But he did more than to practice. A man does not learn to whittle, or to paint, or to play the flute, by the primitive process of merely trying his hand, be it ever so patiently. The fine arts are no longer things to be invented, every man for himself. Others have whittled and painted; one generation has bequeathed its increment of skill to the next; here and there a master has arisen, and the masters have set up a standard; and now, the standard being established, the essential matter is, not to paint or write to the satisfaction of village critics, but to prove one’s self a workman beside the best of the craft. For this there needs acquaintance with the masters’ work,—such acquaintance, or so young Stevenson was persuaded, as could come from nothing but an imitative study of it. And he set himself to imitate. He had never heard the dictum, or he disbelieved it, that a boy should read the best writers, but pattern after nobody. Wherever he saw excellence of a kind that appealed to him, he took it for the time being as his model, a mark to aim at. This he did consciously and unashamed.
Such a course would never give him originality; but no matter. For the present it was not originality he was seeking; he was not yet writing books: he was learning his trade. Whether, having learned it, he should turn out to have original genius to go with his knowledge and put it to use, was a question that the event alone could determine. Originality is a gift of the gods; it is born with a man, or it is not born with him. The technique of a prose style, on the other hand, could be learned, and Stevenson’s present business was to learn it, in the only way of which he had any knowledge, the way in which his masters themselves had learned it,—practice based on imitation.[7]
How could the boy have done better? He was called to write; he had “the love of words” which, as he says, marks the writer’s vocation; and for such a boy “to work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king’s highway of progress.” Yes, “for a while;” and after the while, if he is not merely one of the many that are called, but one of the few that are chosen, he will have found his own line, and such originality as nature endowed him with at birth (or before) will declare itself in the way appointed.
Stevenson had the name of an idler, he tells us, and it must be said that he wore it jauntily,—as he wore his old clothes. Whatever he did or failed to do, it would have been hard to catch him without defense. He wrote “An Apology for Idlers,” which, as he confided to a correspondent, was “an apology for R. L. S.;” and to this day it sounds like a good one. It would do many a hard-working man and useful member of society a service to read it. He believed that, for the young especially, a certain kind and measure of idleness is a profitable kind of industry; while they are seemingly unemployed they may perchance be learning something that is really worth while: “to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.”
For himself, like many another man of genius, he was very little of a scholar in the traditional sense of the word. What the schools had taken upon themselves to teach were mostly not the things that he had taken upon himself to learn. At the university he devised “an extensive and highly rational system of truantry,” and no one “ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.” Like his antitype in Mr. Barrie’s novel, he could always find a way. No doubt his personal attractiveness counted for much here, as it did everywhere. One of his earlier teachers had pronounced him “without exception the most delightful boy he ever knew;” and his mother’s testimony is that his masters found it pleasanter to talk with him than to teach him. How his wits and his fine gift of plausibility helped him over a hard place in one of the last of his examinations—for admission to the bar—is related as from himself, by Mr. Balfour. The subject in hand was “Ethical and Metaphysical Philosophy,” and a certain book had been prescribed. “The examiner asked me a question,” Stevenson says, “and I had to say to him, ‘I beg your pardon, but I do not understand your phraseology.’ ‘It’s the text-book,’ he said. ‘Yes; but you couldn’t possibly expect me to read so poor a book as that.’ He laughed like a hunchback, and then put the question in another form. I had been reading Mayne, and answered him by the historical method. They were probably the most curious answers ever given in the subject. I don’t know what he thought of them, but they got me through.”
It is a good story, and thoroughly characteristic. There was nothing academic in Stevenson’s turn of mind, whether in youth or manhood. “I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke,” he remarks, in his “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin,” and the words may be taken as fairly expressive of his attitude toward the whole business of what is called education. The last thing he meant to be was a conventional man,—“a consistent first-class passenger in life,”—and why should he disquiet himself over a conventional training? Allow him his own subject and his own method, and he would be studious with anybody.
So throughout his early years, as we have seen, he studied the art of authorship. Then, as happens to all artists, came the critical point of production or non-production. Would the plant so sedulously watered and tended, so promising in the leaf, prove to be fertile or sterile? Having so lofty an idea of his art, so exalted a standard of excellence in it, would he go on indefinitely putting himself off with preparations, “prelusory gymnastic,” as he saw so many painters doing at Barbizon (“snoozers” instead of painters, covering their walls with studies, and never coming to the picture), and as is so easy for art students of all kinds to do, or, having learned the handling of his tools, would he set himself to use them in the performance of a man’s work?
Such a question is by no means one that answers itself. In any particular case there is perhaps more than an even chance that the student will never have the industry, the courage, and the intellectual and moral stuff to accomplish, or even seriously put his hand to, any of the great things for which he has so long been making ready. Stevenson himself, from all that appears, may have had at the beginning a period when the issue hung more or less in doubt. “I remember a time,” he wrote afterward, “when I was very idle, and lived and profited by that humor.” Now, he says, the case is different with him, he knows not why. Perhaps it is “a change of age.” He made many slight efforts at reform, “had a thousand skirmishes to keep himself at work upon particular mornings;” the life of Goethe affected him, as did also some noble remarks of Balzac, but he was never conscious of a struggle, “never registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personally to do with the matter.” “I came about like a well-handled ship,” he concludes. “There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we call God.”
In his twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, at all events, he was really getting under way, though for the present, as was becoming, with small ventures; and from that time, except for the frequent occasions when illness and the likelihood of speedy death constrained him to “twiddle his fingers and play patience,” he kept his pen busy as few men of anything like his physical disabilities and his roving disposition have ever done. For it is important to note that he was by inheritance a wanderer. Even had his health allowed it, he could never have sat month after month at the same desk, turning off so many hundred words as his daily stint. Once, when he has lived for six months at Davos, he writes to his friend Colvin that he is in a bad way,—a result, he believes, of having been too long in one place. “That tells on my old gypsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there was in me.” And when his mother complained that he was little at home, he bade her not be vexed at his nomadic habits. “I must be a bit of a vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have had a tramp for a son.”
For a man who had studied authorship, and wished to write not mainly from books, but from the experience of his own mind and body, this ineradicable gypsy strain was of the highest value. How much it imported to Stevenson should be evident even to those who know his books only by the backs of them. Bodily health excepted, he had all the qualifications of a traveler. Happy man that he was, he was always a boy, rich to the last in some of the best of youthful virtues,—buoyancy, curiosity, “interest in the whole page of experience,” and the capacity for surprise. The world for him was never an old story. When he saw a ship or a train of cars, he wished himself aboard. Discomforts and dangers were nothing; nay, they could be turned into excellent fun, and after that into almost as excellent copy. His spirit was habitually strung up to out-of-door pitch, to borrow his own expression. He felt “the incommunicable thrill of things.” Not for him a staid life in drawing-rooms or city clubs. He would be out in the open, “where men still live a man’s life.” At forty he wrote his own formula thus: “0.55 artist, 0.45 adventurer.” Near the same time, being just from the island of Molokai, where he had played croquet with seven leper girls (and would not wear gloves, though cautioned to that effect, lest it should make the girls unhappy to be reminded of their condition), he writes to a friend: “This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbors; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives,—the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem.” A lucky combination it was, both for the man himself and for the world of readers,—fifty-five per cent artist, and forty-five per cent adventurer.