“It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scape-grace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.”
R. L. S.
Mr. John A. Steuart has written two large volumes to explain our legacy from Robert Louis Stevenson, which was “a delightful contribution to the romantic literature of the world and an example of courage that will continue to inspire men to remote generations.”
A generation has come and gone since Stevenson died. Of the one now on the threshold even those gifted with imagination and those who understand the impulsiveness of their countrymen, will find it difficult to understand the esteem in which he was held in America in the beginning of the present century. To form any conception of the appreciation, praise and adulation that were bestowed on his writings, they will have to turn to contemporary criticism.
The British “discovered” Stevenson after we revealed him, but when it came to approbation they surpassed us. Then there was an earthquake in the literary world. Henley, the intimate of his early maturity and the doughty champion of his genius, who more than any one else made a public for him, published an article in the Pall Mall Magazine which seemed to give the coup de grâce to Stevenson as a great writer. The blow glanced off Stevenson and stunned Henley; the spectators howled and called the latter traitor, and ghoul. When the excitement subsided dispassionate witnesses reflected upon the matter. Some of them were moved to re-read Stevenson. Others to read him for the first time. The result was that devotees of Stevenson grew less numerous. However, when in 1914 a temperate and generous critic, a novelist of established reputation, Frank Swinnerton, published a critical study of Stevenson which was adverse to his candidacy to immortality, it precipitated a shower of abuse, less inundating than that which submerged Henley, but still disagreeable. However, since that time, indiscriminate adulation of Stevenson has given place to critical estimation. The result to-day is that most judges agree with Swinnerton that it is no longer possible for a serious critic to place him among the great writers because in no department of letters—save the boy’s book and the short story—has he written work of first class importance. His latest biographer would seem to agree, though it is difficult to say just what Mr. Steuart believes, for his writing is so overladen with verbiage, so surcharged with platitudes, so interpolated with irrelevancies and so replete with alleged inside information that one can not see the wood for the trees. But he does not agree that Stevenson was not a “great” man for when “he is summed up, when his qualities, mental and moral, have been analysed and tabulated, it will be found that a superb courage crowns all and from that master-quality flows other virtues in which he was conspicuous—chivalry, generosity, love of justice, an eager humanity, a passion for the happiness of the race. It is valour more than aught else that enchants, inspires, and endears him to the people of two hemispheres.” Probably no one will contest Mr. Steuart’s statement, but surely it is an extraordinary reason for a critical biography. No one would think of writing a life of Meredith or of Heine because they displayed courage that excites our envy and elicits our admiration. Was the courage of Heine or of Meredith inferior to that of Stevenson and what was the quality of Stevenson’s that made it so distinguished? Heine had a disease which, at the time, was never known to end in recovery, Stevenson had only a disease (so far as his latest biographer seems to know) that frequently is cured and nearly always tends to quiescence when given half a chance. Why has John Addington Symonds’ courage not been estimated properly as an asset of greatness?
In truth Mr. Steuart takes himself too seriously. He has not advanced Stevenson’s reputation an atom. Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography of Stevenson may be a barley-sugar effigy of him, and it may make him out a seraph in chocolate as Henley claimed, and the portrait may have been touched up to please the family as Mr. Steuart maintains, but taken in connection with Mr. Swinnerton’s book, Miss Masson’s Life, and the publications of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, it is a competent account of his life and accomplishments.
There is a feature of Stevenson’s personality that has never been touched upon, but which, now that Mr. Steuart has woven a crown of oak leaves for him, must be discussed, and that is his infantilism. It was his curse as it was in a large measure his shame. It showed itself in many ways: in his relationship to his mother, to Alison Cunningham, “Cunny, my second mother,” to Lady Colvin and to his wife; in his speech, dress, manner and imitativeness; in his gestures; in his emotional reactions and determinations; and more than anything else in his inability to display common sense and ordinary prudence. He was always under the dominion of women older than himself and he enjoyed it; they all mothered him. He had no more capacity to get along without mothering than a ten-year-old child has. He was as interested in his appearance as Narcissus. “He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidence any time he passed it; he was never so much in earnest, never so well-pleased, never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself,” Henley wrote and all his biographers agree. That this is a childish trait, no one needs to be told. His speech, manner and dress never failed to attract attention and he took great pains that they should not. Yearning for notice and efforts to secure it are equally well-known infantile traits. Many children invent fictitious parents and forebears. Stevenson was one of them. Mr. Steuart has discovered that one Margaret Lizars of French descent was his great-grandmother, and he naïvely remarks that this explains Stevenson’s oddities. His imitativeness is testified to by the way he taught himself to write and this incident is discussed in the book under consideration in a chapter entitled The Sedulous Ape. It would be difficult to say which was the most childish of all Stevenson’s beaux gestes, but I shall say, harmonious with heredity, the one he did not make; this incident suggests another illustrious victim of adult infantilism, Shelley. All admirers of that genius know that he went single-handed and inexperienced to Ireland to redress her wrongs. Stevenson, on hearing that a Kerry farmer had been murdered by “moonlighters” and his wife and children boycotted, proposed to rent the Curtis farm and to proceed there with his family!
His dealings with his father, his meeting and courtship of Mrs. Fanny de Grift Osbourne, his break with Henley, all conform to the teachings of child psychology and are harmonious with child-behaviour, and they are even more suggestive of infantilism than are the playing with tin-soldiers, and the setting up and operating a toy press, which was his diversion at Davos when, in his thirty-first year, he sought health there a second time.
But nothing shows his infirmity so conspicuously as his inability to look after his impaired health. It is one of the most pathetic chapters in all biography, Stevenson’s imbecilic neglect of his health. No sooner was he benefited by a stay at Bournemouth, Hyères, Davos, Adirondacks, South Sea Islands, than he, with what looks like deliberation, went somewhere or did something which any one but a child would know was suicidal. The climate of Hyères suited him; in later years he declared that it was the only time in his life that he was really happy. He was lazy, yet at the same time productive, and he felt well. But he must go home, and the reason for going was that “he was yearning to get back to her who had so often and so effectively comforted him.”