III
But it may be urged that Stevenson saved his ideas for that more direct appeal to readers which is the special privilege of the essay. Now the point in this case is to be reached by the inquiry as to what ideas Stevenson expressed in his essays. They are very simple. Stevenson’s essays are either fanciful treatments of pleasant, or attractive, or ingenious notions; or they are frankly homiletic. Stevenson loved courage, and he thought that courage should have trappings. To his mind the bravest actions were the better for a bit of purple. But when we penetrate beyond this crust of happy truism there is little that will reward us for the search. There is no thought, and little enough feeling in the essays: their charm lies in the fact that they dress prettily, and sometimes beautifully, the rather obvious philosophical small-change which most people cherish as their private wisdom. The essays flatter the reader by mirroring his own mind and giving it an odd twist of grace. They are shrewd mother-wit, dressed for a fairing. That is what causes the popularity of the essays—that and the air they have of “looking on the bright side of things.” They do look on the bright side; they are homely, cheerful, charming; they will continue to adorn the bookshelf with a pretty, pale, bedside cheerfulness which will delight all whose culture exceeds their originality. But I believe that they have ceased to be regarded (it has almost become ridiculous that they should ever have been regarded) as comparable with the essays of Montaigne, or Hazlitt, or Lamb; because their day is sinking and their fragility is seen already to indicate a want of robustness rather than a delicacy of perception. By this I do not mean to suggest that already the essays are out of date: they are only out of date in some instances, and even if they were completely out of date that fact would not have much ultimate critical significance. What is, however, very significant, is that they have ceased to stand as essays, and have become goods for the monger of phrases. Their “aptness,” which of old was the charm that dignified the trite moralism, has recoiled upon them: they are seen to be mere aggregations of “happy thoughts,” fit to be culled and calendared for suburban households. It is not without its pathos that one warning against too-eager judgment of weaker brethren, really written by an American woman poet, is widely and steadfastly attributed to Stevenson by his greatest admirers. For the teaching of the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals; it is the doctrine of “that state of life” which finally ends in a good-natured passivity not unlike the happy innocence of the domesticated cat. Thus, for all his powerful desire to preach, Stevenson taught nothing but a bland acquiescence; for the field of battle to which he likened marriage as well as life was a field in which there was no headstrong conflict of ideal and practice, but a mere accommodation which a phrase could embody.