II
Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from Treasure Island, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to Weir of Hermiston, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power. Treasure Island is an excellent adventure-story; Weir of Hermiston seemed to have the makings of a considerable novel, incomparably superior to any other novel or romance ever written by Stevenson. Between the two books lie a host of experiments, from Prince Otto to the rather perfunctory St. Ives, through Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, to The Wrecker, Catriona, and The Ebb Tide. One finds in The Master of Ballantrae the highest point of the romantic novels, not because as a whole it is a great book, but because it has very distinguished scenes; and thereafter follows a perceptible decline in raciness. Stevenson still had the knack, and could still make the supporters of his convention look as clumsy as ghouls, but his zest was impaired. He did now with pains what before had been the easiest part of his work. “Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities,” said Stevenson in The Day After To-morrow. From the inexperience of real life which in 1882 led him, by means of a map and some literary inspirations, to make up a tale such as he thought he would himself have liked as a boy, he turned in later years to work more profound. His romance six years later than Treasure Island had, besides its adventures and its pawky narration, a moral theme; ten years later it had no theme at all, but a faint dragging sweetness due to the reintroduction of two old friends and the picture of a conventional heroine; at the end of his life he began three historical romances, none of which was ever finished, and only one of which ever proceeded beyond its first chapters. It is true that the pretty, heavily figured style was still at command; there was no cessation of skill. There never was any cessation of skill. If skill were needed Stevenson had it ever ready. “I have been found short of bread, gold or grace,” says St. Ives; “I was never yet found wanting an answer.” That is a point to note in Stevenson’s equipment, that he was always very apt with the pen. Having turned writer in his youth, he remained a writer to the end. He could not dictate a letter but what the phrases ran in accustomed grooves, half-way to the tropes of his Covenanting manner. So it was that themes too slight, as in Prince Otto, and themes very complicated (as in The Wrecker), came readily to be embarked upon. He was not sufficiently critical of a theme, so long as it seemed superficially to offer some scope for his skill; which accounts for his abandoned fragments—e.g. Heathercat, The Great North Road, Sophia Scarlet, The Young Chevalier—and for the inequalities in even his best romances. Whatever theme he chose he could write upon it with such damnable skill that nothing truly came amiss or really stretched to the full his genuine talent. The theme, such as it was, lay to hand; there wanted nothing but his skill and the labour of composition. That, curiously enough, shadows out the occupation of the literary hack (a sad person who writes for money and only more money, and whose days are circumscribed by the need for continuous work in the field of romance); but although Stevenson claimed to write for money, “a noble deity” (see a humorous but truthful passage in the letter of January, 1886, to Mr. Gosse), he claimed also to write for himself, and in this sense he was, to our relief, and in spite of any misdirected labours, an artist. There is, of course, much cant written and spoken about writing for money, both for and against; but the man who has no preference between the themes upon which he will write for money must be a very professional writer, and the hack is only a base virtuoso. That is why it is worth putting upon record that Stevenson, after saying he wrote, not for the public, but for money, added: “and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble (i.e. than money), but more intelligent and nearer home.” He wrote variously from diversity of taste: a more interesting and tantalising question is that of his object.