II
An Inland Voyage, on the whole, is a poor book. It records a canoeing expedition made with a friend; and it is full of Puritanical obtuseness and a strained vanity which interferes with the main narrative. Setting out from Antwerp, the two friends paddled, often in the rain, and sometimes—as in the case of Stevenson’s arrest, and his dangerous accident with the fallen tree across the swollen Oise—in dire straits. They travelled on the Sambre and down the Oise by Origny and Moy, Noyon, Compiègne, and Précy; but the weather was bad, and there were trying difficulties about lodgings; and Stevenson’s account reads as though he had been chilled through and through, and as though he needed nothing so much as his home. Almost invariably, in this book, his little spurts of epigram and apophthegm suggest low spirits as well as a sort of cautious experimentalism; and the book, which apparently was very handsomely received by the Press on its publication, is eked out with matter which, beneath the nervous delicacy of Stevenson’s practising style, is raw and sometimes banale. In no other travel-book is there shown such obvious effort. What emerges from An Inland Voyage is the charmingly natural behaviour on several occasions of Stevenson’s companion, a proof even thus early of the author’s ability to be aware of these traits in his friends which, on the printed page, convey to the reader an impression of the person so lightly sketched. This, however, is an exiguous interest in a book supposed to be a picturesque work of travel and topography.
Very much superior is the Sternian Travels with a Donkey. Here there is much greater lightness of touch, and a really admirable sense of observation is revealed. Some of the descriptions of things seen are written with indescribable delicacy, as are the character sketches. Just so are some of the descriptions of places contained in the series of letters to Mrs. Sitwell. In Travels with a Donkey for the first time the reader actually makes a third with Stevenson and the endearing Modestine upon their journey, travelling with them and sharing the sensations of the human pedestrian. If we resent certain intolerable affectations—such as the pretentious and penurious fancy of placing money by the roadside in payment for lodgings in the open air—that resentment may be partly due to the fact that we are not told the amount of the payment, as well, of course, as to the fact that we suspect the author’s motive in detailing his charities. Stevenson seems, in fact, to be asking for commendation of a fantastic generosity without giving us sufficient evidence to evoke any feeling of conviction. We see him here, not so much obeying a happy impulse as observing himself in the light of his own esteem; and that is hardly a pleasant sight to the onlooker. To counterbalance such lapses—which, very likely, are regarded by lovers of Stevenson as no lapses at all, but as delightful exhalations of personality, as glimpses of his character which they are enabled to enjoy only through this very innocent vanity which we have noted,—there are a thousand graceful touches, fit to remind us that Travels with a Donkey is a much better book than An Inland Voyage, and, in fact, the best of his travel-books until we reach that delightfully modest one which is too little known—The Silverado Squatters. The Donkey is the first in which the charming side of his personality really “gets going,” and it will always remain a pretty and effective sketch of a journey taken in wayward weather, with good spirits, a shrewd and observant eye, and, what is also to the point, a commendable courage.
The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains, two long records which, although published separately, are practically a single work, for all their difference from that book are a drop to the executive level of An Inland Voyage. Here again Stevenson was affected by the discomforts of his lonely travelling, and no doubt by his poor health. Both records are for the most part superficial and crabbed. The descriptions of travelling-companions are conscientious, but they have, as Stevenson’s earliest admirers were the first to remark, no imagination or genuine moulding: the accounts are a good deal like uninspired letters home. If one thinks what Stevenson, in happy circumstances, might have made of the tale of his journey, one realises how lifeless are the descriptions given. They have no sense of actual contact; they have lost grip in losing charm, and might have been written by somebody with far less of an eye to the significance of the passing scene. Stevenson claimed to have been aware of the prosaic character of the records, and, indeed, in one letter to Sir Sidney Colvin he said, “It bored me hellishly to write; well, it’s going to bore others to read; that’s only fair.” So perhaps it is not worth while to analyse such confessedly inferior works. Only once in The Amateur Emigrant—in the anecdote of two men who lodged perilously in New York—does Stevenson’s boyish love of the picturesquely terrible bring a note of tense reality to the writing. In its own way the account of the two men looking from their bedroom, through the frame of a seeming picture, into another room where three men are crouching in darkness, is a little masterpiece of horror. It belongs to his romances rather than to his travel-books; but it is the passage that stands out most distinctly from the two which are under notice at the moment. No other scene in either The Amateur Emigrant or Across the Plains compares with it for interest or value.