Stevenson did not talk of himself so freely as Montaigne (how could he, in these proper days?) nor, the present scribe being judge, so adorably as Lamb. Nature herself is little likely to hit the white centre of perfection twice, and we shall perhaps see another Shakespeare as soon as another Lamb; but few have loved a personal theme better, and in the handling of it there were none among the living to surpass him. He had every qualification for the work. A pity he died at forty-four,—a pity in every aspect of the case, but especially when it is considered what treasures of youthful reminiscence he would have left behind him had he lived even to the approaches of old age. Such a devotee of his own past should have been spared to see it through a bluer haze. Yet even in middle life how fair it looked to him, and how lovingly he laid its colors as he transferred the picture to the page! Hear him speak of his grandfather, in a passage no better than is common with him, and dealing with nothing out of the ordinary:—
“Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare, also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had chalkstones in his fingers; and these in good time I may inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.”
A man could talk of himself in that strain till the sun put the stars out, and nobody would vote him tiresome or blame him for an egotist. Yes, a misfortune it was that he could not have lived to write a dozen books full of essays like “The Manse,” “Old Mortality,” “Memoirs of an Islet,” and especially “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s.” So appreciative a reader and so entertaining a talker could never have wearied us with gossip of his favorite books, “the inner circle of his intimates;” and the more first-personal and confidential he became, the better we should have liked it.
Well, since we cannot have the finished essays, we will be the more thankful for the letters. How good they are!—so varied, so spontaneous, so free-spoken, so humanly wise and so deliciously nonsensical; now bubbling over with jest, now touching the deepest springs of thought and action; fit expression of a man who was himself both Ariel and Prospero; “an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman,” yet with “always some childishness on hand;” the “grandson of the Manse,” who would rise from the grave to preach, and has “scarce broken a commandment to mention,” yet owning it as his darling wish to be a pirate. Whim and opinion, settled conviction and passing mood, alike find utterance in them; and best of all, perhaps, many of them are most engagingly rich in matter connected with his own pursuit. A selection of these in a handy volume (why must letters always be put up in a form too cumbersome for lovers’ convenience, as if they, more than other books, were expected to stand forever upon a shelf?) would go far to supply the place of that treatise on “The Art of Literature” which their author spoke so frequently of making.
Here would be found a letter to Mr. Marcel Schwob, a letter one page long, but weighty with the subtlest and pithiest criticism, not of Mr. Schwob’s writings alone (that might not seem so very important), but of writing in general, and in particular of Stevenson’s. For it is impossible to read it without perceiving that the critic is passing judgment (no unkind one) upon his own early books of sentimental travel. His correspondent has sent him a volume of verses. He has read it through twice, and is reading it again,—a handsome compliment, to start with. It is essentially graceful, he says, but is a thing of promise rather than a thing final in itself. “You have yet to give to us—and I am expecting it with impatience—something of a larger gait; something daylit, not twilit; something with the colors of life, not the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be said with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not sung like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace—and not so pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these exquisite pieces, ... you will perhaps never excel them.... Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.”
Happy poet! to be caressed so affectionately and lanced so beneficently with one stroke of the master’s hand; and happy critic, no less! having sentences of this quality to drop without a second thought, like small change from the hand of wealth, into the oblivion of private correspondence.
In truth, Stevenson could afford to be generous; he had always good things enough and to spare. His was a mind incessantly active. He was always covering paper. If only disease would leave him strength enough to hold the pen, he could be trusted to keep it going. Ideas thronged upon him; books by the dozen, one may almost say, stood waiting for him to make them. The more wonder that, with all this excess of fertility, he could yet rewrite and rewrite, and then write again, still on the search for perfection. Surely the artist was strong in him.
His fame was of slow growth, surprising as the fact seems now, till he wrote novels. These, as all the world knows, since all the world reads them, are nothing like the ordinary modern novel of carpet knights and pairs of happy or unhappy lovers. They are romances in the heroic vein, spun mostly of a single thread, with no lack of high lights, plenty of blood-letting, a good spice of humor, dialogue that is closely pared and talks of itself, character displayed in action, not dissected, and movement to delight the lover of a story.
The lode was struck, almost by accident, when Stevenson’s schoolboy stepson son, backed by another “schoolboy in disguise,”—namely, Stevenson’s father,—begged him to “write something interesting.” The response to this reasonable request was “Treasure Island,” which not only filled the schoolboys’ bill, but captivated so stout-hearted a disbeliever in things romantic as Mr. Henry James. As it was this story that introduced its author to a wider public, he used to speak of it (possibly with a shade of irony, though that does not certainly appear) as his first book.
It may be that the gift of romance was the highest of his endowments. Some, at least, have thought so, and have reckoned the novels as not only the most popular, but the greatest of his works. As to the choice among them, the question of their comparative excellence among themselves, that is a matter not under discussion here, the writer of the present paper having no sort of competency for dealing with it. His own special delight is in “David Balfour” (the two parts) and “Treasure Island.” These he hopes to read—now and then a chapter, if no more—as long as he reads anything. He likes the men—and the women,—and he likes the talk. Mr. James’s comment upon “Treasure Island,” that one seems to be reading it over a schoolboy’s shoulder, strikes him as extremely ingenious and pretty, but he is conscious of nothing of that nature himself. He reads it, if he may be allowed to say so, on his own hook, and for the time being is himself the schoolboy,—which may or may not be the better fun. He likes the story and the pictures,—for every chapter is a picture,—and he likes the writing.