Concerning this last point, so often discussed, what shall be said? As Stevenson’s nature was complex and his themes varied, so he wrote in many keys. His prose was never “far from variation and quick change.” When he put pen to any work,—essay, travel, sketch, tragedy, or comedy,—the first thing was to strike “the essential note.” He would not begin a funeral march in A major, nor a sailor’s hornpipe in C minor; a requiem for the friend of his youth was one thing, and a description of his fellow passengers in the steerage was another: and, strange to tell, here and there a wise critic, wise above what is written, has discovered in this change of key proof of a want of originality. “Behold,” he cries, “the man has no style of his own; to-day he writes in one manner, and to-morrow in another.” The same sharp-eyed reviewers are certain to be troubled because Stevenson talks freely of style, openly professing to have cultivated one,—to have cared not only for what he said, but almost or quite as much for the way in which he said it. “How can a man be concerned with the niceties of expression, and yet be true to himself?” they seem ready to ask. A question to which, it must be admitted, there is no answer, or none worth the offering to any who need to ask for it.
To be greatly occupied with matters of form is doubtless to subject one’s self to peril. Careful writing may easily become mannered (as careless writing also may, and with less excuse); but what then? Danger is the common lot. An author, not less than other men, must face it, whether he will or no. He may choose between one set of pitfalls and another, but he will find no path without them. As for the risk of mannerism, Stevenson escaped it substantially unharmed. Compared with some of the more famous of his style-loving contemporaries, he may be said to have come off without a scratch. Whether his style is better or worse than theirs (and touching a point so delicate an unprofessional critic may prudently reserve his opinion) is a different matter; at least, it is less tagged with peculiarity. It was formed, as style should be, by the study of many models, not of one; and it has many virtues, including in good measure one of the highest, rarest, and most elusive, the quality of pleasurableness, or charm,—a quality not to be acquired by labor, nor to be exactly defined; a something added to a thing already complete, like the bloom on the grape or the perfume of the rose.
If the style has failings, also; if one feels now and then, in the more closely wrought of the essays especially, a certain excess of precision, a seeming hardness of outline, a lack, shall we say, of flexibility; if, after a time, one experiences a sensation as of walking in too continuously strong a light, with the sun, as it were, standing still at high noon; if one misses those momentary glimpses of invisible truth, those hints and adumbrations of things beyond the writer’s and the reader’s ken (a feeling as if twilight were coming on, and shadows were falling across the page), those touches of distance and mystery which make the peculiar attractiveness of another order of writing; if this, and perhaps more than this (an occasional want of absolute success in the use of the file; a failure, that is to say, to leave the phrase looking only the more unstudied for the labor bestowed upon it),—if things like these are felt at times by the sensitive reader, what does it all signify but that, in the perception and expression of truth, as in the making of moral character, one excellence of necessity excludes or dwarfs another, and perfection is still to seek? As the French martyr said (“a dread confession,” Stevenson called it, in one of his moods), “Prose is never done.”
The estimate which the author himself placed upon his style (though this is a point of little consequence) seems not to have been exalted. He had his gift, he knew, and had done his best to improve it; but other men had greater ones. He was an enthusiastic reader, and while still fresh from the enjoyment of “A Window in Thrums,” he wrote to Mr. Barrie: “There are two of us now [two Scotchmen] that the Shirra might have patted on the head. And please do not think, when I seem thus to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my sake.”
A handsome thing for a man to write, and a pleasant thing for his lovers to remember, but, as we say, not to be interpreted too strictly, as if it settled anything. The more considerable a man’s gifts, the more likely he is to speak disparagingly of them. To take his own word for it, Stevenson was a poor letter-writer, “essentially and originally incapable.” So he assures one of his correspondents; and then, the mood coming on him, he proceeds to cover page after page with the very scintillations of epistolary genius,—compliment, gossip, humor, brilliant description, verbal felicities, sweetness of personal feeling, everything, in short, that goes to the making of a perfect letter. No doubt he smiled at the incongruity of the thing as he folded the sheet (for no doubt he knew he had done well), but what shall we conclude as to the value of an honest author’s depreciatory judgment of his own work? If it is not a proverb, it ought to be, that self-dispraise goes little ways.
The welcome of Stevenson to his younger Scotch contemporary was characteristic of the man. In all his letters there is not a glimmer of professional jealousy nor a word of belittling criticism. With all his boyishness,—partly because of it, it might be truer to say,—he had a manly heart. Generosity and courage were matters of course with him, native to the blood. In his novels there is plenty—some would say a superfluity—of battle, murder, and sudden death; Cut and Thrust were two of his favorite heroes; he loved the breath of danger, and when, for the first and last time, he saw armed men taking the field, “the old aboriginal awoke” in him, and he sniffed the air like a war horse; he could be stern as the Judgment Day itself against injustice and cruelty; in such a cause he would break a lance, though all the world should call him, what he was once overheard to call himself, another Don Quixote; but withal, few men were ever more tender-hearted. At twenty-one, as he told the story more than twenty years afterward, he enjoyed a great day of fishing; the trout so many and so hungry that in his eagerness he forgot to kill them one by one as he took them from the water. In the small hours of the night his conscience smote him; he saw the fishes “still kicking in their agony;” and he never fished again. Whoever was in distress was sure not only of his sympathy, but of his hand and purse. He would walk the streets of a city half the night with a lost child in his arms, invalid though he was; and when he comes to clear the land of his new South Sea domain, he wonders whether any one else ever felt toward Nature just as he does. He pities the vines and grasses that he uproots: “their struggles go to my heart like supplications.” Since his death, says his biographer, the native chiefs—“gentle barbarians,” truly—have forbidden the use of firearms on the hillside where he is buried, “that the birds may live there undisturbed.”
Stevenson believed in the supremacy of the soul. He would not be put down by things material. Many years he lived face to face with death, and to the last his testimony was that he found his life good. To a critic who thought him too little appreciative of the darker side of human existence he wrote: “If you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them under, you must be very differently made from me, and, I earnestly believe, from the majority of men.” Such was his brave confession; and his life, from all we see of it, was in full accordance with his faith. It might be said of him what Lowell said of Chaucer: he was “so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make.”
Toward the last, it is true, he fell into a state of depression, and for a time was alarmingly unlike his old self. His power of work seemed to be gone, and the “complicated miseries” that surrounded him weighed hard upon his spirits. Even then, however, he protested his belief in “an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it.” This was his natural religion, which the early loss of his ancestral creed—that “damnatory creed” with which his childhood was “pestered almost to madness”—had only deepened and irradiated. And the dark and sterile mood was no more than a mood, after all. Soon he was writing again, more successfully than ever. And then, with everything bright before him, his powers working at their easiest and best, his prayer for “courage, gayety, and the quiet mind” fully answered, all at once the end came. The brief candle, that so often had flickered and burned low, was suddenly blown out. He had gone round more islands than his lighthouse-building grandfather, as it amused him once to boast, and now, like his grandfather, he had reached “the end of all his cruising.”
“Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”