This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous “grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman. Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans, whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems to me important that we should be slow to charge a race that is impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be a great poet is another matter.
II
Stevenson’s poems are contained in four small volumes—Underwoods, Ballads, Songs of Travel (a collection made by himself, but published posthumously), and A Child’s Garden of Verses. Of the four volumes the one that has enjoyed most popularity, as well as most critical esteem, is A Child’s Garden of Verses, which book, although, by Stevenson’s account, very easily produced, has the value of being unique in scheme and contents. The other volumes have less in them of wide interest, and so they are less generally read. Certain poems, such as the Requiem (“Under the wide and starry sky”) and The Vagabond (“Give to me the life I love”) arise whenever the name of Stevenson is fondly mentioned; they are, as it were, the stock-in-trade of the conversational anthologist, who, in the same spirit, will have suggested to him by the name of Meredith the words, “Enter these enchanted woods, Ye who dare.” These two poems are not the best poems Stevenson wrote; but they are handy for remembrance. That explains their frequent employment; that, and their appropriateness to the conventional idea of Stevenson, which is based upon a sentimental and mediocre marvel at the unconventionality of the open road.
The best poems Stevenson wrote are his ballads. With a story to tell, he was keener to represent truly the subject-matter upon which he was engaged; and this engendered the “heat of composition,” if it did not always spring from the native heat or intensity of inspiration. The ballads, especially Ticonderoga, have a swift effectiveness and an adherence to theme which is not so marked in the poems provoked by occasional events. In these the rhyme and form sometimes lead the way, and the poems become exercises in friendly versification, without much feeling, and with only that Scottish affectionateness to which reference has already been made. Examples of impoverished emotion may be found in the two poems expressing gladness at visits from Mr. Henry James. As cheerful little outbursts of pleasure, such poems, in manuscript, would be interesting, even delightful: as poems they fall short of complete success, even in their own class, for the reason that they are as conversational and as fluent as Stevenson’s letters, and are diffuse as his prose rarely is.
Better than these are some of the dryly humorous Scots dialect poems, such as The Spaewife, with its refrain of “—It’s gey an’ easy spierin’, says the beggar-wife to me.” These again are often purely experimental versifications; but they are more than the casual rhymings of the pleased householder, and they have more interest as poetry. Far and away better even than these, however, because it is the expression of a personal and, I think, a deep feeling, is that poem, included in Songs of Travel, and quoted in The Master of Ballantrae, which is untitled, but which is written “To the tune of Wandering Willie.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
In this poem there seems to be real emotion, as I think there is in the dedication to Mrs. Stevenson of Weir of Hermiston. In other poems there is a grace and the mellifluous flow of words which Stevenson could always command; but the verses make a pattern, and a pattern of only occasional significance. They are thus robbed of any power to move us æsthetically.
The two long narrative poems, The Ballad of Rahero and The Feast of Famine, are both well-sustained by a body of incident. They have, in lieu of emotion, a certain vividness of excitement. One is excited by what is going forward, one must read on for the story. In the degree, therefore, in which one’s attention is removed from the versification, these two narratives are good; and those other verses based on legends—Heather Ale and Ticonderoga—would be sufficient to emphasise the fact that Stevenson loved a story and was always at his best with a tale to spin. When, however, we reach poems in which no story is to be told, we are confronted with an absence of emotion which robs the pages we read of all that exceeds mere pleasurable line-scanning. Happy lines there are, turns of phrase that perhaps have given rise to the poem into which they are woven. But they are only, at best, the amiable pleasantries of one who could handle with dexterity the words of whose music his mind was full. “The bright ring of words” is not the phrase of a poet; it is the phrase of a connoisseur, and of one who used words as a connoisseur uses them. The poet is a singer first: he does not make a poem out of his craft. And the tendency to diffuseness which mars many of the longer lyrics is a curious instance of failure in a writer who regarded compression as an essential of good style.