As for Dr. Jekyll, that gruesome work—literally the product of a nightmare—had been quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read by everybody,—it had taken the world by storm. Yet Stevenson's head was not turned by his tardily-won success: with his customary sang froid, he took things as they came, failures and triumphs, and met each alike with smiling gallantry.
The motives which had led him into authorship—or rather forced him, despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances,—were as curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which still drove him hard and incessantly. To fame he was perhaps not wholly indifferent. No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether. Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and beyond the appreciation of the general public. For money,—though it was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,—for money he did not care, except as a means to an end. "Wealth is only useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly want." Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was true. It was for money only, no doubt, that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of tushery," The Black Arrow, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself ill at ease. But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home."
And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more than justified his choice.
All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit condition. Under any and all circumstances, he continued to write unflinchingly; racked by coughing, reeling with weakness, with his right arm in a sling, and his left hand holding the pen,—sitting up in bed with a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet, as he declared, "I like my life all the same ... I should bear false witness if I did not declare life happy." ... He was, in his own words, "made for a contest, and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle."
"To declare life happy," became, in fact, his literary mission,—the condensed philosophy of his gay, inveterate courage. "I believe that literature should give joy," was his maxim, "one dank, dispirited word is harmful,—a crime of lèse-humanité." This brave and cheerful outlook is evident in all his essays,—it is, so to speak, a glorified and artistic Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready to survive the most malevolent accidents of life, the crowning tragedy of death itself. And so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed himself, still ready, in all but body, for great risks and inspiriting adventures, and—through a mist of pain—leading forlorn hopes with a waving sword of flame. You hear him proclaiming that:
"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?" (Virginibus Puerisque.)
And to him, above all, applied his own triumphant lines, those which he addressed to W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like courageous outlook, who, like himself, "in the fell grip of circumstances, had not winced nor cried aloud:
"... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,
Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein
The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,
These dying, sound the triumph over death.
Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy
Unknown before in dying; for each knows
A hero dies with him—though unfulfilled,
Yet conquering truly—and not dies in vain."
At present he was engaged upon Kidnapped, that admirable piece of fiction which he had begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a pot-boiler." It was a relief, after the concentrated horror of Dr. Jekyll, to escape into the Scottish heather-scent and to feel the salt sea-wind whistling through the cordage of Kidnapped.
Painting by W. Hatherell.