VII
As a writer, then, let Stevenson be regarded in the conclusion of this chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his deliberate example in that one essay On some technical elements of Style in Literature; and his theories have aroused bitter comment. Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants recurrent in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he lived in a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of course, was a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because Stevenson was a prolific writer, and could never have afforded the time to be a mere hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first to realise that a prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that an evil use of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he realised that a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive cunning by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with ever-growing interest into the most remote passages of his work. He was a careful writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some sentences of Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their consonants and syllables and “knots,” to their destined conclusion, are still, and I suppose always will be capable of yielding, a pure delight to the ear. Those who do not take Stevenson’s pains will qualify his denunciation of the “natural” writer, because a natural writer is one whose ear is quick and fairly true: he is not necessarily producing “the disjointed babble of the chronicler,” but he is incapable of the fine point of exquisite rhythm which we may find in Stevenson’s best writing. That writing, various though it is (various, I mean, in “styles”), remains true to its musical principles. It is the result of trained ear and recognition of language as a conscious instrument. It has innumerable, most insidious appeals, to disregard which is a task for the barbarian. It is patterned, it is built of sounds,—“one sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another,”—all in accordance with the expressed theory of Stevenson. We will grant it the delights, because they are incontestable. Let us now question whether it has not one grave defect.
All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its music, its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that old dance music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband, stately as they are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear resolution with immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven figured style, than which we could hardly have an illustration more fit. They are examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but in Stevenson’s writing there is no violence to old airs and the old order. His writing is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and in its differentiation from the old way of writing is to be found, not a revolution, not anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style, graceful, sustained though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but it has no vigour. The passages to which one turns are passages of delicious, stealthy accomplishment. They are passages which suggest the slow encroaching fingers of the in-coming tide, creeping and whispering further and further up the sand; and our watchful delight in the attainment of each sentence is the delight we feel in seeing the waves come very gently, pushed on by an incalculable necessity, until their length is reached and their substance is withdrawn. There is no tempestuous certainty in Stevenson’s writing; there is not the magnificent wine of Shakespeare’s prose, which has marvellous strength as well as its delicate precision. Stevenson’s style, clearly invalidish in his imitators, has in itself the germs of their consumption. It is quiet, pretty, picturesque, graceful; it has figure and trope in plenty; but it has no vehemence. You may find in it an amazing variety of pitch and cadence; but at length the care that has made it betrays the artificer; at length the reader will look in vain for the rough word. That is the pity of Stevenson’s style—not that he should have sought it, and exercised it, and made language quite the most important thing in his writing; but that his very artfulness should have yielded him no protection against the demand of nature for something which no care or cunning can ever put into style that does not carry its own impetus.