Over his grave, almost before his body could be lowered into it, there rose the inevitable buzz of critical surmise and questioning. Human nature is impatient. It believes in ranks and orders, and must have the labels on at once. Were Stevenson’s books really great, it desired to know,—as great as those of such and such another man? Or were his admirers—whose regrets and acclamations, it must be owned, made at that minute a pretty busy chorus—setting him on too lofty a pedestal and stirring about him too dense a “dust of praise”? A few disinterested souls seemed surely to believe it, and were in great perturbation accordingly. To listen to them one might have supposed that the very foundations were being destroyed. And then what should the righteous do?
They need not have troubled themselves. The world will last a long time yet, and our little breath of praise or blame will speedily blow itself out and be forgotten. As was said of Hazlitt, so it must be said of Stevenson: Time will tell. Not that it will of necessity tell the truth; since what we dignify as the verdict of Time is, after all, in a certain way of looking at it, nothing but the opinion of the majority; but at least it will have the force of a last word,—there will be nobody to dispute it.
Meanwhile, there is no reason in the nature of things why those who admire Stevenson, or any other contemporary, should be frightened out of saying so. Our judgment may be wrong, of course; but also it may be right; and right or wrong, if it be modestly held, there can be no law against its utterance. And if we are to speak at all, we must speak while we can,—unless, to be sure, we are to call no man happy till after we are dead.
A RELISH OF KEATS
A RELISH OF KEATS
In all the writing of genius, which is a power that possesses its so-called possessor rather than is possessed by him, there is much that seems like accident. Many things—all the best ones, it might not be too much to say—are contributed by the pen rather than by the man. The man had never thought of them; it was no more within his intention to write them than to write another “Hamlet;” and suddenly there they are before him on the paper. The handwriting is his, but as to where the words came from, he can tell hardly more than his most illiterate neighbor. From No-Man’s-Land, if you please to say so.
Keats was proudly conscious of this mystery. There is nothing, indeed, upon which he, or any poet, could half so reasonably felicitate himself. His divinest verses, he knew it and owned it, were traced for him by “the magic hand of chance.” A great thing, a power almost omnipotent, is this that we call by that convenient, ignorance-disguising name. It made not only Keats’s verses, but Keats himself. Otherwise how explain him?—son of a stable-keeper, a play-loving, belligerent, unstudious boy, a surgeon’s apprentice at fifteen, dead at twenty-six, and before that—and henceforth—one of the chief glories of England, a poet, “with Shakespeare.”
He himself suspected nothing of his gift, so far as appears, till he was eighteen. Then he read the “Fairy Queen,” fell under its enchantment, and immediately, or very soon, minding an inward call, began trying his own hand at verses. At first they were no more than verses, “neither precocious nor particularly promising,” says Mr. Colvin; things that a man takes a certain pleasure in doing,—
“There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know,”—