It is the man Walter Scott who thus excites us. This heather, these hills, these peasants, this prodigality and vigor and broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. If we return now to Weir of Hermiston, we seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist. All is intention, all calculation. The very style of Weir of Hermiston is English ten times distilled.

Let us imagine that directness and unconsciousness are the great qualities of style, and that Stevenson believes this. The greatest directness and unconsciousness of which Stevenson himself was capable are to be found in some of his early writings. Across the Plains, for instance, represents his most straightforward and natural style. But it happens that certain great writers who lived some time ago, and were famous examples of "directness," have expressed themselves in the speech of their own period. Stevenson rejects his own style as not good enough for him, not direct enough, not unconscious enough; he will have theirs. And so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, and brings home an elaborate archaism.

Although we think of Stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels and miscellaneous reminiscences.

It was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious artist, and this is true to a great extent. On the day of his death he was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel. But it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of English can pass through. There was one year in which he earned four thousand pounds. His immeasurable generosity kept him forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to the weight carried by this dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder that some of his work is trivial. The wonder is that he should have produced it at all.

The journalistic work of Stevenson, beginning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters afterwards published as Across the Plains, is valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that in the letters Across the Plains the lights were turned down. But, in truth, the light is daylight. The letters have a freshness that midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of more permanent interest than all the polite essays he ever wrote.

If we compare the earlier with the later work of Stevenson as a magazine writer, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. It is not a single style which grows more intense, but his amazing skill in many which has increased.

The following is a specimen of Stevenson's natural style, and it would be hard to find a better:--

"The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than night-gear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale."

The following is from an essay written by Stevenson while under the influence of the author of Rab and his Friends.

"One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. In his youth he was a most beautiful person, most serene and genial by disposition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming.... From this disaster like a spent swimmer he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing never more to rise. But in his face there was the light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation. Of his wounded pride we knew only by his silence."

The following is in the sprightly style of the eighteenth century:--

"Cockshot is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it on the minute. 'Let me see,' he will say, 'give me a moment, I should have some theory for that.'"

But for serious matters this manner would never do, and accordingly we find that, when the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into English as early as the time of James I.

Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his smaller works to his physicians:--

"There are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule.... I forget as many as I remember and I ask both to pardon me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech."

After finishing off this dedication to his satisfaction, Stevenson turns over the page and writes a NOTE in the language of two and one-half centuries later. He is now the elegant _littérateur_ of the last generation--one would say James Russell Lowell:--

"The human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of conduct for what I should have supposed to be the less congenial field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect, so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of mispronunciation."

But in this last extract we are still three degrees away from what can be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of style. Take the following, which is the very peach-blow of courtesy:--

"But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no business in the arts. If he be not frugal he steers directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he should attain to--or preserve--distinction in the arts," etc.

Now the very next essay to this is a sort of intoned voluntary played upon the more sombre emotions.

"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes."

There is a tincture of Carlyle in this mixture. There are a good many pages of Gothic type in the later essays, for Stevenson thought it the proper tone in which to speak of death, duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. He derived this impression from the works of Sir Thomas Browne. But the solemnity of Sir Thomas Browne is like a melodious thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing.

"Time sadly overcometh all things and is now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he passeth through these deserts asketh of her 'who builded them?' And she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not."

The frenzy to produce something like this sadly overcomes Stevenson, in his later essays. But perhaps it were to reason too curiously to pin Stevenson down to Browne. All the old masters stalk like spectres through his pages, and among them are the shades of the moderns, even men that we have dined with.

According to Stevenson, a certain kind of subject requires a certain "treatment," and the choice of his tone follows his title. These "treatments" are always traditional, and even his titles tread closely on the heels of former titles. He can write the style of Charles Lamb better than Lamb could do it himself, and his Hazlitt is very nearly as good. He fences with his left hand as well as with his right, and can manage two styles at once like Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from the 7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined about it.

It is with a pang of disappointment that we now and then come across a style which we recognize, yet cannot place.

People who take enjoyment in the reminiscences awakened by conjuring of this kind can nowhere in the world find a master like Stevenson. Those persons belong to the bookish classes. Their numbers are insignificant, but they are important because they give countenance to the admiration of others who love Stevenson with their hearts and souls.

The reason why Stevenson represents a backward movement in literature, is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from speech, and new thoughts from life, and Stevenson used all his powers to exclude both from his work. He lived and wrote in the past. That this Scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period of English literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours' traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that literature. He is the Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is impossible to assign him rank in any line of writing. If you shut your eyes to try and place him, you find that you cannot do it. The effect he produces while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the mistletoe of English literature whose roots are not in the soil but in the tree.

But enough of the nature and training of Stevenson which fitted him to play the part he did. The cyclonic force which turned him from a secondary London novelist into something of importance and enabled him to give full play to his really unprecedented talents will be recognized on glancing about us.

We are now passing through the age of the Distribution of Knowledge. The spread of the English-speaking race since 1850, and the cheapness of printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. All the books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in popular editions. The magazines fulfil the same function; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. Andrew Lang heads an army of organized workers who mine in the old literature and coin it into booklets and cash.

The American market rules the supply of light literature in Great Britain. While Lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends of his own--something just as good. The two men serve the same public.

Stevenson's reputation in England was that of a comparatively light weight, but his success here was immediate. We hailed him as a classic--or something just as good. Everything he did had the very stamp and trademark of Letters, and he was as strong in one department as another. We loved this man; and thenceforward he purveyed "literature" to us at a rate to feed sixty millions of people and keep them clamoring for more.

Does any one believe that the passion of the American people for learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? Does any one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? It creates an eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is a power like Niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this importation of culture by the carload. The state of mind it shows is a definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through, and which precedes the discovery that real things are better than sham. When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hundred thousand dollars' worth of Louis XV. furniture to be made--and most well made--in Buffalo, and when the American public gives Stevenson an order for Pulvis et Umbra--the same forces are at work in each case. It is Chicago making culture hum.

And what kind of a man was Stevenson? Whatever may be said about his imitativeness, his good spirits were real. They are at the bottom of his success, the strong note in his work. They account for all that is paradoxical in his effect. He often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. And yet we do not reproach him. He has by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the scepticism inherent in them. And yet we know that he was not a sceptic; on the contrary, we like him, and he was regarded by his friends as little lower than the angels.

Why is it that we refuse to judge him by his own utterances? The reason is that all of his writing is playful, and we know it. The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. The truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as Stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of Europe, there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a pale boy.

But the courage of this boy, the heroism of his life, illumine all his works with a personal interest. The last ten years of his life present a long battle with death.

We read of his illnesses, his spirit; we hear how he never gave up, but continued his works by dictation and in dumb show when he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak to speak. This courage and the lovable nature of Stevenson won the world's heart. He was regarded with a peculiar tenderness such as is usually given only to the young. Honor, and admiration mingled with affection followed him to his grave. Whatever his artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual nature in his work. It was this nature which made him thus beloved.

End of Project Gutenberg's Emerson and Other Essays, by John Jay Chapman