II
From the grimly earnest abstracts of knowledge contributed by Bacon to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few fancies, or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily composed a single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson, as I have said, belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England Charles Lamb is most representative, and of whom Montaigne was most probably his more direct model—the writer who conveyed information about his personal tastes and friends and ancient practices in a form made prepossessing by a flavoured style. To those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added a strong didactic strain, as much marked in his early essays as in the later ones; and it is this strain which differentiates Stevenson’s work from that of Lamb and Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the delicious vintage of a ripe mind both credulous and sceptical, grown old enough to examine with great candour and curiousness the details of its own vagaries: many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays are the work of his youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of the pseudo-candour of vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s shrewd naïveté. He was thirty or thirty-one when the collection entitled Virginibus Puerisque was published. A year later there followed Familiar Studies of Men and Books. He was only thirty-seven (Montaigne was thirty-eight when he “retired” from active life and began to produce his essays) when his third collection, Memories and Portraits, obviously more sedate and less open to the charge of literary affectation, completed the familiar trilogy. Although Across the Plains did not appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to form that book had earlier received periodical publication (the dated essays range from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously collected in The Art of Writing belong to 1881. So it is not unfair to say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by which personality is so much matured as to yield readily to condensation. Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays, for the judgments of maturity, although we may find in Virginibus Puerisque a rather middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek the significance of these essays in the degree in which they reveal consciously the graces and the faultless negligé of an attractive temperament. We may look to find at its highest point the illustration of those principles of style which Stevenson endeavoured to formulate in one very careful essay upon the subject (to the chagrin, I seem to remember, at the time of its republication, of so many critics who misunderstood the aim of the essay). And we shall assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson possessed of quoting happily from other writers. Quotation with effect is a matter of great skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was peculiar rather than wide, drew from this very fact much of the inimitable effect obtained by references so apt.