IV
Implicit in the strictures upon Stevenson’s poetry which have preceded this paragraph is the assumption that Milton’s requirements of poetry—that it should be simple, sensuous, passionate—is fundamentally true as applied to lyrical poetry. It would be troublesome to apply such a test to many of the minor poets; and it may be that a few of Stevenson’s poems would stand the test. Not many of them, however, because none of them shows a depth of emotion uncommon to the ordinarily sensitive person. Stevenson was sensitive to many things; without sensitiveness he could not have written A Child’s Garden of Verses or that very excellent ballad Ticonderoga. But sensitiveness is only a poor substitute for emotion; and Stevenson’s emotion ran in the few ordinary channels of the normal Scotsman. He loved home; he loved those around him; he desired to be loved, to be free of the fear of poverty, to live in comfort and in health. Those things he felt deeply, as Scotsmen, as most men, do. He loved truth; but it was a conventional truth; a truth, that is to say, improvised from ordinary usage, from hearsay, from the dogma of “that station of life”; a truth such as any man who finds himself born in a little pit of earth may harden his moral shell and his imagination and stultify his spiritual curiosity by accepting; and it was a truth out of which Stevenson was escaping towards the end of his life. But in all this love of virtues and duties and usages there was never until Stevenson’s emergence into the greater freedom of life in the South Seas the passionate love of anything for its own sake. If he loved the open air it was with a pleasant, “playing” love, a sort of self-indulgence. Over his heart he kept the watchful guard of a Protestant Scotsman. It was unmoved, a secret, not to be known. It did not inform his work, in which there is sometimes a heat of composition, or even a heat of feeling, but never the cold heat of profound and piercing emotion. That he was capable of being easily moved, that he loved virtue and hated cruelty and wrong, these things are true. That he could grow hot at a calumny, as he did in the defence of Father Damien, is equally true. But these things are the signs of a prudent man, eagerly interested in life, rather taking pleasure in the thought that he is hot to attack injustice; not of a profound thinker or of a poet. They warm us with, perhaps, affection for Stevenson; they keep alive our admiration for him as an attractive figure in our literary history. They do not thrill us, because they appeal to the interest and excitement and honesty and feeling in us, and not to those more secret, more passionate reserves which we yield only to the poet.