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Other documents randomly have
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 II
JUVENILIA
I
Before we come to the main divisions of Stevenson’s work it may be
as well to consider briefly those few early works which, to the
majority of readers, were first made known by their inclusion in the
Edinburgh Edition. It is unfortunately impossible to recover the
original essay upon Moses, or the earliest romances; so that we are
presented first with The Pentland Rising, published as a pamphlet
when Stevenson was sixteen. This is conscientious and fully-
documented work, written too close to authorities to have much
flexibility or personal interest; but it is not strikingly immature.
Daniel Defoe, Burnet, Fuller’s “History of the Holy Warre,” and a
surprising number of other writers upon the period are successively
quoted with good effect; and it is amusing to note the references to
“A Cloud of Witnesses,” which appears to have been a favourite with
Alison Cunningham. This pamphlet is decidedly the outcome of
Alison Cunningham’s teaching, full as it is of the authentic manner of
the Covenanters, which Stevenson was presently to imitate to the
admiration of all the world.
Many readers of Stevenson must have regarded with eyes of marvel
the two serious papers, the gravity of which is perfect, dealing with
the Thermal Influence of Forests, and with a new form of
Intermittent Light. I have no ability to determine the scientific value
of these papers; and as literary works they have less interest than
most of the other instances of Juvenilia. They are illustrated with
diagrams, and they possess coherence and lucidity. In any work
these two qualities are important, and we shall find that clearness is
a quality which Stevenson never lost. He always succeeded in being
clear, in escaping the obscure sayings of the philosopher or the
enthusiast. That is to say, he was a writer. He was a writer in those
two scientific papers, no less than in Virginibus Puerisque or Prince
Otto. When obscurity is so easy, clearness is a distinguished virtue;
and if Stevenson sometimes errs to the extent of robbing his work of
thickets and dim frightening darknesses, that is also because he was
a writer, and because he preferred to be a writer.
There follow a number of shorter pieces, some of them the fruit of
his University days of practising; some later, so that they include the
papers on Roads and Forest Notes which are mentioned in the next
chapter. These sometimes show obvious immaturity, but they also
show more than anything else could do the real doggedness with
which Stevenson pursued his aim of learning to write. They show
him, at least, forming his sentences with careful attention to rhythm
and to sound—not yet elaborate, not yet so “kneaded” as his
manner was in a little while to be. It is here sometimes thin, as is
the subject-matter. In one sketch, The Wreath of Immortelles, we
may catch a glimpse of the method of opening an essay which
Stevenson developed later; but, on the other hand, in the Forest
Notes (possibly more mature work) there is really excellent
treatment of good and interesting matter. Three “criticisms” have
point. One, of Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Slang,” is fairly conventional;
the second, on Salvini’s Macbeth, was the one condemned by
Fleeming Jenkin because it showed Stevenson thinking more about
himself than about Salvini; the third is a very delightful little paper
on Bagster’s illustrated edition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
All these short pieces are of interest because they show the growth
of Stevenson as a writer. They are the more interesting because at
the same time they illustrate the way in which Stevenson gradually
made his work take on the impress of his personality. All young work
lacks character, as young hand-writing does, and as young style
does; and all young essay-work in particular appears sometimes
rather tepid and even silly when the author tries to interest us in his
“ego.” Stevenson from the first saw himself as the central object in
his essay: it is amusing to watch how soon he begins to make
himself count as an effective central object. At first the personality is
thin: it has not carried. Later it develops with the development of
style: the use of words becomes firmer, and with that firmness
comes greater confidence, greater ease, in the projection of the
author’s self. It is perhaps not until we reach the familiar essays that
we find Stevenson fully master of himself, for literary purposes; but
the growth provides matter for rather ingenious study.

II
In that volume of the collected editions which contains these early
essays it is customary to include the works issued by the Davos
Press; and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne (at the age of twelve the proprietor of
the Davos Press) has also discovered a wholly amusing account of
an important military campaign conducted in an attic at Davos by
himself and Stevenson as opposed commanders of tin soldiers. The
game, which had of course inexhaustible interest, has also, as
described by Mr. Osbourne, its intricacies for the lay mind; but
Stevenson’s account of this particular campaign, written by means of
official reports, rumours, newspapers yellow and otherwise, offers no
difficulty. It is an excellent piece of pretence. The Davos Press, which
provided the world with unique works by Stevenson and by Mr.
Osbourne, illustrated with original woodcuts, belongs, as does the
war-game, to the time spent in the châlet at Davos shortly after
Stevenson’s marriage. It shows how easily he could enjoy elaborate
games (as most men do enjoy them, if they are not deterred by self-
importance or preoccupation with matters more strictly commercial);
and the relationship with Mr. Osbourne seems to have been as frank
and lively as anybody could desire.
I have mentioned these matters out of their due place because they
seem to me to have a value as contributing to certain suggestions
which I shall make later. By his marriage, Stevenson gained not only
a very devoted wife but a very intimate boy-friend, the kind of friend
he very likely had long wanted. There was almost twenty years’
difference between them; but that, I think, made the friendship
more suited to Stevenson’s nature. By means of this difference he
could indulge in that very conscious make-belief for which his nature
craved—a detached make-belief, which enabled him to enjoy the
play both in fact and as a spectator, to make up for Mr. Osbourne’s
admitted superiority in marksmanship by the subtilty of his own
military devices; finally, to enjoy the quite personal pleasure of
placing upon record, with plans and military terms, in the best
journalistic style, accounts of his military achievements. The art of
gloating innocently over his own power to gloat; the power to
delight consciously in his own delight at being able to play—these, I
believe, are naturally Scots pleasures, and profoundly Stevensonian
pleasures. I hope that no reader will deny Stevenson the right to
such enjoyments, for Stevenson’s not very complex nature is really
bound up in them. If we take from him the satisfaction of seeing
himself in every conceivable posture, we take from him a vanity
which permeates his whole life-work, and which, properly regarded,
is harmless to offend our taste.
 III
TRAVEL BOOKS
I
“One of the pleasantest things in the world,” says Hazlitt, “is going on
a journey; but I like to go alone.” In his earliest days of manhood,
Stevenson also formed the habit of going alone; and in his own
essay upon Walking Tours he very circumstantially endorses Hazlitt’s
view, for reasons into which we need not enter here. We may find
an indication of his habit even so early as the fragment, included in
Essays of Travel, which describes a journey from Cockermouth to
Keswick. Other papers, of various dates, show that, either from
choice or from necessity, he often did tramp solitary; but it is worth
noting that only in the walk through the Cevennes and in his journey
to America did Stevenson ever travel alone for any length of time.
His other, and on the whole more important, travel-books are the
descriptions of journeys taken in company.
Furthermore, in the early essay which we have just noted he rather
ostentatiously proclaims his practice in writing accounts of his tours.
He says, “I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the moment,
or that has been before me only a little while before; I must allow
my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till
nothing be except the pure gold.” Apart from the surprising alchemy
of the declaration, this disability is wholly to his credit; but
Stevenson found, of course, that when he planned to record a
journey of some duration, in a form more or less chronological, he
must preserve a sense of fabric in his book by keeping a daily diary
of experiences. That is why, in his earliest book of travel, An Inland
Voyage, he mentions “writing-up” his diary at the end of each day;
and it explains also the frequent references in later books to such an
evening occupation. As Stevenson admitted in Cockermouth and
Keswick, the process of incubation might in the long run be
unreasonably prolonged; and perhaps it is true that experience
taught him very early that in the professional writer thrift is a virtue.
It was, if so, a lesson that he never forgot.
Although the fragment on Keswick to which I have referred is clearly
a juvenile piece of work, it is highly entertaining as a small piece of
autobiography. On its own account the essay is rather pragmatical
and anecdotal, after the manner of an afternoon sermon, and it
gives as yet small evidence that the writer has any highly developed
sense of accurate and significant observation. But to the reader who
cares to go below its superficial interest, there is other material. Not
without value are the boyish allusions to his pipe, to his whisky-and-
soda, and to his importance in the smoking-room of the hotel. These
are all typical, and interesting. What, however, is clear on the
question of mere literary talent, is Stevenson’s ability to spin
something out of himself. He must be talking; and, if he has nothing
of much moment to say, there must follow some apt reflection, or a
“tale of an old Scots minister.”
Would that the ability, a very dangerous ability, had been shed as
soon as were some of Stevenson’s juvenile theories about the art of
writing! This particular ability remains very noticeably in his first full-
size travel-book, An Inland Voyage, along with another trait—his
abnormal consciousness of his own appearance in the eyes of other
people. Stevenson was always interested in that aspect of his
personality: he could not forget for a moment that his costume, his
face, his manner, all carried some impression to the beholder. It was
a part of his nature that he should see children upon the river bank,
not merely as children, but as an audience, a congregation of
speculating souls busy wondering about him, likening him among
themselves to some particular figure, interested in him. Nobody, I
think, had ever failed to be interested in him.

II
An Inland Voyage, on the whole, is a poor book. It records a
canoeing expedition made with a friend; and it is full of Puritanical
obtuseness and a strained vanity which interferes with the main
narrative. Setting out from Antwerp, the two friends paddled, often
in the rain, and sometimes—as in the case of Stevenson’s arrest, and
his dangerous accident with the fallen tree across the swollen Oise—
in dire straits. They travelled on the Sambre and down the Oise by
Origny and Moy, Noyon, Compiègne, and Précy; but the weather was
bad, and there were trying difficulties about lodgings; and
Stevenson’s account reads as though he had been chilled through
and through, and as though he needed nothing so much as his
home. Almost invariably, in this book, his little spurts of epigram and
apophthegm suggest low spirits as well as a sort of cautious
experimentalism; and the book, which apparently was very
handsomely received by the Press on its publication, is eked out with
matter which, beneath the nervous delicacy of Stevenson’s practising
style, is raw and sometimes banale. In no other travel-book is there
shown such obvious effort. What emerges from An Inland Voyage is
the charmingly natural behaviour on several occasions of
Stevenson’s companion, a proof even thus early of the author’s
ability to be aware of these traits in his friends which, on the printed
page, convey to the reader an impression of the person so lightly
sketched. This, however, is an exiguous interest in a book supposed
to be a picturesque work of travel and topography.
Very much superior is the Sternian Travels with a Donkey. Here there
is much greater lightness of touch, and a really admirable sense of
observation is revealed. Some of the descriptions of things seen are
written with indescribable delicacy, as are the character sketches.
Just so are some of the descriptions of places contained in the series
of letters to Mrs. Sitwell. In Travels with a Donkey for the first time
the reader actually makes a third with Stevenson and the endearing
Modestine upon their journey, travelling with them and sharing the
sensations of the human pedestrian. If we resent certain intolerable
affectations—such as the pretentious and penurious fancy of placing
money by the roadside in payment for lodgings in the open air—that
resentment may be partly due to the fact that we are not told the
amount of the payment, as well, of course, as to the fact that we
suspect the author’s motive in detailing his charities. Stevenson
seems, in fact, to be asking for commendation of a fantastic
generosity without giving us sufficient evidence to evoke any feeling
of conviction. We see him here, not so much obeying a happy
impulse as observing himself in the light of his own esteem; and that
is hardly a pleasant sight to the onlooker. To counterbalance such
lapses—which, very likely, are regarded by lovers of Stevenson as no
lapses at all, but as delightful exhalations of personality, as glimpses
of his character which they are enabled to enjoy only through this
very innocent vanity which we have noted,—there are a thousand
graceful touches, fit to remind us that Travels with a Donkey is a
much better book than An Inland Voyage, and, in fact, the best of
his travel-books until we reach that delightfully modest one which is
too little known—The Silverado Squatters. The Donkey is the first in
which the charming side of his personality really “gets going,” and it
will always remain a pretty and effective sketch of a journey taken in
wayward weather, with good spirits, a shrewd and observant eye,
and, what is also to the point, a commendable courage.
The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains, two long records
which, although published separately, are practically a single work,
for all their difference from that book are a drop to the executive
level of An Inland Voyage. Here again Stevenson was affected by the
discomforts of his lonely travelling, and no doubt by his poor health.
Both records are for the most part superficial and crabbed. The
descriptions of travelling-companions are conscientious, but they
have, as Stevenson’s earliest admirers were the first to remark, no
imagination or genuine moulding: the accounts are a good deal like
uninspired letters home. If one thinks what Stevenson, in happy
circumstances, might have made of the tale of his journey, one
realises how lifeless are the descriptions given. They have no sense
of actual contact; they have lost grip in losing charm, and might
have been written by somebody with far less of an eye to the
significance of the passing scene. Stevenson claimed to have been
aware of the prosaic character of the records, and, indeed, in one
letter to Sir Sidney Colvin he said, “It bored me hellishly to write;
well, it’s going to bore others to read; that’s only fair.” So perhaps it
is not worth while to analyse such confessedly inferior works. Only
once in The Amateur Emigrant—in the anecdote of two men who
lodged perilously in New York—does Stevenson’s boyish love of the
picturesquely terrible bring a note of tense reality to the writing. In
its own way the account of the two men looking from their bedroom,
through the frame of a seeming picture, into another room where
three men are crouching in darkness, is a little masterpiece of horror.
It belongs to his romances rather than to his travel-books; but it is
the passage that stands out most distinctly from the two which are
under notice at the moment. No other scene in either The Amateur
Emigrant or Across the Plains compares with it for interest or value.

III
Following upon his tedious journey to America, and the hardships
and illness which, before his marriage, brought him nearly to his
grave, Stevenson went to the mountains for health. The Silverado
Squatters was written-up later, and, from Stevenson’s letters of that
time, it seems to have been condemned as uncharacteristic. But it
may have been that, as I think was the case, Stevenson’s voyage to
America and his marriage considerably affected his outlook. For one
thing he really had come into contact with hard inconvenience and
loneliness, with a self-inflicted exile from his family (and a hostility to
his marriage on their part which existed more in his imagination than
in fact), which matured him. Those of us who never take these
voyages out into the unknown, who sit tight and think comfortably
of such things as emigrant trains, cannot realise with what sudden
effect the stubborn impact of realities can work upon those who
actually venture forth. One small instance will show something of the
experience Stevenson gained. On the voyage he met emigrants who
were leaving Scotland because there was nothing else for them to
do, because to stay meant “to starve.” Coming to these men, and
hearing from them something of the lives they had left, he touched
a new aspect of life which, in spite of his runnings to-and-fro in
Edinburgh and elsewhere, he had never appreciated. He writes, in
The Amateur Emigrant:
I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of
houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors
broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men
loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests
beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and
starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
And when, in Across the Plains, he tells how his emigrant train,
going in one direction, crowded, was met by another, also crowded,
returning, must that not have reacted upon his mind? My own
impression, which of course is based upon nothing more than the
apparent change in Stevenson’s manner of writing, is that The
Silverado Squatters, as we now have it, very much altered from the
condemned first drafts, represents the emergence of a new
Stevenson, who, in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains,
had been overweighted by the material realities he had in bad health
encountered, and who, in consequence, had failed to make those
accounts vivid. The Silverado Squatters has more substance than its
predecessors. It is much more free, it is almost entirely free, from
affectation. The style is less full of trope, and may be considered
therefore, by some readers, as the less individual. But the matter
and manner are more strictly united than hitherto. We are not
interrupted by such trivial explosions of sententiousness as “We
must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of Fate,” and in the
degree in which the matter entirely “fills-out” the manner the book is
so far remarkable. It is not generally regarded as convenient to say
that Stevenson’s matter was often thin, and his style a mere ruffle
and scent to draw off the more frigid kind of reader; yet when we
come to work so able and so unpretentious as The Silverado
Squatters, in which Stevenson is honestly trying to show what he
saw and knew (instead of trying to show the effect of his address
upon a strange community) we do seem to feel that what has gone
before has been less immediately the natural work of the writer, and
more the fancy sketch of the writer’s own sense of his picturesque
figure. In one aspect, in its lack of vivacity, The Silverado Squatters
may compare to disadvantage with earlier work; it may seem, and
indeed is ordinarily condemned as, less pungent, and less elastic;
but that could only be to those who miss the fact that Stevenson’s
pungency and elasticity were the consequence of the unwearying
revision to which most of his work was subjected. He was never a
quick worker, never one of those careless writers whose ear
approves while the pen is in motion. He had a fine ear, but not
essentially a quick ear; he was not what is sometimes called a
“natural” writer, but with devoted labour went again and again
through what he had written, revising it until his fastidiousness was
relieved. This way of working, while it served to allay what he called
the “heat of composition”—a heat which some readers find very
grateful in other, less painstaking writers—has patent virtues. It is
likely to make work more polished and more finely balanced.
Nevertheless, it probably has the effect of reducing the vigour and
resilience of a style. However that may be, it is a method making
great demands upon a writer’s deep conscientiousness; and it is not
the purpose of this book to extol the rapid method or the quick ear.
All we may do at this moment is to suggest that Stevenson, having
done well in practising year after year the craft of the writer, had
now turned very deliberately and honourably in the first year of his
marriage to that other side of the writer’s craft, the sober
description, free from the amateur’s experimentalism, of the real
world as he saw it. Even so, it is a world made smooth by his
temperament—his love of smoothness, which one may see
exemplified in his declared love of simple landscape—and by his
matured dexterity in manipulating sentences. It is a world seen, not
with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in a fair haven,
whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture to him.
Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his
descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa,
have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest
intuitions of beauty. Not his the ecstatic oneness with the lovely
things of Nature which makes Keats the purest exponent of what
Keats himself called “that delicate snail’s-horn perception of beauty”:
Stevenson’s ecstasy had to be stirred by excitement; he had not the
poet’s open-handed out-running to the emotion of place. But his
sense of the remoteness of the squatters of Silverado, his early-
morning peeps into the wonders of colour and aspect in a strange
corner of the earth, his shrewd understanding of sullen human
nature, are made clear to the reader by plain expression. The book
is self-conscious in a good sense; not, as has often hitherto been the
case, in a bad one.

IV
If we notice such a change of attitude in The Silverado Squatters,
we shall find it even more fully revealed in the volume of his letters
for an American magazine which appeared under the title of In the
South Seas. Some of the letters were withheld, as too tedious; even
now, the book is frankly called dull by many staunch admirers of
Stevenson. To others, however, it must surely appear otherwise. It
is, in effect, a sort of glorified log; but a log of real enterprise and
adventure in a marvellous part of the world. Stevenson heroically
tried to penetrate to the heart of the South Seas. He was caught up
by the islands and their people, and was bent upon making them
known to those who lived afar. In the political intrigues so honestly
described in his letters, Stevenson may, indeed, appear to throw
away the importance of his own genius; but the sacrifice is made in
obedience to his deepest convictions of right. He still sees himself as
the point of focus; but we do not resent that when we find ourselves
so clearly in his train. Even while his friends were urging him to give
up the Samoan politics which threatened to become the King
Charles’s head of his correspondence, he continued to live amid the
difficulties from which he felt that he could not in honour withdraw.
And although the Samoan period had its fluctuations of talent, it
was, upon the whole, the time when his boyish love of game took on
a keener zest of earnest and made him indeed a man. The period
marks a further decline in the more strictly romantic nature of his
work, as we may later on be able to discuss in comparing St. Ives
with earlier and more triumphant experiments in that field; but it
opens the path for the sober realism (if that word may here be used
without sinister connotation) of the torso known as Weir of
Hermiston, a fragment in which it is usual to find the greatest
promise of all. This is all of a piece with the increasing purpose of
Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a professional author
forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance may be conjured
for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most persuasive
cajollery. Stevenson was the professional author in his
collaborations, and in such work as St. Ives; but in In the South
Seas as in Weir he is writing truth for the love of truth, than which
there can be no more noble kind of authorship.

V
In San Francisco, as we have seen, Stevenson chartered a schooner-
yacht, and went to the South Seas in pursuit of health. On board
ship he was always happy; and he made more than one cruise, in
different ships, among the Gilbert, Paumotuan, and Marquesan
groups of islands. He also stayed for periods of varying length in the
three groups of islands, became familiar with the manners of the
natives, realised their distinctions, and made many new friends
among them. His mind was entirely occupied with them; he saw
everything he could, and learned everything he could, his shrewd
Scots habit of inquiry filling him with a satisfied sense of labour. A
big book, proving beyond doubt the entire peculiarity of the South
Sea islands and their islanders, was planning in his mind; a book
which would soundly establish his reputation as something other
than a literary man and a teller of tales. In the South Seas, as I have
already mentioned, was found dull by friendly critics; yet it is full of
observation and of feeling. It is the wisest of the travel-books, and
the most genuine, for Stevenson has put picturesqueness behind
him for what it is—the hall-mark of the second-rate writer; and he
has risen to a height of understanding which adds to his stature.
There is, in the portrait of Tembinok’, a simplicity which is
impressive: throughout, there is a simple exposition of a fascinating
subject, a kind of life remote from our experience, a civilisation strict
and dignified, minds and habits interesting in themselves and by
contrast with our own. The book may not be the epitome of the
South Seas for which the chapters were planned as rough notes;
other writers may have known more than Stevenson knew of the
actual life of the islands. It is true that he frequented kings’ palaces,
and that his acquaintance with common native life was very largely a
matter of observation caught up in passing, or by hearsay, or by the
contemplation of public gatherings. That is true. What we, as
readers endeavouring patiently to trace the growth of Stevenson’s
knowledge, must, however, remember above all things, is that the
book is really a finer and a more distinguished work than An Inland
Voyage or Travels with a Donkey. It has not the grimaces of the first,
or the pleasing delicacy of the second. It is a better book than The
Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. It is fuller and richer than
The Silverado Squatters. What, then, do we ask of a book of travel?
Is it that we may see the author goading his donkey, or putting
money by the wayside for his night’s lodging; or is it that we may
see what he has seen? With Stevenson, the trouble is, I suppose,
that, having thought of him always as a dilettante, his admirers
cannot reconcile themselves to his wish to be a real traveller and a
real historian. Perhaps they recognise that he had not the necessary
equipment? Rather, it is very likely that, being largely uncreative
themselves, they had planned for Stevenson a future different from
the one into which gradually he drifted. All creative writers have
such friends. We may say, perhaps, that a man who was not
Stevenson could have written In the South Seas, though I believe
that is not the case. But if we put the books slowly in order we shall
almost certainly find that while Travels with a Donkey is a pretty
favourite, with airs and graces, and a rather imaginary figure
charmingly posed as its chief attraction, In the South Seas is the
work of the same writer, grown less affected, more intent upon
seeing things as they are, and less intent upon being seen in their
midst. There is the problem. If a travel-book is an exploitation of the
traveller’s self, we can be charmed with it: let us not, therefore,
because we find less charm in In the South Seas, find the later book
dull. Stevenson is duller because he is older: the bloom is going: he
is not equal intellectually to the task he has set himself. But there is
a greater sincerity in the later travel-books, an honest looking upon
the world. It is surely better to look straight with clear eyes than to
dress life up in a bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard
mountain. Stevenson’s admirers want the song upon the mountain,
because they want to continue the legend that he never grew up.
They want him to be the little boy with a fine night of stars in his
eyes and a pack upon his back, singing cheerily that it is better to
travel hopefully than to arrive. That is why Stevenson’s best work is,
relatively speaking, neglected in favour of work that tarnishes with
the passing of youth. And it is all because of the insatiable desire of
mediocrity for the picturesque. We must be surprised and startled,
and have our senses titillated by savours and perfumes; we must
have the strange and the new; we must have a fashion to follow and
to forget. Stevenson has been a fashionable traveller, and his sober
maturity is too dull; he has lost his charm. Well, we must make a
new fashion. Interest in a figure must give place to interest in the
work. If the work no longer interests, then our worship of Stevenson
is founded upon a shadow, is founded, let us say, upon the applause
of his friends, who sought in his work the fascination they found in
his person.
 IV
ESSAYS
I
There have been some English essayists whose writing is so packed
with thought that it is almost difficult to follow the thought in its
condensation. Such was Bacon, whose essays were by way of being
“assays,” written so tightly that each little sentence was the
compression of the author’s furthest belief upon that aspect of his
subject, and so that to modern students the reading of Bacon’s
essays resembles the reading of a whole volume printed in Diamond
type. There have been English essayists whose essays are clear-cut
refinements of truth more superficial or more simple. Such was
Addison, who wrote with a deliberate and flowing elegance, and
whose essays Stevenson found himself unable to read. There have
been such essayists as Hazlitt, the shrewd sincerity of whose
perceptions is expressed with so much appropriateness that his
essays are examples of what essays should be. There has never
been in England a critic or an essayist of quite the same calibre as
Hazlitt. It was of Hazlitt that Stevenson wrote, in words so true that
they summarily arrest by their significance the reader who does not
expect to find in Walking Tours so vital an appraisement: “Though
we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.”
And, in succession, for there would be no purpose in continuing the
list for its own sake, there have been essayists who, intentionally
resting their work upon style and upon the charm of personality,
have in a thousand ways diversified their ordinary experience, and
so have been enabled to disclose as many new aspects and delights
to the reader. Such an essayist was Lamb. Hazlitt, I think, was the
last of the great English essayists, because Hazlitt sought truth
continuously and found his incomparable manner in the disinterested
love of precision to truth. But Lamb is the favourite; and Lamb is the
English writer of whom most readers think first when the word
“essay” is mentioned. That is because Lamb brought to its highest
pitch that personal and idiosyncratic sort of excursion among
memories which has created the modern essay, and which has
severed it from the older traditions of both Bacon and Addison. It is
to the school of Lamb, in that one sense, that Stevenson belonged.
He did not “write for antiquity,” as Lamb did; he did not write
deliberately in the antique vein or in what Andrew Lang called
“elderly English”; but he wrote, with conscious and anxious literary
finish, essays which had as their object the conveyance in an alluring
manner of his own predilections. He quite early made his personality
what Henley more exactly supposed that it only afterwards became
—a marketable commodity—as all writers of strong or acquired
personality are bound to do.
Since Stevenson there have been few essayists of classic rank,
largely because the essay has lost ground, and because interest in
“pure” literature has been confined to work of established position
(by which is meant the work of defunct writers). There has been
Arthur Symons, of whose following of Pater as an epicure of
sensation we have heard so much that the original quality of his fine
work—both in criticism and in the essay—has been obscured. There
has been an imitator of Stevenson, an invalid lady using the
pseudonym “Michael Fairless”; and there have been Mr. Max
Beerbohm, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Street, Mr.
A. C. Benson, and Mr. Filson Young. These writers have all been of
the “personal” school, frankly accepting the essay as the most
personal form in literature, and impressing upon their work the
particular personal qualities which they enjoy. Some of them have
been more robust than others, some less distinguished; but all of
them are known to us (in relation to their essays) as writers of
personality rather than as writers of abstract excellence. An essay
upon the art of the essay, tracing its development, examining its
purpose, and distinguishing between its exponents, might be a very
fascinating work. Such an essay is manifestly out of place here; but
it is noteworthy that, apart from the distinguished writers whose
names I have given, nearly all the minor writers (that is, nearly all
those whose names I have not mentioned) who have produced
essays since the death of Stevenson, or who are nowadays
producing genteel essays, have been deeply under his influence. It is
further noteworthy that most of those who have been so powerfully
influenced have been women.

II
From the grimly earnest abstracts of knowledge contributed by
Bacon to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few
fancies, or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily
composed a single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson,
as I have said, belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England
Charles Lamb is most representative, and of whom Montaigne was
most probably his more direct model—the writer who conveyed
information about his personal tastes and friends and ancient
practices in a form made prepossessing by a flavoured style. To
those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added a strong didactic strain,
as much marked in his early essays as in the later ones; and it is this
strain which differentiates Stevenson’s work from that of Lamb and
Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the delicious vintage of a ripe
mind both credulous and sceptical, grown old enough to examine
with great candour and curiousness the details of its own vagaries:
many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays are the work of his
youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of the pseudo-candour of
vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s shrewd naïveté. He
was thirty or thirty-one when the collection entitled Virginibus
Puerisque was published. A year later there followed Familiar Studies
of Men and Books. He was only thirty-seven (Montaigne was thirty-
eight when he “retired” from active life and began to produce his
essays) when his third collection, Memories and Portraits, obviously
more sedate and less open to the charge of literary affectation,
completed the familiar trilogy. Although Across the Plains did not
appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to form that book
had earlier received periodical publication (the dated essays range
from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously
collected in The Art of Writing belong to 1881. So it is not unfair to
say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he
reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age
by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by
which personality is so much matured as to yield readily to
condensation. Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays,
for the judgments of maturity, although we may find in Virginibus
Puerisque a rather middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek
the significance of these essays in the degree in which they reveal
consciously the graces and the faultless negligé of an attractive
temperament. We may look to find at its highest point the illustration
of those principles of style which Stevenson endeavoured to
formulate in one very careful essay upon the subject (to the chagrin,
I seem to remember, at the time of its republication, of so many
critics who misunderstood the aim of the essay). And we shall
assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson possessed of quoting
happily from other writers. Quotation with effect is a matter of great
skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was peculiar rather than
wide, drew from this very fact much of the inimitable effect obtained
by references so apt.

III
One note which we shall find persistently struck and re-struck in
Stevenson’s essays is the memory of childhood. From Child’s Play to
The Lantern-Bearers we are confronted by a mass of material
regarding one childhood, by which is supported a series of
generalisations about all children and their early years. So we
proceed to youth, to the story of A College Magazine; and so to
Ordered South. Then we return again to An Old Scotch Gardener
and The Manse, where again that single childhood, so well-stored
with memories, provides the picture. Now it is one thing for
Stevenson to re-vivify his own childhood, for that is a very legitimate
satisfaction which nobody would deny him; but it is another thing for
Stevenson, from that single experience and with no other apparent
observation or inquiry, to generalise about all children. While he tells
us what he did, in what books and adventures and happenings he
found his delight, we may read with amusement. When, upon the
other hand, he says, “children are thus or thus,” it is open to any
candid reader to disagree with Stevenson. Whether it is that he has
set the example, or whether it is that he merely exemplifies the
practice, I cannot say; but Stevenson is one of those very numerous
people who talk wisely and shrewdly about children in the bulk
without seeming to know anything about them. These wiseacres
alternately under-rate and make too ingenious the intelligence and
the calculations of childhood, so that children in their hands seem to
become either sentimental barbarians or callous schemers, but are
never, in the main, children at all. Stevenson has a few excellent
words upon children: he admirably says, “It is the grown people who
make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve
the text”: but I am sorry to say that, upon the whole, I can find little
else that is of value in his general observations.
It is open to anybody to reconstruct a single real childhood from
Stevenson’s essays, and no doubt that is a matter of considerable
interest, as anything which enables us to understand a man is of
value. Curiously enough, however, Stevenson’s essays upon the
habits and notions of children seem to suggest a great deal too
much thought about play, and too little actual play. They seem to
show him, as a little boy, so precocious and lacking in heart, that he
is watching himself play rather than playing. It is not the preliminary
planning of play that delights children, not the academic invention of
games and deceits; it is the immediate and enjoyable act of play.
Our author shows us a rather elderly child who, in deceiving himself,
has savoured not so much the game as the supreme cleverness of
his own self-deception. That, to any person who truly remembers
the state of childhood, may be accepted as a perfectly legitimate
recollection; and it is so far coherent. That his own habit should be,
in these essays, extended to all other children whatsoever—in fact,
to “children”—is to make all children delicate little Scots boys, greatly
loved, very self-conscious, and, in the long run, rather tiresome, as
lonely, delicate little boys incline to become towards the end of the
day. Unfortunately the readers of Stevenson’s essays about little
boys have mostly been little girls; and they are not themselves
children, but grown-up people who are looking back at their own
childhood through the falsifying medium of culture and indulgent,
dishonest memory. Culture, in dwelling upon interpretations and
upon purposes, and in seeing childhood always through the
refraction of consequence, destroys interest in play itself; and if play
is once called in question it very quickly becomes tedious rigmarole.
Stevenson’s essays must thus be divided into two parts, the first
descriptive, the second generalised. The first division, sometimes
delightful, is also sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes is
exaggerative of the originality of certain examples of play. The
second is about as questionable as any writing on children has ever
been, because it is based too strictly upon expanded recollections of
a single abnormal model. You do not, by such means, obtain good
generalisations.

IV
Something of the same objection might be urged against
Stevenson’s rather unpleasant descriptions of adolescence. These
again are not typical. Stevenson himself was the only youth he ever
knew—he never had the detachment to examine disinterestedly the
qualities of any person but himself—and we might gain from his
descriptions an impression of youth which actually will not bear the
stereoscopic test to which we are bound to submit all
generalisations. To read the essays with the ingenuous mind of
youth is to feel wisdom, grown old and immaculate, passing from
author to reader. It is to marvel at this debonair philosopher, who
finds himself never in a quandary, and who has the strategies of
childhood and of youth balanced in his extended hand. It is to
proceed from childhood to youth, and from youth to the married
state; and our adviser describes to us in turn, with astonishing
confidence, the simplified relations, which otherwise we might have
supposed so intricate, of the lover, the husband, and the wife.
Nothing comes amiss to him: love, jealousy, the blind bow-boy, truth
of intercourse—these and many other aspects of married life are
discoursed upon with grace and the wistful sagaciousness of a
decayed inexperience. But when we consider the various arguments,
and when we bring the essays Virginibus Puerisque back to their
starting-point, we shall find that they rest upon the boyish discovery
that marriages occur between unlikely persons. Stevenson has not
been able to resist the desire to institute an inquiry into the reasons.
He cannot suppose that these persons love one another; and yet
why else should they marry? Well, he is writing an essay, and not a
sociological study, so that—as the result of his inquiry—we must not
expect to receive a very distinct contribution to our knowledge. We
may prepare only to be edified, to be, perhaps, greatly amused by a
young man who may at least shock us, or stir us, if he is unable to
show this fruitful source of comedy in action. We are even, possibly,
alert to render our author the compliment of preliminary enjoyment,
before we have come to his inquiry. What Stevenson has to tell us
about marriage, however, is a commonplace; even if it is a
commonplace dressed and flavoured. It is that “marriage is a field of
battle—not a bed of roses”; and it is that “to marry is to domesticate
the Recording Angel.” “Alas!” as Stevenson says of another matter,
“If that were all!”
I wonder what it is that makes such phrases (for they are no more
than phrases, phrases which are not true to experience, and which
therefore can have no value as propositions or as explanations) give
so much pleasure to such a number of readers. How can we explain
it, unless it be simply by the explanation that Stevenson has been
idolised? This book, Virginibus Puerisque, has been a favourite for
many years, sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense
unoriginal. It is the most quoted; it is the one which most certainly
may be regarded as the typical book of Stevenson’s early period.
Surely it is because a half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a
phrase and remembered only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a
whole truth, upon which the reader must engage his attention? It
must, I mean, be the trope that lures readers of Virginibus Puerisque
into acceptance of thought so threadbare and ill-nourished. Such an
essay as Æs Triplex seems by its air to hold all the wisdom of the
ages, brought steadfastly to the contemplation of the end to which
all must come. If it is read sentimentally, with the mind swooning, it
may give the reader the feeling that he has looked upon the bright
face of danger and seen death as no such bad thing. For a moment,
as it might be by a drug, he has received some stimulation which is
purely temporary. The essay has not changed his thought of death;
it has not transformed his fear of death into an heroic love; it slides
imperceptibly, unheeded, from his memory, and remains dishevelled
forever as “that rather fine thing of Stevenson’s,” for which he never
knows where to look. Only its phrases remain for quotation, for use
in calendars, common thoughts turned into remembrances and
mottoes ready for the rubricator. When an ordinary person says, “It’s
nice to have something to look forward to,” Stevenson is ready with,
“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and the true success is
to labour.” There is all the difference between this and that advice of
Browning’s that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” Stevenson
has not sought to invigorate the toiler, he has not caught up with
optimism the spirit of mankind: what he has done is to make a
phrase for the boudoir. There is no philosophic optimism in
Stevenson’s essays: there is sometimes high spirits, and sometimes
there is a cheerful saying; but at heart the “teaching” of these things
is as prosaic as is the instruction of any lay preacher.
When the more solemn sort of subject, such as death, comes to be
dealt with, we find Stevenson, the actor, falling into the feeling of his
own intonations, gravely reassuring, like a politician explaining a
defeat. When he is describing acts of bravery, as in The English
Admirals, his love of courage rises and his feelings seem to glow; but
the phrases with which he adorns the tale and with which eventually
he points the moral are phrases made to be read, not phrases that
break from his full heart. They are not the phrases made, will he nill
he, by his enthusiasm; they are such phrases as are publicly
conveyed from one king or statesman or commander to another
upon the occasion of some notable event. I do not mean that they
are as baldly expressed, though I think they are often as baldly
conceived. They are very handsomely expressed, too handsomely for
the occasion, if one agrees with Bob Acres that “the sound should be
an echo of the sense.” Although it may be true that, as Stevenson
says, “people nowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their
virtues,” for a self-respecting author to give them the picturesque for
that reason seems to me a most immoral and, in the end, a most ill-
judged proceeding. Cultivation of the picturesque, fondness for
phrase, is inevitably productive of falseness; it is literary gesture, a
cultivable habit, such as the habit of any vain person who flickers his
hands or persistently turns the “better side” of his face or character
to the beholder. The first instinctive vanity develops rapidly into a
pose, and pose can never be much more than amusing.
Appropriateness of phrase to meaning is lost in the sense of phrase,
honesty of intention does not suffice to cover inexactitude of
expression. Unconsciously, Stevenson often approved a phrase that
expressed something not in exact accordance with his belief; he was
misled by its splendour or its picturesqueness or its heroic virtue. So
it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and held
us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken this
wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as
though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer.
They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no
longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook
for a thrill of nature.
To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater
pleasure. We are displeased in Virginibus Puerisque by the excess of
manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is
invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case of
such essays as The Foreigner at Home and Pastoral, where the
matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that
Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. His essay on the
English, to take the first of the two we have named, is partial and
incomplete—faults due to lack of sympathy. Its incompleteness
seems to me more serious than its partiality; and by
“incompleteness” I do not mean that it should have been more
exhaustive, but that it does not appear quite to work out its own
thesis, but presents an air of having been finished on a smaller scale
than is attempted in other parts. In exactly the same way, the
Pastoral engages our interest completely, and then, for the reason, it
would seem, that the author’s memory runs short, the portrait is left
suddenly. It is not left in such a state that the reader’s imagination
fills in every detail: the effect is again one of truncation.
The best of these essays are probably those two, which are written
in the vein of Hazlitt, on Talk and Talkers. Here the matter is ample;
and the manner is studiously moderate. I note, by the way, that Sir
Sidney Colvin mentions the composition of this essay at about the
time of Stevenson’s proposal for writing a life of Hazlitt; so that it
would not be very reckless to say that the manner of Talk and
Talkers may be due to a contemporary familiarity with Hazlitt’s
essays. However that may be, these two essays in particular have
distinguished qualities. They have point, character, and thought.

V
The two essays which conclude Memories and Portraits, respectively
entitled A Gossip on Romance and A Humble Remonstrance, are by
way of being essays in constructive criticism, showing why the novel
of incident (i.e. the romance) is superior to the domestic novel. The
former belongs to 1882, the latter to 1884. A Gossip on Romance
expresses for “Robinson Crusoe” a greater liking than that held for
“Clarissa Harlowe,” and concludes with great praise of Scott; A
Humble Remonstrance shows Stevenson entering, with something of
the Father Damien manner, into a debate which was at that time
taking place between Sir Walter Besant, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. W.
D. Howells. Besant’s arguments were contained in an essay on “The
Art of Fiction,” which may still be had as a negligible little book; Mr.
Henry James’s reply, a wholly delightful performance, is reprinted in
“Partial Portraits.” The point was that Besant wanted to express his
amiable and workmanlike notions, that Mr. Henry James preferred to
talk about the art of fiction, and that Stevenson, who seems never to
have felt entire approval of the subject-matter of Mr. James’s books,
felt called upon to rally to the defence of his own practices.
Unfortunately he could not do this without savaging Mr. James and
Mr. Howells, and this, while it makes the essay a rather honest,
unaffected piece of work, does not increase its lucidity.
But we may very well turn at this point to notice that Stevenson’s
one legitimate book of essays on specifically literary subjects—
Familiar Studies of Men and Books—illustrates very well his attitude
to the writers in whom he was interested to the point of personal
study. The nine subjects of the essays in this book do not seem to us
at this time a specially interesting selection; and indeed the essays
themselves are not remarkable for originality or insight. It does
show, however, some range of understanding to wish to write upon
subjects so varied as Hugo, Burns, Whitman, Thoreau, Villon,
Charles of Orleans, Pepys, and John Knox. It is true that Stevenson
(the Hugo essay is perhaps an exception to this) never gets very far
away from his “authorities” or from quotations from the works of his
subject; and that his criticism is “safe” rather than personal; but
these facts, while they interfere with the value of the essays as
essays, give them the interest of being single and without parallel in
Stevenson’s output. They show that he was a good enough
journeyman critic to stand beside those who write essays on literary
subjects for the reviews. They conform, as far as I can tell, to the
standard of such work; they are useful and plain, and some of them,
but not all, are interesting. In each case the interest is chiefly a
moral interest; it is the “teaching” of the various writers, the moral
vagaries of the different delinquents, that engage the critic’s
attention.
It must be borne in mind that Stevenson was not primarily a literary
critic. His flashes of insight were more remarkable than his
considered judgments, because, as I have suggested elsewhere in
this book, he had not the kind of mind that takes delight in pursuing
a subject to its logical conclusion. He had the inventive, but not the
constructive mind, and he had the nervous and delicate man’s
intolerance of anything requiring sustained intellectual effort. I
imagine that in reading books he “read for the story,” and that his
perception of qualities in the telling (apart from the excellence of the
story) was spasmodic. It may be noticed as a defect in Familiar
Studies of Men and Books that no character, apart from traditional
character, as in the case of Pepys, emerges from any of the essays:
we are given accounts and criticisms of, for example, Burns; but we
do not have them flashed out at us as real men. Stevenson, I think,
had a very poor sense of character. In all these essays there is the
same defect, an air of flatness, of colourlessness, such as we may
find in any case where character has not been imagined.
Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could
grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character,
which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a
personality all was different; then, every touch told, as we may see
in the picture of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the
character he could see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for
quiet, unpicturesque men baffled his powers of reproduction. He
could admire, but he could not draw them. There is a very curious
instance of this in the Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, which is worth
commenting on here. That memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a
whole it belongs to the same uncharacterised class of portrait-
studies as these Men and Books. Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he
might be anybody. But there are passages in the Memoir which are
the most moving passages that Stevenson ever wrote. They do not
relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is all out of focus: they relate to the
parents of Jenkin and his wife. Jenkin’s personality, it would seem,
was never grasped by Stevenson; these vignettes, on the other
hand, are quite poignantly real and quite pathetically beautiful.
 VI
The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have
tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter.
Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed—there are
many, which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and
which will continue to give pleasure because they are a little
whimsical in conception and very finished in performance. These
essays owe their charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing
about himself, for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He
was charmed by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not
the courage or possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you
that Stevenson took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing
and not at all distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was
deliciously joined together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His
essays, the most personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the
same vanity which brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It
was not the unhappy vanity that drives friends away, that is
suspicious of all kindness: Stevenson had been too much petted as a
child to permit of such wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was
confident, but not vulgarly confident; vain, to the extent of being
more interested in himself than in anything else; but he was not
dependent upon his earnings, and success came early enough to
keep sweet his happy complacency. His essays show these things as
clearly as do his letters. His essays “are like milestones upon the
wayside of his life,” and they are so obviously milestones, that all
readers who are fascinated by autobiography, particularly if it be
veiled, have been drawn to Stevenson as they are drawn to an
attractive, laughing child. My own opinion is that Stevenson has sent
his lovers away no richer than they came; but there are many who
could not share that view, because there are many who are thankful
to him for telling them that “it is better to be a fool than to be dead.”
I think Stevenson did not know what it was to be either a fool or
dead. That state of nervous high spirits which is a part of his natural
equipment for the battle, which lent even his most artificial writing a
semblance of vivacity, prevented him from ever being dead (in the
sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant it); and I cannot
persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.
It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s
essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please
some readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That
they were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure,
had the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as
anyone may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers:
it is a part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure
some obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the
gimcrack relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that
he fell naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality
—as we may realise from the lengthy fragment called Lay Morals—
preoccupied him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged
head of sententious dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by
whatever means, by whatever labour the art was attained,
Stevenson was, above everything else, a writer. “There is no
wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s
biography, “there is no wonder that Stevenson wrote his best in the
shadow of the Shade; for writing his best was very life to him.”

VII
As a writer, then, let Stevenson be regarded in the conclusion of this
chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his
deliberate example in that one essay On some technical elements of
Style in Literature; and his theories have aroused bitter comment.
Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants
recurrent in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he
lived in a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of
course, was a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because
Stevenson was a prolific writer, and could never have afforded the
time to be a mere hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first
to realise that a prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that
an evil use of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he
realised that a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive
cunning by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with
ever-growing interest into the most remote passages of his work. He
was a careful writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some
sentences of Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their
consonants and syllables and “knots,” to their destined conclusion,
are still, and I suppose always will be capable of yielding, a pure
delight to the ear. Those who do not take Stevenson’s pains will
qualify his denunciation of the “natural” writer, because a natural
writer is one whose ear is quick and fairly true: he is not necessarily
producing “the disjointed babble of the chronicler,” but he is
incapable of the fine point of exquisite rhythm which we may find in
Stevenson’s best writing. That writing, various though it is (various, I
mean, in “styles”), remains true to its musical principles. It is the
result of trained ear and recognition of language as a conscious
instrument. It has innumerable, most insidious appeals, to disregard
which is a task for the barbarian. It is patterned, it is built of sounds,
—“one sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with
another,”—all in accordance with the expressed theory of Stevenson.
We will grant it the delights, because they are incontestable. Let us
now question whether it has not one grave defect.
All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its music,
its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that old dance
music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband, stately as they
are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear resolution with
immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven figured style,
than which we could hardly have an illustration more fit. They are
examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but in Stevenson’s
writing there is no violence to old airs and the old order. His writing
is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and in its differentiation
from the old way of writing is to be found, not a revolution, not
anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style, graceful, sustained
though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but it has no vigour. The
passages to which one turns are passages of delicious, stealthy