In his Travels with a Donkey the author had no companionship but such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. ‘My lady-friend’ he calls her. Modestine was her name; ‘she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.’ She gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. ‘What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.’ He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her sex. ‘The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty.’
From time to time Modestine’s load would topple off. The villagers were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. ‘Judge if I was hot!’ says Stevenson. ‘I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jack-ass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days before this trouble came upon me.’
He had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep’s wool within, and in this portable house he passed his nights afield. Not always by choice, as witness his chapter entitled ‘A Camp in the Dark.’ There are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to perfection,—if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. I don’t know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in which Stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking next morning to see the ‘world flooded with a blue light, the mother of dawn.’ He had been in search of an adventure all his life, ‘a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,’ and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that morning found him, an inland castaway, ‘as strange to his surroundings as the first man upon the earth.’
Passages like these indicate Stevenson’s quality. He was no carpet-knight; he had the true adventurer’s blood in his veins. He and Drake and the Belgian omnibus-driver should have gone to the Indies together. Better still, the omnibus driver should have gone with Drake, and Stevenson should have gone with Amyas Leigh. They say that Stevenson traveled in search of health. Without doubt; but think how he would have traveled if he had had good health. And one has strange mental experiences alone with the stars. That came of sleeping in the fields ‘where God keeps an open house.’ ‘I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists.’
Much as he gloried in his solitude he ‘became aware of a strange lack;’ for he was human. And he gave it as his opinion that ‘to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.’ It may be so. Such a woman would need to be of heroic physical mould, and there is danger that she would turn out of masculine mould as well. Isopel Berners was of such sort. Isopel could handle her clenched fists like a prizefighter. She was magnificent in the forest, and never so perfectly in place as when she backed up George Borrow in his fight with the Flaming Tinman. Having been in the habit of taking her own part, she was able to give pertinent advice at a critical moment. ‘It’s of no use flipping at the Flaming Tinman with your left hand,’ she said, ‘why don’t you use your right?’ Isopel called Borrow’s right arm ‘Long Melford.’ And when the Flaming Tinman got his knock-down blow from Borrow’s right, Isopel exclaimed, ‘Hurrah for Long Melford; there is nothing like Long Melford for shortness all the world over!’
But what an embarrassing personage Miss Berners would have been transferred from the dingle to the drawing-room; nay, how impossible it is to think of that athletic young goddess as Miss Berners! The distinctions and titles of conventional society refuse to cling even to her name. I wonder how Stevenson would have liked Isopel Berners.
And now his philosophy. Yet somehow ‘philosophy’ seems a big word for so unpretentious a theory of life as his. Stevenson didn’t philosophize much; he was content to live and to enjoy. He was deliberate, and in general he would not suffer himself to be driven. He resembled an admirable lady of my acquaintance who, when urged to get something done by a given time, usually replied that ‘time was made for slaves.’ Stevenson had the same feeling. He says: ‘Hurry is the resource of the faithless. When a man can trust his own heart and those of his friends to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in the mean while, why, then, there he dies, and the question is solved.’
You think this a poor philosophy? But there must be all kinds of philosophy; the people in the world are not run into one mould like so much candle-grease. And because of this, his doctrine of Inaction and Postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon Stevenson. In their opinion instead of being up and doing he consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. They feel towards him as Hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge would have felt towards him. Hawthorne imagines that ghostly and terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite scorn, ‘A writer of storybooks. What kind of employment is that for an immortal soul?’
To many people nothing is more hateful than this willingness to hold aloof and let things drift. That any human being should acquiesce with the present order of the world appears monstrous to these earnest souls. An Indian critic once called Stevenson ‘a faddling Hedonist.’ Stevenson quotes the phrase with obvious amusement and without attempting to gainsay its accuracy.
But if he allowed the world to take its course he expected the same privilege. He wished neither to interfere nor to be interfered with. And he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. He says: ‘To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.’ Independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one’s own good estate. He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, ‘so long as he boasts of what he really has.’ If people but knew this they would boast ‘more freely and with a better grace.’