III
Following upon his tedious journey to America, and the hardships and illness which, before his marriage, brought him nearly to his grave, Stevenson went to the mountains for health. The Silverado Squatters was written-up later, and, from Stevenson’s letters of that time, it seems to have been condemned as uncharacteristic. But it may have been that, as I think was the case, Stevenson’s voyage to America and his marriage considerably affected his outlook. For one thing he really had come into contact with hard inconvenience and loneliness, with a self-inflicted exile from his family (and a hostility to his marriage on their part which existed more in his imagination than in fact), which matured him. Those of us who never take these voyages out into the unknown, who sit tight and think comfortably of such things as emigrant trains, cannot realise with what sudden effect the stubborn impact of realities can work upon those who actually venture forth. One small instance will show something of the experience Stevenson gained. On the voyage he met emigrants who were leaving Scotland because there was nothing else for them to do, because to stay meant “to starve.” Coming to these men, and hearing from them something of the lives they had left, he touched a new aspect of life which, in spite of his runnings to-and-fro in Edinburgh and elsewhere, he had never appreciated. He writes, in The Amateur Emigrant:
I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
And when, in Across the Plains, he tells how his emigrant train, going in one direction, crowded, was met by another, also crowded, returning, must that not have reacted upon his mind? My own impression, which of course is based upon nothing more than the apparent change in Stevenson’s manner of writing, is that The Silverado Squatters, as we now have it, very much altered from the condemned first drafts, represents the emergence of a new Stevenson, who, in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains, had been overweighted by the material realities he had in bad health encountered, and who, in consequence, had failed to make those accounts vivid. The Silverado Squatters has more substance than its predecessors. It is much more free, it is almost entirely free, from affectation. The style is less full of trope, and may be considered therefore, by some readers, as the less individual. But the matter and manner are more strictly united than hitherto. We are not interrupted by such trivial explosions of sententiousness as “We must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of Fate,” and in the degree in which the matter entirely “fills-out” the manner the book is so far remarkable. It is not generally regarded as convenient to say that Stevenson’s matter was often thin, and his style a mere ruffle and scent to draw off the more frigid kind of reader; yet when we come to work so able and so unpretentious as The Silverado Squatters, in which Stevenson is honestly trying to show what he saw and knew (instead of trying to show the effect of his address upon a strange community) we do seem to feel that what has gone before has been less immediately the natural work of the writer, and more the fancy sketch of the writer’s own sense of his picturesque figure. In one aspect, in its lack of vivacity, The Silverado Squatters may compare to disadvantage with earlier work; it may seem, and indeed is ordinarily condemned as, less pungent, and less elastic; but that could only be to those who miss the fact that Stevenson’s pungency and elasticity were the consequence of the unwearying revision to which most of his work was subjected. He was never a quick worker, never one of those careless writers whose ear approves while the pen is in motion. He had a fine ear, but not essentially a quick ear; he was not what is sometimes called a “natural” writer, but with devoted labour went again and again through what he had written, revising it until his fastidiousness was relieved. This way of working, while it served to allay what he called the “heat of composition”—a heat which some readers find very grateful in other, less painstaking writers—has patent virtues. It is likely to make work more polished and more finely balanced. Nevertheless, it probably has the effect of reducing the vigour and resilience of a style. However that may be, it is a method making great demands upon a writer’s deep conscientiousness; and it is not the purpose of this book to extol the rapid method or the quick ear. All we may do at this moment is to suggest that Stevenson, having done well in practising year after year the craft of the writer, had now turned very deliberately and honourably in the first year of his marriage to that other side of the writer’s craft, the sober description, free from the amateur’s experimentalism, of the real world as he saw it. Even so, it is a world made smooth by his temperament—his love of smoothness, which one may see exemplified in his declared love of simple landscape—and by his matured dexterity in manipulating sentences. It is a world seen, not with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in a fair haven, whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture to him. Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa, have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest intuitions of beauty. Not his the ecstatic oneness with the lovely things of Nature which makes Keats the purest exponent of what Keats himself called “that delicate snail’s-horn perception of beauty”: Stevenson’s ecstasy had to be stirred by excitement; he had not the poet’s open-handed out-running to the emotion of place. But his sense of the remoteness of the squatters of Silverado, his early-morning peeps into the wonders of colour and aspect in a strange corner of the earth, his shrewd understanding of sullen human nature, are made clear to the reader by plain expression. The book is self-conscious in a good sense; not, as has often hitherto been the case, in a bad one.