Part 8

His remark, quoted above, about the “plenty of sailors to talk to” suggests another thing: his exceeding fondness for rubbing elbows with what are called, inappropriately enough, common people,--people who have lived free from the leveling, uniformity-producing, character-dulling, commonizing influences of too many books and an excess of social sophistication. This, too, was a real fairy’s gift to a man destined for literature. “He was of a conversible temper” (he is speaking of himself in his youth), “and insatiably curious in the aspects of life.” Like Will o’ the Mill, “he had a taste for other people, and other people had a taste for him.” As we read of his journeyings hither and thither, and the friends he made almost as often as he opened his mouth, we are reminded of what David Balfour’s father said of his offspring: “He is a steady lad and a canny goer; and I doubt not he will come safe, and be well liked where he goes.” Perhaps it was from his own experience that Stevenson was writing when he said that a boy might learn in his truant hours “to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.”

Stevenson’s books, the narratives of travel and the essays not less than the novels,--perhaps even more,--are galleries of portraits. Wherever he went, he found men: not caricatures, mere burlesques and oddities, cheap material for print, creatures of a single crying peculiarity, so easily drawn and, for one reading, so “effective;” nor lay figures simply, wire frames (literature is populated with them) on which to hang “the trappings of composition;” but breathing men, full, like the rest of us, of complexity and paradox, nobly designed, perhaps, but--still like the rest of us--more or less spoiled in the making; men who had known, each for himself, the war in the members (happy for them if they knew it still!), and had drunk, every one, of the mingled cup of tragedy and comedy. He loved the sight of them; their talk, wise or foolish, was music to his ears; and the queerest and ugliest of them, under his capable and affectionate hand, wear something of a human grace upon the canvas.

It is a great gallery. Who that has ever walked there will forget the old soldier turned beggar, the borrower of poets’ books?--“the wreck of an athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken in his face; but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute.” We can see him, “striding forward uphill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.” His honest head may have been “very nearly empty, his intellect like a child’s,” but he loved the unexpected words and the moving cadence of good verse. We know his talk; a little more, and we should hear it: “Keats,--John Keats, sir,--he was a very fine poet.”

A book like “The Amateur Emigrant” is full of such sketches, every one done from life, and hit off with a perfection that might well render it and the volume, as foolish mortals say, “immortal.” It would be long to enumerate them, though it is a short book. There is Jones the Welshman, for example,--“my excellent friend Mr. Jones,” owner and dispenser of the Golden Oil; “hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and living in a dream of patents.” He had been rich, and now was poor, but, like all dabblers in patents, he had “a nature that looked forward.” “If the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights.” What _we_ should have cared most to see was Mr. Jones and Mr. Stevenson walking the deck by the hour and dissecting their neighbors; for Jones was first of all a student of character. “Whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day’s kill.” And there is the fiddler, “carrying happiness about with him in his fiddle-case,” a “white-faced Orpheus cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced women,” with his fiery bit of a brother, who “made a god of the fiddler,” and was determined that everybody else should do the same; and Mackay, the cynic and debater, who professed to believe in nothing but what had to do with food (“that’s the bottom and the top”), but who once grew so eager in maintaining this noble thesis that he slipped the meal hour, and was compelled, with a smile of shamefacedness, to go without his tea; and Barney the Irishman, the universal favorite, so natural and happy, with his “tight little figure, unquenchable gayety, and indefatigable good will,” who could sing most acceptably and play all manner of innocent pranks, but whose “drab clothes were immediately missing from the group” when, after the ladies had retired, some one struck up an indecent song; and the sick man (poor soul), who thought it was “by” with him, and who had a good house at home, and “no call to be here;” and the two stowaways, so fond of each other, yet so strikingly contrasted,--one so ready to work for his passage, the other “a skulker in the grain,” and like the devil himself for lying.

And besides these there are numbers more nearly or quite as telling; but they must be let pass, though it is pleasant to pick good things out of a book that, comparatively speaking, seems to have been little made of, either by the author or by his admirers. To one of these, at least, “The Amateur Emigrant” seems, not one of Stevenson’s greatest books, indeed, but certainly one of the most enjoyable, say on the sixth or eighth reading.

It is a point of grace with any writer, and a very _sine qua non_ with the essayist, that he should be able to speak often of himself without offense, as Montaigne and Lamb did, to mention two shining and incontestable examples. And the trick (though it is not a trick, but an admirable quality, and almost as far as honesty from being common) is none of your easy ones. To begin with, the venturer on such an experiment must be interested in himself, which is by no means an ordinary happening. Most men, we may say, count for nullities under this head; they recognize their outward presentments in the glass, no doubt, and are letter-perfect with their names and occupations; but for a knowledge of their inner selves, the story of their real lives, the “wonderful pageant of consciousness,” one might almost as well interrogate the lamp-post on the next corner. They have never kept company with their own thoughts, nor been in the least degree inquisitive about them. Life, as they live it, is a matter of externals, of eating and drinking and being clothed, of getting and spending more or less money, of being amused, of movings up or down on a social ladder. As for the past, the past of themselves,--which with another man is his dearest possession,--it is mainly as if it had never been. They must have had a boy’s dreams once, one would think, but that was long, long ago, and the dreamer is dead, and his dreams with him.

But if a man is to tell the world about himself, and charm it into attention, he must not only be in love with his subject; he must have a natural frankness, an unaffected and almost unconscious delight in self-revelation,--tempered by a decent sense of personal privacy,--such as infallibly commends itself and makes its way, the listener cannot tell how. In other words, and in a good sense, the man must be still a boy, endowed with a boy’s winning attributes, and entitled, therefore, to something of a boy’s privilege. And with all the rest, and among the most important, he must be favored with the gracious quality of humor. Of all talk whatsoever, talk about one’s self must not be too serious. No man (or none but a great poet) can safely indulge in it unless it is natural for him to see the funny side of his own foibles, and at the right minute to make his point at his own expense. All of which is perhaps no more than to say that the writer in the first person must be a man of taste, knowing (a wisdom which nobody under the sun can teach him) what to say and what not to say, and, chiefest of all, how and when to say it.

Stevenson did not talk of himself so freely as Montaigne (how could he, in these proper days?) nor, the present scribe being judge, so adorably as Lamb. Nature herself is little likely to hit the white centre of perfection twice, and we shall perhaps see another Shakespeare as soon as another Lamb; but few have loved a personal theme better, and in the handling of it there were none among the living to surpass him. He had every qualification for the work. A pity he died at forty-four,--a pity in every aspect of the case, but especially when it is considered what treasures of youthful reminiscence he would have left behind him had he lived even to the approaches of old age. Such a devotee of his own past should have been spared to see it through a bluer haze. Yet even in middle life how fair it looked to him, and how lovingly he laid its colors as he transferred the picture to the page! Hear him speak of his grandfather, in a passage no better than is common with him, and dealing with nothing out of the ordinary:--

“Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare, also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had chalkstones in his fingers; and these in good time I may inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.”

A man could talk of himself in that strain till the sun put the stars out, and nobody would vote him tiresome or blame him for an egotist. Yes, a misfortune it was that he could not have lived to write a dozen books full of essays like “The Manse,” “Old Mortality,” “Memoirs of an Islet,” and especially “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s.” So appreciative a reader and so entertaining a talker could never have wearied us with gossip of his favorite books, “the inner circle of his intimates;” and the more first-personal and confidential he became, the better we should have liked it.

Well, since we cannot have the finished essays, we will be the more thankful for the letters. How good they are!--so varied, so spontaneous, so free-spoken, so humanly wise and so deliciously nonsensical; now bubbling over with jest, now touching the deepest springs of thought and action; fit expression of a man who was himself both Ariel and Prospero; “an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman,” yet with “always some childishness on hand;” the “grandson of the Manse,” who would rise from the grave to preach, and has “scarce broken a commandment to mention,” yet owning it as his darling wish to be a pirate. Whim and opinion, settled conviction and passing mood, alike find utterance in them; and best of all, perhaps, many of them are most engagingly rich in matter connected with his own pursuit. A selection of these in a handy volume (why must letters always be put up in a form too cumbersome for lovers’ convenience, as if they, more than other books, were expected to stand forever upon a shelf?) would go far to supply the place of that treatise on “The Art of Literature” which their author spoke so frequently of making.

Here would be found a letter to Mr. Marcel Schwob, a letter one page long, but weighty with the subtlest and pithiest criticism, not of Mr. Schwob’s writings alone (that might not seem so very important), but of writing in general, and in particular of Stevenson’s. For it is impossible to read it without perceiving that the critic is passing judgment (no unkind one) upon his own early books of sentimental travel. His correspondent has sent him a volume of verses. He has read it through twice, and is reading it again,--a handsome compliment, to start with. It is essentially graceful, he says, but is a thing of promise rather than a thing final in itself. “You have yet to give to us--and I am expecting it with impatience--something of a larger gait; something daylit, not twilit; something with the colors of life, not the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be _said_ with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not _sung_ like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace--and not so pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these exquisite pieces, ... you will perhaps never excel them.... Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.”

Happy poet! to be caressed so affectionately and lanced so beneficently with one stroke of the master’s hand; and happy critic, no less! having sentences of this quality to drop without a second thought, like small change from the hand of wealth, into the oblivion of private correspondence.

In truth, Stevenson could afford to be generous; he had always good things enough and to spare. His was a mind incessantly active. He was always covering paper. If only disease would leave him strength enough to hold the pen, he could be trusted to keep it going. Ideas thronged upon him; books by the dozen, one may almost say, stood waiting for him to make them. The more wonder that, with all this excess of fertility, he could yet rewrite and rewrite, and then write again, still on the search for perfection. Surely the artist was strong in him.

His fame was of slow growth, surprising as the fact seems now, till he wrote novels. These, as all the world knows, since all the world reads them, are nothing like the ordinary modern novel of carpet knights and pairs of happy or unhappy lovers. They are romances in the heroic vein, spun mostly of a single thread, with no lack of high lights, plenty of blood-letting, a good spice of humor, dialogue that is closely pared and talks of itself, character displayed in action, not dissected, and movement to delight the lover of a story.

The lode was struck, almost by accident, when Stevenson’s schoolboy stepson son, backed by another “schoolboy in disguise,”--namely, Stevenson’s father,--begged him to “write something interesting.” The response to this reasonable request was “Treasure Island,” which not only filled the schoolboys’ bill, but captivated so stout-hearted a disbeliever in things romantic as Mr. Henry James. As it was this story that introduced its author to a wider public, he used to speak of it (possibly with a shade of irony, though that does not certainly appear) as his first book.

It may be that the gift of romance was the highest of his endowments. Some, at least, have thought so, and have reckoned the novels as not only the most popular, but the greatest of his works. As to the choice among them, the question of their comparative excellence among themselves, that is a matter not under discussion here, the writer of the present paper having no sort of competency for dealing with it. His own special delight is in “David Balfour” (the two parts) and “Treasure Island.” These he hopes to read--now and then a chapter, if no more--as long as he reads anything. He likes the men--and the women,--and he likes the talk. Mr. James’s comment upon “Treasure Island,” that one seems to be reading it over a schoolboy’s shoulder, strikes him as extremely ingenious and pretty, but he is conscious of nothing of that nature himself. He reads it, if he may be allowed to say so, on his own hook, and for the time being is himself the schoolboy,--which may or may not be the better fun. He likes the story and the pictures,--for every chapter _is_ a picture,--and he likes the writing.

Concerning this last point, so often discussed, what shall be said? As Stevenson’s nature was complex and his themes varied, so he wrote in many keys. His prose was never “far from variation and quick change.” When he put pen to any work,--essay, travel, sketch, tragedy, or comedy,--the first thing was to strike “the essential note.” He would not begin a funeral march in A major, nor a sailor’s hornpipe in C minor; a requiem for the friend of his youth was one thing, and a description of his fellow passengers in the steerage was another: and, strange to tell, here and there a wise critic, wise above what is written, has discovered in this change of key proof of a want of originality. “Behold,” he cries, “the man has no style of his own; to-day he writes in one manner, and to-morrow in another.” The same sharp-eyed reviewers are certain to be troubled because Stevenson talks freely of style, openly professing to have cultivated one,--to have cared not only for what he said, but almost or quite as much for the way in which he said it. “How can a man be concerned with the niceties of expression, and yet be true to himself?” they seem ready to ask. A question to which, it must be admitted, there is no answer, or none worth the offering to any who need to ask for it.

To be greatly occupied with matters of form is doubtless to subject one’s self to peril. Careful writing may easily become mannered (as careless writing also may, and with less excuse); but what then? Danger is the common lot. An author, not less than other men, must face it, whether he will or no. He may choose between one set of pitfalls and another, but he will find no path without them. As for the risk of mannerism, Stevenson escaped it substantially unharmed. Compared with some of the more famous of his style-loving contemporaries, he may be said to have come off without a scratch. Whether his style is better or worse than theirs (and touching a point so delicate an unprofessional critic may prudently reserve his opinion) is a different matter; at least, it is less tagged with peculiarity. It was formed, as style should be, by the study of many models, not of one; and it has many virtues, including in good measure one of the highest, rarest, and most elusive, the quality of pleasurableness, or charm,--a quality not to be acquired by labor, nor to be exactly defined; a something added to a thing already complete, like the bloom on the grape or the perfume of the rose.

If the style has failings, also; if one feels now and then, in the more closely wrought of the essays especially, a certain excess of precision, a seeming hardness of outline, a lack, shall we say, of flexibility; if, after a time, one experiences a sensation as of walking in too continuously strong a light, with the sun, as it were, standing still at high noon; if one misses those momentary glimpses of invisible truth, those hints and adumbrations of things beyond the writer’s and the reader’s ken (a feeling as if twilight were coming on, and shadows were falling across the page), those touches of distance and mystery which make the peculiar attractiveness of another order of writing; if this, and perhaps more than this (an occasional want of absolute success in the use of the file; a failure, that is to say, to leave the phrase looking only the more unstudied for the labor bestowed upon it),--if things like these are felt at times by the sensitive reader, what does it all signify but that, in the perception and expression of truth, as in the making of moral character, one excellence of necessity excludes or dwarfs another, and perfection is still to seek? As the French martyr said (“a dread confession,” Stevenson called it, in one of his moods), “Prose is never done.”

The estimate which the author himself placed upon his style (though this is a point of little consequence) seems not to have been exalted. He had his gift, he knew, and had done his best to improve it; but other men had greater ones. He was an enthusiastic reader, and while still fresh from the enjoyment of “A Window in Thrums,” he wrote to Mr. Barrie: “There are two of us now [two Scotchmen] that the Shirra might have patted on the head. And please do not think, when I seem thus to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my sake.”

A handsome thing for a man to write, and a pleasant thing for his lovers to remember, but, as we say, not to be interpreted too strictly, as if it settled anything. The more considerable a man’s gifts, the more likely he is to speak disparagingly of them. To take his own word for it, Stevenson was a poor letter-writer, “essentially and originally incapable.” So he assures one of his correspondents; and then, the mood coming on him, he proceeds to cover page after page with the very scintillations of epistolary genius,--compliment, gossip, humor, brilliant description, verbal felicities, sweetness of personal feeling, everything, in short, that goes to the making of a perfect letter. No doubt he smiled at the incongruity of the thing as he folded the sheet (for no doubt he knew he had done well), but what shall we conclude as to the value of an honest author’s depreciatory judgment of his own work? If it is not a proverb, it ought to be, that self-dispraise goes little ways.