IV
If we notice such a change of attitude in The Silverado Squatters, we shall find it even more fully revealed in the volume of his letters for an American magazine which appeared under the title of In the South Seas. Some of the letters were withheld, as too tedious; even now, the book is frankly called dull by many staunch admirers of Stevenson. To others, however, it must surely appear otherwise. It is, in effect, a sort of glorified log; but a log of real enterprise and adventure in a marvellous part of the world. Stevenson heroically tried to penetrate to the heart of the South Seas. He was caught up by the islands and their people, and was bent upon making them known to those who lived afar. In the political intrigues so honestly described in his letters, Stevenson may, indeed, appear to throw away the importance of his own genius; but the sacrifice is made in obedience to his deepest convictions of right. He still sees himself as the point of focus; but we do not resent that when we find ourselves so clearly in his train. Even while his friends were urging him to give up the Samoan politics which threatened to become the King Charles’s head of his correspondence, he continued to live amid the difficulties from which he felt that he could not in honour withdraw. And although the Samoan period had its fluctuations of talent, it was, upon the whole, the time when his boyish love of game took on a keener zest of earnest and made him indeed a man. The period marks a further decline in the more strictly romantic nature of his work, as we may later on be able to discuss in comparing St. Ives with earlier and more triumphant experiments in that field; but it opens the path for the sober realism (if that word may here be used without sinister connotation) of the torso known as Weir of Hermiston, a fragment in which it is usual to find the greatest promise of all. This is all of a piece with the increasing purpose of Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a professional author forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance may be conjured for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most persuasive cajollery. Stevenson was the professional author in his collaborations, and in such work as St. Ives; but in In the South Seas as in Weir he is writing truth for the love of truth, than which there can be no more noble kind of authorship.