Or this:—
“To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else” (Virginibus Puerisque).
In his characterization he is at his best—like Scott and Borrow—when dealing with the picaresque elements in life. His rogues are depicted with infinite gusto and admirable art, and although even they, in common with most of his characters, lack occasionally in substance and objective reality, yet when he has to illustrate a characteristic he will do so with a sure touch.
Take, for instance, this sketch of Herrick in The Ebb Tide—the weak, irresolute rascal, with just force enough to hate himself. He essays to end his ignominious career in the swift waters:—
. . . “Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming; there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?
“And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he—at once within and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain, which a single manly thought would suffice to open—and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a revelation—there was no escape possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow—a merciful chance blow—or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his infamy.
“There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who could not. His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself.”
Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson—a love of the grotesque, a passion for the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of roughness, and in Browning’s case the relish imparts itself to his style. Not so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious treasure; but not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of finished beauty will he allow you to get a glimpse of it.
This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with all the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson’s is always the better way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real attractiveness of certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness, their downright ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting would have shown off the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one has nothing but welcome for such memorable figures as John Silver, the Admiral in The Story of a Lie, Master Francis Villon, and a goodly company beside.
It is impossible even in such a cursory estimate of Stevenson as this to pass over his vignettes of Nature. And it is the more necessary to emphasize these, inasmuch as the Vagabond’s passion for the Earth is clearly discernible in these pictures. They are no Nature sketches as imagined by a mere “ink-bottle feller”—to use a phrase of one of Mr. Hardy’s rustics. One of Stevenson’s happiest recollections was an “open air” experience when he slept on the earth. He loved the
largeness of the open air, and his intense joy in natural sights and sounds bespeaks the man of fine, even hectic sensibility, whose nerves quiver for the benison of the winds and sunshine.
Ever since the days of Mrs. Radcliffe, who used the stormier aspects of Nature with such effect in her stories, down to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose massive scenic effects are so remarkable, Nature has been regarded as a kind of “stage property” by the novelist.