VI
The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter. Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed—there are many, which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and which will continue to give pleasure because they are a little whimsical in conception and very finished in performance. These essays owe their charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing about himself, for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He was charmed by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not the courage or possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you that Stevenson took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing and not at all distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was deliciously joined together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His essays, the most personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the same vanity which brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It was not the unhappy vanity that drives friends away, that is suspicious of all kindness: Stevenson had been too much petted as a child to permit of such wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was confident, but not vulgarly confident; vain, to the extent of being more interested in himself than in anything else; but he was not dependent upon his earnings, and success came early enough to keep sweet his happy complacency. His essays show these things as clearly as do his letters. His essays “are like milestones upon the wayside of his life,” and they are so obviously milestones, that all readers who are fascinated by autobiography, particularly if it be veiled, have been drawn to Stevenson as they are drawn to an attractive, laughing child. My own opinion is that Stevenson has sent his lovers away no richer than they came; but there are many who could not share that view, because there are many who are thankful to him for telling them that “it is better to be a fool than to be dead.” I think Stevenson did not know what it was to be either a fool or dead. That state of nervous high spirits which is a part of his natural equipment for the battle, which lent even his most artificial writing a semblance of vivacity, prevented him from ever being dead (in the sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant it); and I cannot persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.
It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please some readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That they were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure, had the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as anyone may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers: it is a part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure some obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the gimcrack relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that he fell naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality—as we may realise from the lengthy fragment called Lay Morals—preoccupied him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged head of sententious dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by whatever means, by whatever labour the art was attained, Stevenson was, above everything else, a writer. “There is no wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography, “there is no wonder that Stevenson wrote his best in the shadow of the Shade; for writing his best was very life to him.”