Let us imagine that directness and unconsciousness are the great qualities of style, and that Stevenson believes this. The greatest directness and unconsciousness of which Stevenson himself was capable are to be found in some of his early writings. Across the Plains, for instance, represents his most straightforward and natural style. But it happens that certain great writers who lived some time ago, and were famous examples of "directness," have expressed themselves in the speech of their own period. Stevenson rejects his own style as not good enough for him, not direct enough, not unconscious enough; he will have theirs. And so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, and brings home an elaborate archaism.
Although we think of Stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels and miscellaneous reminiscences.
It was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious artist, and this is true to a great extent. On the day of his death he was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel. But it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of English can pass through. There was one year in which he earned four thousand pounds. His immeasurable generosity kept him forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to the weight carried by this dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder that some of his work is trivial. The wonder is that he should have produced it at all.
The journalistic work of Stevenson, beginning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters afterwards published as Across the Plains, is valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that in the letters Across the Plains the lights were turned down. But, in truth, the light is daylight. The letters have a freshness that midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of more permanent interest than all the polite essays he ever wrote.
If we compare the earlier with the later work of Stevenson as a magazine writer, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. It is not a single style which grows more intense, but his amazing skill in many which has increased.
The following is a specimen of Stevenson's natural style, and it would be hard to find a better:—
"The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than night-gear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale."
The following is from an essay written by Stevenson while under the influence of the author of Rab and his Friends.
"One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. In his youth he was a most beautiful person, most serene and genial by disposition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming.... From this disaster like a spent swimmer he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing never more to rise. But in his face there was the light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation. Of his wounded pride we knew only by his silence."
The following is in the sprightly style of the eighteenth century:—