Wanganui River, N.Z.
Stevenson had a sneaking regard for vagabonds, and his eyes twinkled with delight in their company. He was very credulous and believed a deal that he heard. I think he would have gone off exploring for some new country, or a treasure island, in five minutes, if he had been encouraged by some of the fearless adventurers whom he mixed with through his love of vagabondage and adventure. The questions he used to ask men of the seafaring class revealed how implicitly he believed that which they were telling him, yet at other times he seemed alert with suspicion and in a mood to disbelieve actual facts.
Though I heard Stevenson make several attempts to play the violin, and also heard him pedalling at the harmonium, I cannot recall that he accomplished anything that struck me as showing musical talent—that is, talent revealing a quick ear to distinguish the scales and intervals of mechanical music. Indeed the pedals made more noise and sounded more rhythmical than the time he played; and he looked like some careworn priest toiling away on the treadmill of penance to save his soul. But still I can say that Stevenson had a gift that was something much greater than an ear for light melody. He was a great tone poet! His mind was a shell that caught echoes from the vastness of creation, and the murmurs of humanity in all its joy, passion and sorrow. Otherwise he could never have even noticed, let alone described as he did, for not in all literature will you find another who describes sound so perfectly at one stroke as Stevenson did. You can hear Nature’s moods, in all her wild grandeur of seas and the winds in the mountain forests, as you read his books. The seas beating over the barrier reefs, the vast silence of the tropical night, the starlit coco-palms and the coughing derelict beachcomber sleeping beneath them, become realities that haunt your mind, because they are made and played by a great musician who was an artist in Nature’s great orchestra.
I think if Stevenson had been able to cast aside all thought of the critical inspection of lovers of polite literature, and the mechanical niceties of phrase and thought, and had written his reminiscences down in a book, the characters therein would have walked, talked and laughed with cinema realism. Down in the magical world of words, before the mind’s eye and ear, we should have seen the vast tropical Pacific, and the stars over it reflected in the lagoons of the far-scattered isles clad with coco-palms as if painted by the magical silver oils of moonlight. We should have heard the cry of the traders and seen the beachcombers’ ragged clothes fluttering by tossing waters, and paddled canoes filled with the swarthy faces of wild men, on the waves that were breaking over the shores of his wonderful pages.
But, unfortunately, it was not to be, because of the great truth that we cannot do differently from that which we do. We are born in the chains of grim conventionality that become inevitably a part of us. Indeed he who professes to be utterly free from it, and to have no regard for it in his work, has his published book as strong evidence against his sincerity.
I’ve met far greater geniuses than Robert Louis Stevenson in the Southern Seas—geniuses so intense with pathos, wit, insight and heroic courage that though they had never even read a book, or learnt to write, their minds were gold mines of truth and experience and all that men have ever attempted to tell in polite phrase. Could they, by some magical means, have turned a handle and so written down in a book their reminiscences, and their thoughts on human affairs, modern literature would not have to bewail the loss of its Golden Age, but would be absorbed with delight, filled with ecstatic charm over the pathos and the wonderful touches of truth, in what would be the great classic, the new Odyssey of modern times.
But to return to Stevenson. I once heard him arguing violently on board a ship, when he was at dinner in the saloon. At the time I was busily cleaning the brass door handle. It grieves me to have to confess to this humble occupation while I was seeking fame and fortune in far countries, but it was the execution of this little detail of one of my many professions that gave me the opportunity of hearing the celebrated author’s opinion on Socialism.
One of the diners, who sat opposite Robert Louis Stevenson, was a big red-faced man, weighing about sixteen stone, a quantity of heavy jewellery which adorned his clothing being included. He breathed violently as he ate and kept insisting on the wonderful virtues of Socialism. Stevenson combated with him in fine style, winning every point. All I can remember of the conversation was that the author said: “Socialism is based on ideas of equality and the freedom of the individual; yet its principal aim in practice would be to destroy individuality and freedom, and the equality would be a system producing nothing else but a nation of slaves.”
I think Stevenson was right, for I have noticed that socialists are not continually busy in giving away anything. Indeed, socialists have so developed the instinct of commercial grab that they can always perceive, “by the cut of your jib” (a socialistic phrase), how much you are worth and whether you would part with it without the use of muscular force. I am not well read in the ethics of Socialism, because I cannot waste my time. If a burglar broke into my house, and I caught him stealing my goods as his fair share, I should not want to read his private correspondence and hear his views on human affairs, or wish to know if he had a clean shirt on ere I threw him out of the window or fetched the police. Socialists do not like sharing their property with others any more than I do.