Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character, which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a personality all was different; then, every touch told, as we may see in the picture of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the character he could see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for quiet, unpicturesque men baffled his powers of reproduction. He could admire, but he could not draw them. There is a very curious instance of this in the Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, which is worth commenting on here. That memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a whole it belongs to the same uncharacterised class of portrait-studies as these Men and Books. Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he might be anybody. But there are passages in the Memoir which are the most moving passages that Stevenson ever wrote. They do not relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is all out of focus: they relate to the parents of Jenkin and his wife. Jenkin’s personality, it would seem, was never grasped by Stevenson; these vignettes, on the other hand, are quite poignantly real and quite pathetically beautiful.
VI
The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter. Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed—there are many, which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and which will continue to give pleasure because they are a little whimsical in conception and very finished in performance. These essays owe their charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing about himself, for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He was charmed by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not the courage or possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you that Stevenson took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing and not at all distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was deliciously joined together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His essays, the most personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the same vanity which brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It was not the unhappy vanity that drives friends away, that is suspicious of all kindness: Stevenson had been too much petted as a child to permit of such wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was confident, but not vulgarly confident; vain, to the extent of being more interested in himself than in anything else; but he was not dependent upon his earnings, and success came early enough to keep sweet his happy complacency. His essays show these things as clearly as do his letters. His essays “are like milestones upon the wayside of his life,” and they are so obviously milestones, that all readers who are fascinated by autobiography, particularly if it be veiled, have been drawn to Stevenson as they are drawn to an attractive, laughing child. My own opinion is that Stevenson has sent his lovers away no richer than they came; but there are many who could not share that view, because there are many who are thankful to him for telling them that “it is better to be a fool than to be dead.” I think Stevenson did not know what it was to be either a fool or dead. That state of nervous high spirits which is a part of his natural equipment for the battle, which lent even his most artificial writing a semblance of vivacity, prevented him from ever being dead (in the sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant it); and I cannot persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.
It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please some readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That they were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure, had the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as anyone may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers: it is a part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure some obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the gimcrack relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that he fell naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality—as we may realise from the lengthy fragment called Lay Morals—preoccupied him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged head of sententious dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by whatever means, by whatever labour the art was attained, Stevenson was, above everything else, a writer. “There is no wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography, “there is no wonder that Stevenson wrote his best in the shadow of the Shade; for writing his best was very life to him.”
VII
As a writer, then, let Stevenson be regarded in the conclusion of this chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his deliberate example in that one essay On some technical elements of Style in Literature; and his theories have aroused bitter comment. Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants recurrent in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he lived in a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of course, was a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because Stevenson was a prolific writer, and could never have afforded the time to be a mere hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first to realise that a prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that an evil use of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he realised that a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive cunning by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with ever-growing interest into the most remote passages of his work. He was a careful writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some sentences of Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their consonants and syllables and “knots,” to their destined conclusion, are still, and I suppose always will be capable of yielding, a pure delight to the ear. Those who do not take Stevenson’s pains will qualify his denunciation of the “natural” writer, because a natural writer is one whose ear is quick and fairly true: he is not necessarily producing “the disjointed babble of the chronicler,” but he is incapable of the fine point of exquisite rhythm which we may find in Stevenson’s best writing. That writing, various though it is (various, I mean, in “styles”), remains true to its musical principles. It is the result of trained ear and recognition of language as a conscious instrument. It has innumerable, most insidious appeals, to disregard which is a task for the barbarian. It is patterned, it is built of sounds,—“one sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another,”—all in accordance with the expressed theory of Stevenson. We will grant it the delights, because they are incontestable. Let us now question whether it has not one grave defect.
All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its music, its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that old dance music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband, stately as they are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear resolution with immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven figured style, than which we could hardly have an illustration more fit. They are examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but in Stevenson’s writing there is no violence to old airs and the old order. His writing is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and in its differentiation from the old way of writing is to be found, not a revolution, not anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style, graceful, sustained though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but it has no vigour. The passages to which one turns are passages of delicious, stealthy accomplishment. They are passages which suggest the slow encroaching fingers of the in-coming tide, creeping and whispering further and further up the sand; and our watchful delight in the attainment of each sentence is the delight we feel in seeing the waves come very gently, pushed on by an incalculable necessity, until their length is reached and their substance is withdrawn. There is no tempestuous certainty in Stevenson’s writing; there is not the magnificent wine of Shakespeare’s prose, which has marvellous strength as well as its delicate precision. Stevenson’s style, clearly invalidish in his imitators, has in itself the germs of their consumption. It is quiet, pretty, picturesque, graceful; it has figure and trope in plenty; but it has no vehemence. You may find in it an amazing variety of pitch and cadence; but at length the care that has made it betrays the artificer; at length the reader will look in vain for the rough word. That is the pity of Stevenson’s style—not that he should have sought it, and exercised it, and made language quite the most important thing in his writing; but that his very artfulness should have yielded him no protection against the demand of nature for something which no care or cunning can ever put into style that does not carry its own impetus.
V
POEMS
I
The Scottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance. Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality, in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons. It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very appreciative of good actions contributed by other persons to that advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the voice of a singer—especially when the singer happens to be the person who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities, although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned. It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show affection or weep: how hard it is that we should weigh in the balance of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!