The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 01

by Robert Louis Stevenson

We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish, his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage. He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to use an obsolete piece of slang, is vécu. There were other projects, many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends, no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal Come back! come back!

Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's. Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.

His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work; so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he was in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy; he is approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and disaster; his characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are entirely human, with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate lives in our memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered consciousness—then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me, some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of Scott and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or whether he had merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who outlived themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the fullness of his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and he was mourned like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who had known him, and by many thousands who had never seen his face. There was mourning at home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope that the news was untrue), in England, in Europe, in America, in Australia and the Isles. He who had been such "a friendly writer," who had created for us so many friends in his characters, had made more friends for himself, friends more and more various in age, race, tastes, character, and temper, than any British writer, perhaps, since Dickens. He was taken from us untimely; broken was our strong hope in the future gifts of his genius, and there was a pain that does not attend the peaceful passing, in the fullness of years and wisdom and honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.

Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his "class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most recent publications of its own day. But les délicats will look back on Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking, remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal—time cannot stale Beowulf, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, la mort n'y mord. But it is as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is, I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no competitor.

"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so to speak, as Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith; and their field, the great living world of their time, is what the general reader wants the novelist to deal with as he best may.

Shakespeare, to be sure, wrote no drama on Elizabethan times in England; we must go to Heywood and Ben Jonson for the drama of his contemporary world. Many circumstances caused Stevenson, when at his best, to be a historical novelist, and he is, since Scott and Thackeray, the best historical novelist whom we have.

Add to all this his notable eminence in tales of shorter scope; in essays, whether on life or on literature, so various and original, so graceful and so strong; add the fantasies of his fables, and remember that almost all he did is good—and we must, I think, give to Stevenson a very high place in the literature of his century.

Of his verse I have hitherto said nothing, and I do not think that if he had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished. His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a genre of his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I would rather have received from him in prose than in his ballad measure. Possibly I am prejudiced a little by his willfulness in giving to a Cameron the part of the generous hero; true to his word, in spite of the desire to avenge a brother, and of the thrice-repeated monition of the dead. It is not that I grudge any glory to the children of Lochiel, a clan, in General Wolfe's opinion, the bravest where all were brave, a clan of constant and boundless loyalty. But in Stevenson's own note to his poem, the Cameron "swears by his sword and Ben Cruachan," and "Cruachan" is a slogan of the Campbells. The hero, as a matter of fact, was a Campbell of Inverawe. "Between the name of Cameron and that of Campbell the Muse will never hesitate," says Stevenson. One name means "Wry mouth," the other "Crooked nose"; so far, the Muse has a poor choice! But the tale is a tale of the Campbells, of Clan Diarmaid, and the Muse must adhere to the historic truth.

This essay must not close on a difference of opinion concerning historical events—a jarring note.

There are points enough in Stevenson's character and opinions which I have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty. This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."