or nothing of those merits in its quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires; these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the Artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil ‘like a miner buried in a landslip,’ for which day after day he recasts and revises and rejects, the gross mass of the Public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest point of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, that you fail by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought alone in his studio the Artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal.” [124a]
An exacting ideal, but one to which Stevenson was as faithful as a Calvinist to his theology. The question arises, however; is the fastidiousness, the patient care of the Artist, consistent with Vagabondage? Should one not say the greater the stylist, the lesser the Vagabond?
This may be admitted. And thus it is that in the letters alone do we find the Vagabond temperament of Stevenson fully asserting itself. Elsewhere ’tis held in check. As Mr. Sidney Colvin justly says: [124b] “In his letters—
excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye—Stevenson, the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order, or logical sequence, or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most distinguished eloquence on one day, with simple good sense and good feeling on a second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most slashing, often ultra-colloquial vehemency on a fourth, or will vary through all these moods, and more, in one and the same letter.”
Fresh and spontaneous his letters invariably appear; with a touch of the invalid’s nervous haste, but never lacking in courage, and with nothing of the querulousness which we connect with chronic ill-health. Weak and ailing, shadowed by death for many years before the end, Stevenson showed a fine fortitude, which will remain in the memory of his friends as his most admirable character. With the consistency of Mark Tapley (and with less talk about it) he determined to be jolly in all possible circumstances. Right to the end his wonderful spirits, his courageous gaiety attended him; the frail body grew frailer, but the buoyant intellect never failed him, or if it did so the failure was momentary, and in a moment he was recovered.
No little of his popularity is due to the desperate valour with which he contested the ground with death, inch by inch, and died, as Buckle and John Richard Green had done, in the midst of the work that he would
not quit. Romance was by him to the last, gladdening his tired body with her presence; and if towards the end weariness and heart-sickness seized him for a spell, yet the mind soon resumed its mastery over weakness. In a prayer which he had written shortly before his death he had petitioned: “Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun lightens the world, so let our lovingkindness make bright this house of our habitation.” Assuredly in his case this characteristic petition had been realized; the prevalent sunniness of his disposition attended him to the last.
IV
Of all our writers there has been none to whom the epithet “charming” has been more frequently applied. Of late the epithet has become a kind of adjectival maid-of-all-work, and has done service where a less emphatic term would have done far better. But in Stevenson’s case the epithet is fully justified. Of all the literary Vagabonds he is the most captivating. Not the most interesting; the most arresting, one may admit. There is greater power in Hazlitt; De Quincey is more unique; the “prophetic scream” of Whitman is more penetrating. But not one of them was endowed with such wayward graces of disposition as Stevenson. Whatever you read of his you think invariably of the man. Indeed the personal note in his work is frequently the most interesting thing about it. I mean that what attracts and holds us is often not any originality, any profundity, nothing
specially inherent in the matter of his speech, but a bewitchingly delightful manner.