Was he too serious for his own good, whether as man or as writer? And did he sometimes feel himself so? Was he whipping his own fault when he spoke against conscientious, duty-ridden people, and praised
“simple laboring folk
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is a song”?
It is not impossible, of course. But he, too, loved his work,—loved it so well as perhaps to need no playtime. Some have said that he made too much of his “thoughts and moods,” that he was unwholesomely beset with the idea of self-improvement. Others have thought that he would have written better books had he stuck closer to science, and paid less court to poetry and Buddhistic philosophy. Such objections and speculations are futile. He did his work, and with it enriched the world. In the strictest sense it was his own work. If his ideal escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Stevenson was one of the happy few: he knew his life’s business from childhood. He was to write books. Happier still, and one of even a smaller minority, he early discovered that authorship is an art requiring a long and rigorous apprenticeship; that, if a man is to write, he must first study how, putting himself under tuition and devoting himself to practice; that an author no more than a pianist can begin with “pieces” and a public performance. In short, Stevenson had from the beginning an idea of literary composition as a fine art,—an art not to be picked up some pleasant day by the roadside (as later in life he essayed, for whim’s sake, to pick up the art of writing music), nor carried away, as a matter of course, along with other more or less useful odds and ends of knowledge, from the grammar school or university, but to be acquired, if at all, by years on years of drill. Another man may write “well enough,” and perhaps successfully, so far as material rewards go, by nature and the rule of thumb; but the artist aims at perfection,—perfection for its own sake. That aim, the pursuit of that ideal, is what makes him an artist. And such was Stevenson.
“All through my boyhood and youth,” he says, “I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny-version book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas.”
So he “lived with words.” And the point of the confession is that these “childish tasks,” as he calls them in another place, were done “consciously for practice.” “I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.”