Companionable Books

by Henry Van Dyke

But when Stevenson sets a detail in a story you see at once that it cannot be spared. Will o’ the Mill, throwing back his head and shouting aloud to the stars, seems to see “a momentary shock among them, and a diffusion of frosty light pass from one to another along the sky.” When Markheim has killed the antiquarian and stands in the old curiosity shop, musing on the eternity of a moment’s deed,—“first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice,—one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz,—the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.” Turning over the bit of paper on which “the black spot,” the death-notice of the pirates, has been scrawled with charcoal, Jim Hawkins finds it has been cut from the last page of a Bible, and on the other side he reads part of a verse from the last chapter of the Revelation: Without are dogs and murderers.

There is no “besotting particularity” in such details as these. On the contrary they illustrate the classic conception of a work of art, in which every particular must be vitally connected with the general, and the perfection of the smallest part depends upon its relation to the perfect whole. Now this is precisely the quality, and the charm, of Stevenson’s stories, short or long. He omits the non-essential, but his eye never misses the significant. He does not waste your time and his own in describing the coloured lights in the window of a chemist’s shop where nothing is to happen, or the quaint costume of a disagreeable woman who has no real part in the story. That kind of realism, of local colour, does not interest him. But he is careful to let you know that Alan Breck wore a sword that was much too long for him; that Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, and bore himself “with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness”; that John Silver could use his wooden leg as a terrible weapon; that the kitchen of the cottage on Aros was crammed with rare incongruous treasures from far away; and that on a certain cold sunny morning “the blackbirds sung exceeding sweet and loud about the House of Durisdeer, and there was a noise of the sea in all the chambers.” Why these trivia? Why such an exact touch on these details? Because they count.

Yet Stevenson’s tales and romances do not give—at least to me—the effect of over-elaboration, of strain, of conscious effort; there is nothing affected and therefore nothing tedious in them. They move; they carry you along with them; they are easy to read; one does not wish to lay them down and take a rest. There is artifice in them, of course, but it is a thoroughly natural artifice,—as natural as a clean voice and a clear enunciation are to a well-bred gentleman. He does not think about them; he uses them in his habit as he lives. Tusitala enjoys his work as a teller of tales; he is at home in it. His manner is his own; it suits him; he wears it without fear or misgiving,—the velvet jacket again.

III

Of Stevenson as a moralist I hesitate to write because whatever is said on this point is almost certain to be misunderstood. On one side are the puritans who frown at a preacher in a velvet jacket; on the other side the pagans who scoff at an artist who cares for morals. Yet surely there is a way between the two extremes where an artist-man may follow his conscience with joy to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God. And having caught sight of that path, though he may trace it but dimly and follow it stumbling, surely such a man may say to his fellows, “This is the good way; let us walk in it.” Not one of the great writers who have used the English language, so far as I know, has finished his career without wishing to moralize, to teach something worth learning, to stand in the pulpit of experience and give an honest message to the world. Stevenson was no exception to this rule. He avowed the impulse frankly when he said to William Archer, “I would rise from the dead to preach.”

In his stories we look in vain for “morals” in the narrow sense,—proverbs printed in italics and tagged on to the tale like imitation oranges tied to a Christmas tree. The teaching of his fiction is like that of life, diffused through the course of events and embodied in the development of characters. But as the story unfolds we are never in doubt as to the feelings of the narrator,—his pity for the unfortunate; his scorn for the mean, the selfish, the hypocritical; his admiration for the brave, the kind, the loyal and cheerful servants of duty. Never at his lightest and gayest does he make us think of life as a silly farce; nor at his sternest and saddest does he leave us disheartened, “having no hope and without God in the world.” Behind the play there is a meaning, and beyond the conflict there is a victory, and underneath the uncertainties of doubt there is a foothold for faith.

I like what Stevenson wrote to an old preacher, his father’s friend. “Yes, my father was a ‘distinctly religious man,’ but not a pious.... His sentiments were tragic; he was a tragic thinker. Now granted that life is tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper service of religion to make us accept and serve in that tragedy, as officers in that other and comparable one of war. Service is the word, active service in the military sense; and the religious man—I beg pardon, the pious man—is he who has a military joy in duty,—not he who weeps over the wounded.”

This is the point of view from which Stevenson writes as a novelist; you can feel it even in a romance as romantic as Prince Otto; and in his essays, where he speaks directly and in the first person, this way of taking life as an adventure for the valourous and faithful comes out yet more distinctly. The grace and vigour of his diction, the pointed quality of his style, the wit of his comment on men and books, add to the persuasiveness of his teaching. I can see no reason why morality should be drab and dull. It was not so in Stevenson’s character, nor is it so in his books. That is one reason why they are companionable.

“There is nothing in it [the world],” wrote he to a friend, “but the moral side—but the great battle and the breathing times with their refreshments. I see no more and no less. And if you look again, it is not ugly, and it is filled with promise.”