IV
Something of the same objection might be urged against Stevenson’s rather unpleasant descriptions of adolescence. These again are not typical. Stevenson himself was the only youth he ever knew—he never had the detachment to examine disinterestedly the qualities of any person but himself—and we might gain from his descriptions an impression of youth which actually will not bear the stereoscopic test to which we are bound to submit all generalisations. To read the essays with the ingenuous mind of youth is to feel wisdom, grown old and immaculate, passing from author to reader. It is to marvel at this debonair philosopher, who finds himself never in a quandary, and who has the strategies of childhood and of youth balanced in his extended hand. It is to proceed from childhood to youth, and from youth to the married state; and our adviser describes to us in turn, with astonishing confidence, the simplified relations, which otherwise we might have supposed so intricate, of the lover, the husband, and the wife. Nothing comes amiss to him: love, jealousy, the blind bow-boy, truth of intercourse—these and many other aspects of married life are discoursed upon with grace and the wistful sagaciousness of a decayed inexperience. But when we consider the various arguments, and when we bring the essays Virginibus Puerisque back to their starting-point, we shall find that they rest upon the boyish discovery that marriages occur between unlikely persons. Stevenson has not been able to resist the desire to institute an inquiry into the reasons. He cannot suppose that these persons love one another; and yet why else should they marry? Well, he is writing an essay, and not a sociological study, so that—as the result of his inquiry—we must not expect to receive a very distinct contribution to our knowledge. We may prepare only to be edified, to be, perhaps, greatly amused by a young man who may at least shock us, or stir us, if he is unable to show this fruitful source of comedy in action. We are even, possibly, alert to render our author the compliment of preliminary enjoyment, before we have come to his inquiry. What Stevenson has to tell us about marriage, however, is a commonplace; even if it is a commonplace dressed and flavoured. It is that “marriage is a field of battle—not a bed of roses”; and it is that “to marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.” “Alas!” as Stevenson says of another matter, “If that were all!”
I wonder what it is that makes such phrases (for they are no more than phrases, phrases which are not true to experience, and which therefore can have no value as propositions or as explanations) give so much pleasure to such a number of readers. How can we explain it, unless it be simply by the explanation that Stevenson has been idolised? This book, Virginibus Puerisque, has been a favourite for many years, sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense unoriginal. It is the most quoted; it is the one which most certainly may be regarded as the typical book of Stevenson’s early period. Surely it is because a half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a phrase and remembered only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a whole truth, upon which the reader must engage his attention? It must, I mean, be the trope that lures readers of Virginibus Puerisque into acceptance of thought so threadbare and ill-nourished. Such an essay as Æs Triplex seems by its air to hold all the wisdom of the ages, brought steadfastly to the contemplation of the end to which all must come. If it is read sentimentally, with the mind swooning, it may give the reader the feeling that he has looked upon the bright face of danger and seen death as no such bad thing. For a moment, as it might be by a drug, he has received some stimulation which is purely temporary. The essay has not changed his thought of death; it has not transformed his fear of death into an heroic love; it slides imperceptibly, unheeded, from his memory, and remains dishevelled forever as “that rather fine thing of Stevenson’s,” for which he never knows where to look. Only its phrases remain for quotation, for use in calendars, common thoughts turned into remembrances and mottoes ready for the rubricator. When an ordinary person says, “It’s nice to have something to look forward to,” Stevenson is ready with, “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” There is all the difference between this and that advice of Browning’s that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” Stevenson has not sought to invigorate the toiler, he has not caught up with optimism the spirit of mankind: what he has done is to make a phrase for the boudoir. There is no philosophic optimism in Stevenson’s essays: there is sometimes high spirits, and sometimes there is a cheerful saying; but at heart the “teaching” of these things is as prosaic as is the instruction of any lay preacher.
When the more solemn sort of subject, such as death, comes to be dealt with, we find Stevenson, the actor, falling into the feeling of his own intonations, gravely reassuring, like a politician explaining a defeat. When he is describing acts of bravery, as in The English Admirals, his love of courage rises and his feelings seem to glow; but the phrases with which he adorns the tale and with which eventually he points the moral are phrases made to be read, not phrases that break from his full heart. They are not the phrases made, will he nill he, by his enthusiasm; they are such phrases as are publicly conveyed from one king or statesman or commander to another upon the occasion of some notable event. I do not mean that they are as baldly expressed, though I think they are often as baldly conceived. They are very handsomely expressed, too handsomely for the occasion, if one agrees with Bob Acres that “the sound should be an echo of the sense.” Although it may be true that, as Stevenson says, “people nowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues,” for a self-respecting author to give them the picturesque for that reason seems to me a most immoral and, in the end, a most ill-judged proceeding. Cultivation of the picturesque, fondness for phrase, is inevitably productive of falseness; it is literary gesture, a cultivable habit, such as the habit of any vain person who flickers his hands or persistently turns the “better side” of his face or character to the beholder. The first instinctive vanity develops rapidly into a pose, and pose can never be much more than amusing. Appropriateness of phrase to meaning is lost in the sense of phrase, honesty of intention does not suffice to cover inexactitude of expression. Unconsciously, Stevenson often approved a phrase that expressed something not in exact accordance with his belief; he was misled by its splendour or its picturesqueness or its heroic virtue. So it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and held us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken this wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer. They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook for a thrill of nature.
To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater pleasure. We are displeased in Virginibus Puerisque by the excess of manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case of such essays as The Foreigner at Home and Pastoral, where the matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. His essay on the English, to take the first of the two we have named, is partial and incomplete—faults due to lack of sympathy. Its incompleteness seems to me more serious than its partiality; and by “incompleteness” I do not mean that it should have been more exhaustive, but that it does not appear quite to work out its own thesis, but presents an air of having been finished on a smaller scale than is attempted in other parts. In exactly the same way, the Pastoral engages our interest completely, and then, for the reason, it would seem, that the author’s memory runs short, the portrait is left suddenly. It is not left in such a state that the reader’s imagination fills in every detail: the effect is again one of truncation.
The best of these essays are probably those two, which are written in the vein of Hazlitt, on Talk and Talkers. Here the matter is ample; and the manner is studiously moderate. I note, by the way, that Sir Sidney Colvin mentions the composition of this essay at about the time of Stevenson’s proposal for writing a life of Hazlitt; so that it would not be very reckless to say that the manner of Talk and Talkers may be due to a contemporary familiarity with Hazlitt’s essays. However that may be, these two essays in particular have distinguished qualities. They have point, character, and thought.