VI
But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature—herein parting company with Thoreau as well as Hardy—he can moralize on occasion, and with infinite relish too.
“Something of the Shorter Catechist,” as his friend Henley so acutely said. There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories—Jekyll and Hyde is a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so is A Christmas Sermon.
Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.
Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow’s big green gamp or De Quincey’s insularity. “What business has a Vagabond to moralize?” asks the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond (especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson gives an additional piquancy to his work. The Lay Morals and the Christmas Sermon may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in the Fables. And even if you do not care for Stevenson’s “Hamlet” and “Shorter Catechist” moods, is it wise, even from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament? Was it the absence of the “Shorter Catechist” in Edgar Allan Poe that sent him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring,
grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And was it the “Shorter Catechist” in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of life’s possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder.
VI
RICHARD JEFFERIES
“Noises of river and of grove
And moving things in field and stall
And night birds’ whistle shall be all
Of the world’s speech that we shall hear.”William Morris.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
Keats.
I
The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come within its ken; the delight of a passionate soul in the riotous wealth of the Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid in the splendid sanity of the sunlight—these are the sentiments that well up from the writings of Richard Jefferies.