V
Finally, the fact which all must recognise in connection with Stevenson’s work is the versatility of talent which is displayed. From essays personal to essays critical; from short-stories picturesque to short-stories metaphysical, and stories of bogles to fairy stories of princes and magic bottles and wondrous enchanted isles; from tales of treasure to the politics of a principality, from Scottish history to tales of the South Seas; from travel-books to poems for men and children; from the thermal influences of forests to a defence of a Roman Catholic hero-priest; from Samoan politics to the story of the Justice Clerk; from plays to topographical history and imaginary war-news and the cutting of wood-blocks (to the satisfaction of Mr. Joseph Pennell)—that is a dazzling record. Quite obviously one cannot contemplate it without great admiration. When it is remembered also that it is the product of a man who was very frequently (though not, as is generally supposed, continuously) an invalid, the amount of it, and the variety, seems to be impossible. Yet it is possible, and this fact it is which finally explains our attitude to Stevenson. We think it marvellous that he should have been able to write at all, forgetting, as we do, that “writing his best was very life to him.” We do forget that; we ought not to forget it. We ought not to forget that Stevenson was a writer. He meant to be a writer, and a writer he became. He is known chiefly in these days as a writer; and in the future he will be still more clearly seen as a writer. The weaknesses of his work will be realised; to some extent his writing will fall in popular esteem; but he will be less the brave soul travelling hopefully and labouring to arrive, and more the deliberate writer. When other men sing and walk and talk and play chess and loiter, Stevenson wrote. In his life there is no question that he sang and walked and loitered and talked and played chess; but when he could do none of these things he could write. Writing was as the breath of his body; writing was his health, his friends, his romance. He will go down into literary history as the man who became a professional writer, who cared greatly about the form and forms of expression. The fact that he concentrated upon expression left his mind to some extent undeveloped, so that he could express very excellently perceptions more suitable to his youth than to his maturer years. It made his earlier writing too scented and velvet-coated. But it enabled him, when his feeling was aroused, as it only could have been in the last years of his life, to write at great speed, with great clearness, an account of the political troubles in Samoa and in particular of German diplomacy there, which seems to us still valuable—not because the facts it records are of extreme significance, but because at the end of his life Stevenson was at last to be found basing his work upon principles, really and consciously grasped, from which the incidental outcome was of less importance than the main realisation. Where he had hitherto been shuttlecocked by his impulses, and tethered by his moralism, he became capable of appreciating ideas as of more importance than their expression. If he had been less prolific, less versatile, less of a virtuoso, Stevenson might have been a greater man. He would have been less popular. He would have been less generally admired and loved. But with all his writing he took the road of least resistance, the road of limited horizons; because with all his desire for romance, his desire for the splendour of the great life of action, he was by physical delicacy made intellectually timid and spiritually cautious. He was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after. Was not that the greatest misfortune that could have befallen him? Is the work that is produced by nervous reaction from prudence ever likely to enjoy an air of real vitality? In the versatility of Stevenson we may observe his restlessness, the nervous fluttering of the mind which has no physical health to nourish it. In that, at least, and the charming and not at all objectionable inclination to pose. He was a poseur because if he had not pretended he would have died. It was absolutely essential to him that he should pose and that he should write, just as it was essential that he should be flattered and anxiously guarded from chill and harm. But it was necessary for the same reason, lest the feeble flame should perish and the eager flicker of nervous exuberance be extinguished. That Stevenson was deliberately brave in being cheerful and fanciful I do not for one moment believe; I think such a notion is the result of pure ignorance of nervous persons and their manifestations. But that Stevenson, beneath all his vanity, realised his own disabilities, seems to me to be certain and pathetic. That is what makes so much of the extravagant nonsense written and thought about Stevenson since his death as horrible to contemplate as would be any dance of ghouls. The authors of all this posthumous gloating over Stevenson’s illnesses have been concerned to make him a horribly piteous figure, to harrow us in order that we should pity. How much more is Stevenson to be pitied for his self-constituted apostles! We shall do ill to pity Stevenson, because pity is the obverse of envy, and is as much a vice. Let us rather praise Stevenson for his real determination and for that work of his which we can approve as well as love. To love uncritically is to love ill. To discriminate with mercy is very humbly to justify one’s privilege as a reader.