IV
ESSAYS
I
There have been some English essayists whose writing is so packed with thought that it is almost difficult to follow the thought in its condensation. Such was Bacon, whose essays were by way of being “assays,” written so tightly that each little sentence was the compression of the author’s furthest belief upon that aspect of his subject, and so that to modern students the reading of Bacon’s essays resembles the reading of a whole volume printed in Diamond type. There have been English essayists whose essays are clear-cut refinements of truth more superficial or more simple. Such was Addison, who wrote with a deliberate and flowing elegance, and whose essays Stevenson found himself unable to read. There have been such essayists as Hazlitt, the shrewd sincerity of whose perceptions is expressed with so much appropriateness that his essays are examples of what essays should be. There has never been in England a critic or an essayist of quite the same calibre as Hazlitt. It was of Hazlitt that Stevenson wrote, in words so true that they summarily arrest by their significance the reader who does not expect to find in Walking Tours so vital an appraisement: “Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.” And, in succession, for there would be no purpose in continuing the list for its own sake, there have been essayists who, intentionally resting their work upon style and upon the charm of personality, have in a thousand ways diversified their ordinary experience, and so have been enabled to disclose as many new aspects and delights to the reader. Such an essayist was Lamb. Hazlitt, I think, was the last of the great English essayists, because Hazlitt sought truth continuously and found his incomparable manner in the disinterested love of precision to truth. But Lamb is the favourite; and Lamb is the English writer of whom most readers think first when the word “essay” is mentioned. That is because Lamb brought to its highest pitch that personal and idiosyncratic sort of excursion among memories which has created the modern essay, and which has severed it from the older traditions of both Bacon and Addison. It is to the school of Lamb, in that one sense, that Stevenson belonged. He did not “write for antiquity,” as Lamb did; he did not write deliberately in the antique vein or in what Andrew Lang called “elderly English”; but he wrote, with conscious and anxious literary finish, essays which had as their object the conveyance in an alluring manner of his own predilections. He quite early made his personality what Henley more exactly supposed that it only afterwards became—a marketable commodity—as all writers of strong or acquired personality are bound to do.
Since Stevenson there have been few essayists of classic rank, largely because the essay has lost ground, and because interest in “pure” literature has been confined to work of established position (by which is meant the work of defunct writers). There has been Arthur Symons, of whose following of Pater as an epicure of sensation we have heard so much that the original quality of his fine work—both in criticism and in the essay—has been obscured. There has been an imitator of Stevenson, an invalid lady using the pseudonym “Michael Fairless”; and there have been Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Street, Mr. A. C. Benson, and Mr. Filson Young. These writers have all been of the “personal” school, frankly accepting the essay as the most personal form in literature, and impressing upon their work the particular personal qualities which they enjoy. Some of them have been more robust than others, some less distinguished; but all of them are known to us (in relation to their essays) as writers of personality rather than as writers of abstract excellence. An essay upon the art of the essay, tracing its development, examining its purpose, and distinguishing between its exponents, might be a very fascinating work. Such an essay is manifestly out of place here; but it is noteworthy that, apart from the distinguished writers whose names I have given, nearly all the minor writers (that is, nearly all those whose names I have not mentioned) who have produced essays since the death of Stevenson, or who are nowadays producing genteel essays, have been deeply under his influence. It is further noteworthy that most of those who have been so powerfully influenced have been women.
II
From the grimly earnest abstracts of knowledge contributed by Bacon to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few fancies, or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily composed a single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson, as I have said, belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England Charles Lamb is most representative, and of whom Montaigne was most probably his more direct model—the writer who conveyed information about his personal tastes and friends and ancient practices in a form made prepossessing by a flavoured style. To those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added a strong didactic strain, as much marked in his early essays as in the later ones; and it is this strain which differentiates Stevenson’s work from that of Lamb and Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the delicious vintage of a ripe mind both credulous and sceptical, grown old enough to examine with great candour and curiousness the details of its own vagaries: many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays are the work of his youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of the pseudo-candour of vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s shrewd naïveté. He was thirty or thirty-one when the collection entitled Virginibus Puerisque was published. A year later there followed Familiar Studies of Men and Books. He was only thirty-seven (Montaigne was thirty-eight when he “retired” from active life and began to produce his essays) when his third collection, Memories and Portraits, obviously more sedate and less open to the charge of literary affectation, completed the familiar trilogy. Although Across the Plains did not appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to form that book had earlier received periodical publication (the dated essays range from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously collected in The Art of Writing belong to 1881. So it is not unfair to say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by which personality is so much matured as to yield readily to condensation. Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays, for the judgments of maturity, although we may find in Virginibus Puerisque a rather middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek the significance of these essays in the degree in which they reveal consciously the graces and the faultless negligé of an attractive temperament. We may look to find at its highest point the illustration of those principles of style which Stevenson endeavoured to formulate in one very careful essay upon the subject (to the chagrin, I seem to remember, at the time of its republication, of so many critics who misunderstood the aim of the essay). And we shall assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson possessed of quoting happily from other writers. Quotation with effect is a matter of great skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was peculiar rather than wide, drew from this very fact much of the inimitable effect obtained by references so apt.
III
One note which we shall find persistently struck and re-struck in Stevenson’s essays is the memory of childhood. From Child’s Play to The Lantern-Bearers we are confronted by a mass of material regarding one childhood, by which is supported a series of generalisations about all children and their early years. So we proceed to youth, to the story of A College Magazine; and so to Ordered South. Then we return again to An Old Scotch Gardener and The Manse, where again that single childhood, so well-stored with memories, provides the picture. Now it is one thing for Stevenson to re-vivify his own childhood, for that is a very legitimate satisfaction which nobody would deny him; but it is another thing for Stevenson, from that single experience and with no other apparent observation or inquiry, to generalise about all children. While he tells us what he did, in what books and adventures and happenings he found his delight, we may read with amusement. When, upon the other hand, he says, “children are thus or thus,” it is open to any candid reader to disagree with Stevenson. Whether it is that he has set the example, or whether it is that he merely exemplifies the practice, I cannot say; but Stevenson is one of those very numerous people who talk wisely and shrewdly about children in the bulk without seeming to know anything about them. These wiseacres alternately under-rate and make too ingenious the intelligence and the calculations of childhood, so that children in their hands seem to become either sentimental barbarians or callous schemers, but are never, in the main, children at all. Stevenson has a few excellent words upon children: he admirably says, “It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text”: but I am sorry to say that, upon the whole, I can find little else that is of value in his general observations.
It is open to anybody to reconstruct a single real childhood from Stevenson’s essays, and no doubt that is a matter of considerable interest, as anything which enables us to understand a man is of value. Curiously enough, however, Stevenson’s essays upon the habits and notions of children seem to suggest a great deal too much thought about play, and too little actual play. They seem to show him, as a little boy, so precocious and lacking in heart, that he is watching himself play rather than playing. It is not the preliminary planning of play that delights children, not the academic invention of games and deceits; it is the immediate and enjoyable act of play. Our author shows us a rather elderly child who, in deceiving himself, has savoured not so much the game as the supreme cleverness of his own self-deception. That, to any person who truly remembers the state of childhood, may be accepted as a perfectly legitimate recollection; and it is so far coherent. That his own habit should be, in these essays, extended to all other children whatsoever—in fact, to “children”—is to make all children delicate little Scots boys, greatly loved, very self-conscious, and, in the long run, rather tiresome, as lonely, delicate little boys incline to become towards the end of the day. Unfortunately the readers of Stevenson’s essays about little boys have mostly been little girls; and they are not themselves children, but grown-up people who are looking back at their own childhood through the falsifying medium of culture and indulgent, dishonest memory. Culture, in dwelling upon interpretations and upon purposes, and in seeing childhood always through the refraction of consequence, destroys interest in play itself; and if play is once called in question it very quickly becomes tedious rigmarole.
Stevenson’s essays must thus be divided into two parts, the first descriptive, the second generalised. The first division, sometimes delightful, is also sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes is exaggerative of the originality of certain examples of play. The second is about as questionable as any writing on children has ever been, because it is based too strictly upon expanded recollections of a single abnormal model. You do not, by such means, obtain good generalisations.