TWO PASTELS
I Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet
A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume with The Lawyers Farewell to his Muse. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem, Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us his Busy, curious, thirsty Fly. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the Anatomy of Melancholy, and to Bacon for The World's Bubble. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett's Ode to Leven Water should by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's Gaffer Gray, or Sydney Smith's Receipt for a Salad, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.
As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made, the room was fit," from Travels with a Donkey. But Mr. Stevenson is now ineligible—he has published books of poems.
That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I do not refer to his early collections of verse, to Not I, and other Poems, to Moral Emblems, and to The Graver and the Pen. (I mention these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been the Shorter Catechism; they are books which no one can read and not be the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired. Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, if you happen to be lucky enough to possess them, e passa. Where the careful reader has perceived that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of A Child's Garden of Verses (Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise, and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems, Underwoods (Chatto and Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.
The Child's Garden of Verses has now been published long enough to enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After reading the new book, the Underwoods, we come back to A Child's Garden with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing which struck the reader of A Child's Garden was the extraordinary clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us—
My bed is like a little boat;