Companionable Books

by Henry Van Dyke

That he was versatile, turned from one subject to another, tried many forms of his art, and succeeded in some better than in others, he would have admitted boldly—even before those critics who speak slightingly of versatility as if it marked some inferiority in a writer, whereas they dislike it chiefly because it gives them extra trouble in putting him into his precise pigeonhole of classification. Stevenson would have referred these gentlemen to his masters Scott and Thackeray for a justification. His versatility was not that of a weathercock whirled about by every wind of literary fashion, but that of a well-mounted gun which can be turned towards any mark. He did not think that because he had struck a rich vein of prose story-telling he must follow that lead until he had worked it or himself out. He was a prospector as well as a miner. He wished to roam around, to explore things, books, and men, to see life vividly as it is, and then to write what he thought of it in any form that seemed to him fit,—essay, or story, or verse. And this he did, thank God, without misgiving, and on the whole greatly to our benefit and enjoyment.

I am writing now of the things which make his books companionable. That is why I have begun with a thumb-nail sketch of the man in the velvet jacket who lives in them and in his four volumes of letters,—the best English letters, it seems to me, since Lamb and Thackeray. That also is why I have not cared to interrupt this simple essay by telling which of his works strike me as comparative failures, and giving more or less convincing reasons why certain volumes in my “collective edition” are less worn than others.

’Tis of these others that I wish to speak,—the volumes whose bindings are like a comfortable suit of old clothes and on whose pages there are pencil-marks like lovers’ initials cut upon the bark of friendly trees. What charm keeps them alive and fresh, in an age when most books five years old are considered out of date and everything from the unspacious times of Queen Victoria is cordially damned? What manner of virility is in them to evoke, and to survive, such a flood of “Stevensoniana”? What qualities make them still welcome to so wide a range of readers, young and old, simple and learned,—yes, even among that fair and capricious sex whose claim to be courted his earlier writings seem so lightly (or prudently) to neglect?

I

Over and above the attraction of his pervading personality, I think the most obvious charm of Stevenson’s books lies in the clear, vivid, accurate and strong English in which they are written. Reading them is like watching a good golfer drive or putt the ball with clean strokes in which energy is never wanting and never wasted. He does not foozle, or lose his temper in a hazard, or brandish his brassy like a war-club. There is a grace of freedom in his play which comes from practice and self-control.

Stevenson describes (as far as such a thing is possible) the way in which he got his style. “All through my boyhood and youth,” says he, “I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler, and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.” He traces with gusto, and doubtless with as much accuracy as can be expected in a map drawn from memory, the trails of early admiration which he followed towards this goal. His list of “authors whom I have imitated” is most entertaining: Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, Obermann. In another essay, on “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” he names The Bible, Hamlet, As You Like It, King Lear, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Leaves of Grass, Herbert Spencer’s books, Lewes’s Life of Goethe, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the poems of Wordsworth, George Meredith’s The Egoist, the essays of Thoreau and Hazlitt, Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan,—a strange catalogue, but not incoherent if you remember that he is speaking now more of their effect upon his way of thinking than of their guidance in his manner of writing,—though in this also I reckon he learned something from them, especially from the English Bible.

Besides the books which he read, he carried about with him little blank-books in which he jotted down the noteworthy in what he saw, heard, or imagined. He learned also from penless authors, composers without a manuscript, masters of the viva-voce style, like Robert, the Scotch gardener, and John Todd, the shepherd. When he saw a beggar on horseback, he cared not where the horse came from, he watched the rascal ride. If an expression struck him “for some conspicuous force, some happy distinction,” he promptly annexed it;—because he understood it, it was his.

In two separate essays, each of which he calls “A Gossip,” he pays tribute to “the bracing influence of old Dumas,” and to the sweeping power and broad charm of Walter Scott, “a great romantic—an idle child,” the type of easy writers. But Stevenson is of a totally different type, though of a kindred spirit. He is the best example in modern English of a careful writer. He modelled and remodelled, touched and retouched his work, toiled tremendously. The chapter on Honolulu in The Wrecker, was rewritten ten times. His essays for Scribner’s Magazine passed through half a dozen revisions.

His end in view was to bring his language closer to life, not to use the common language of life. That, he maintained, was too diffuse, too indiscriminate. He wished to condense, to distil, to bring out the real vitality of language. He was like Sentimental Tommy in Barrie’s book, willing to cogitate three hours to find the solitary word which would make the thing he had in mind stand out distinct and unmistakable. What matter if his delay to finish his paper lost him the prize in the competition? Tommy’s prize was the word; when he had that his work was crowned.