Here is a sirocco in Spain: “It came out of malarious lowlands, and over several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom it blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their legs ached under the burden of their body; and the touch of one hand upon another grew to be odious.”
Now take an illustration from one of his very early essays, Notes on the Movements of Young Children, printed in 1874. Here are two very little girls learning to dance: “In these two, particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken by an excess of energy, as though the pleasure of the music in their light bodies could endure no longer the restraint of the regulated dance.”
These examples are purposely chosen from tranquil pages; there is nothing far-fetched or extraordinary about them; yet I shall be sorry for you, reader, if you do not feel something rare and precious in a style like this, in which the object, however simple, is made alive with a touch, and stands before you as if you saw it for the first time.
II
Tusitala,—“Teller of Tales,”—was the name which the South Sea Islanders gave to Stevenson; and he liked it well. Beginning as an essayist, he turned more and more, as his life went on, to the art of prose fiction as that in which he most desired to excel. It was in this field, indeed, that he made his greatest advance. His later essays do not surpass his earlier ones as much as his later stories excel his first attempts.
Here I conceive my reader objecting: Did not Treasure Island strike twelve early in the day? Is it not the best book of its kind in English?
Yes, my fellow Stevensonian, it is all that you say, and more,—of its kind it has no superior, so far as I know, in any language. But the man who wrote it wrote also books of a better kind,—deeper, broader, more significant, and in writing these he showed, in spite of some relapses, a steadily growing power which promised to place him in the very highest rank of English novelists.
The Master of Ballantrae, maugre its defects of construction, has the inevitable atmosphere of fate, and the unforgettable figures of the two brothers, born rivals. The second part of David Balfour is not only a better romance, but also a better piece of character drawing, than the first part. St. Ives, which was left unfinished, may have been little more than a regular “sword-and-cloak” story, more choicely written, perhaps, than is usual among the followers of “old Dumas.” But Stevenson’s other unfinished book, Weir of Hermiston, is the torso of a mighty and memorable work of art. It has the lines and the texture of something great.
Why, then, was it not finished? Ask Death.
Lorna Doone was written at forty-four years: The Scarlet Letter at forty-six: The Egoist at fifty-one: Tess of the D’Urbervilles at fifty-one. Stevenson died at forty-four. But considerations of what he might have done, (and disputes about the insoluble question,) should not hinder us from appraising his actual work as a teller of tales which do not lose their interest nor their charm.