I
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSI1Y OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 

 
 STEVENSON'S ATTITUDE TO LIFE 
 JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG
 
 ITEVENSON'S ATTITUDE 
 TO LIFE : WITH READ- 
 INGS FROM HIS ESSAYS 
 AND LETTERS. BY JOHN 
 FRANKLIN GENUNG 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL AND COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS: NEW YORK: MDCCCCI
 
 Copyright, 1901, by T. Y. Crowell & Co. 
 
 Twelfth Thousand 
 
 D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 |HE marks of oral discourse, 
 which this book still bears from 
 its original form as a lecture, it 
 has not been thought best to re- 
 move. What was first read aloud 
 by the author he now gives, to 
 those who care for the theme, opportunity to 
 read for themselves. And if, beyond the sound 
 of his voice, some fit audience may like to hear 
 how the deep music of life reverberates from 
 one of the sanest minds, one of the bravest 
 hearts, of the century just past, the purpose of 
 this little volume will be fulfilled. 
 For the readings, which have a very vital share 
 in giving the volume whatever value it has, 
 thankful acknowledgment is hereby made to 
 Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, who have 
 kindly given permission to quote from works 
 of which they hold the copyright. The readings 
 are taken from the Thistle Edition of Steven* 
 son's works. 
 
 Amherst, Massachusetts, February 6, 1901.
 
 STEVENSON'S ATTITUDE TO LIFE 
 
 iTEVENSON'S attitude to life: 
 this is what we now propose to 
 consider ; a natural enough sub- 
 ject of inquiry, it would seem; 
 and yet the very proposal, as 
 thus phrased, is a departure 
 from the Stevensonian idiom. If 
 he had the framing of an ideal for us, his first 
 counsel, I imagine, would be, Do not assume 
 an attitude toward life at all, but just live; do 
 not be a spectator and critic of the business of 
 living, but throw yourself into the heart of it, 
 and be all there, and say no more about it. 
 
 i 
 
 ROM this consideration radi- 
 ates our whole subject. In Ste- 
 venson's implicit philosophy a 
 formulated attitude would be 
 too much like attitudinizing; 
 too self-conscious and put on; 
 too much sicklied o'er with the uneasy intro- 
 spectiveness of the tired century. Enough of 
 posing and irresolution outside the arena of 
 life ; such, we may be sure, was his thought as 
 he listened to the utterances that came surging 
 up to him from the inner heart of his time. And 
 so what he represents first and wholesomest 
 of all, what most gives him power on his age, 
 is the robust reaction against all this which 
 breathes like an ozone through every page of 
 his writings. Not that this reaction is overt, 
 or that he takes it upon himself to set up a pro- 
 
 i
 
 J>tewn0on'6 test. One great element of his power, on the 
 to contrary, is the entire absence of remonstrance, 
 or of anything merely negative or repressive. 
 He simply ignores that benumbing arriere pen- 
 sde which for full half a century has so beset 
 the faith of the world, and dares to take life 
 at its positive intrinsic value, without the dis- 
 quiet of morbid analysis. That is all; his "atti- 
 tude" is merely the free joyous erectness of the 
 undismayed soul. 
 
 To approach life with fearless confidence that 
 it means intensely and means good; to bear 
 full weight upon it, never letting encroaching 
 doubts or disillusions chill the youthful spirit 
 in which the soul first welcomes the world, 
 a hearty gospel this ; introduced by him, too, 
 just at a time when the spirit of the age might 
 turn to it most gratefully, as to a sunshine out 
 of fogs and discomfort. And not only Steven- 
 son's words, but his life no less, ennobled that 
 gospel ; maintained as it was under such diffi- 
 culties of physical weakness and enforced exile 
 that just for this brave service we count him 
 among the heroes and martyrs of literature ; 
 classing him as a worthy peer in the same rank 
 with Walter Scott, breathing forth the rarest 
 spirit of romance from under his burden of un- 
 righteous debt, and Charles Lamb, adding to 
 the world's joy by his immortal words written 
 from the home where in lifelong renunciation 
 of conjugal comfort he was caring for a mad 
 sister. All these buried their hardships in si- 
 lence away from the world, while they coined 
 their life's best ore into a mintage of health and 
 
 2
 
 cheer. Nor can we count the latest-born the )teven6ori > 6 
 least of these, when we recall how almost from Rttitttbe to 
 earliest years he lived face to face with death, 
 yet not in defiance but with unflagging buoy- 
 ancy and courage wrought as he could snatch 
 respite from disease to fulfil what we may truly 
 call his message to the world. To work thus 
 was his animating principle, his life-creed ; and 
 this very triumph of spirit was his greatest 
 message. 
 
 You remember how bravely this trait of his 
 comes to expression in his essay JEs Triplex, 
 an essay not only full of his own life but singu- 
 larly prophetic of his manner of leaving it. The 
 whole essay ought to be quoted ; I will read you 
 merely the last page. "Who would find heart 
 enough," he says, "to begin to live, if he dallied 
 with the consideration of death? . . . It is better 
 to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste 
 it like a miser. It is better to live and be done 
 with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By 
 all means begin your folio ; even if the doctor 
 does not give you a year, even if he hesitates 
 about a month, make one brave push and see 
 what can be accomplished in a week. It is not 
 only in finished undertakings that we ought to 
 honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the 
 man who means execution, which outlives the 
 most untimely ending. 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 
 
 3
 
 tradition of mankind. And even if death catch 
 to people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, 
 laying out vast projects, and planning mon- 
 strous 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 miserably straggling to an end 
 in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their 
 fine saying that those whom the gods love die 
 young, I cannot help believing they had this 
 sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at 
 whatever age it overtake the man, this is to 
 die young. Death has not been suffered to take 
 so much as an illusion from his heart. In the 
 hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of 
 being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. 
 The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely 
 quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blow- 
 ing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, 
 this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots 
 into the spiritual land." 
 
 A "happy-starred, full-blooded spirit," how 
 well this phrase describes that man within 
 Stevenson who so courageously and against 
 such tyrannous odds struggled toward an ut- 
 terance that should be, like himself, full of the 
 glory of life. "Vital," he writes in one of his 
 letters to Colvin, "that's what I am at first: 
 wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life." This was 
 not an aim that came to him casually; he knew 
 well what it meant, and how it squared with his 
 4
 
 limitations. "Quite early in his career," s 
 Edmund Gosse, "he adjusted himself to the JTttitu&e to 
 inevitable sense of physical failure. He threw 
 away from him all the useless impediments: he 
 sat loosely in the saddle of life. Many men who 
 get such a warning as he got take up something 
 to lean against ; according to their education or 
 temperament, they support their maimed exis- 
 tence on religion, or on cynical indifference, or 
 on some mania of the collector or the dilettante. 
 Stevenson did none of these things. He deter- 
 mined to make the sanest and most genial use 
 of so much of life as was left him. As any one who 
 reads his books can see, he had a deep strain of 
 natural religion ; but he kept it to himself; he 
 made no hysterical or ostentatious use of it." 
 This deep-lying strain in Stevenson's nature, 
 all the more potent because so sacredly reti- 
 cent, which Mr. Gosse calls natural religion, 
 which in order to avoid an ungenial connota- 
 tion I prefer to call his attitude to life, let us 
 now consider a little more particularly, looking 
 first at its power and timeliness in the age, and 
 then at its more salient elements, as springing 
 from their points of outset in him. 
 
 ti 
 
 |N his relation to the age, Steven- 
 son may be regarded as pioneer 
 in the new mood or spiritual cur- 
 rent now well under way ; a mood 
 much heartier and wholesomer 
 
 than what it succeeds ; nor is it 
 
 on the whole less reverent, albeit far less ob- 
 
 5
 
 tewti60n'6 servant of devotional or philosophical forms. 
 
 Jf ttttu&e to We may in a word call it a spiritual return to 
 nature. 
 
 A few moments ago I spoke of that blighting 
 arriere pensde which has so inveterately clung 
 to a half-century's faith, and the complete ig- 
 noring of which gives so invigorating a tone to 
 Stevenson's work. In 1889 Richard Holt Hutton 
 described this as "the spiritual fatigue of the 
 world," and by way of illustration named such 
 works as Amiel's Journal and Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward's Robert Elsmere. We also, as we re- 
 call the period stretching back from that date, 
 have a general sense that much of its foremost 
 utterance was morbid, and very little of it buoy- 
 antly joyful. We recall how George Eliot sat 
 in pensive despair over a world to be noble 
 and unhappy in; how Matthew Arnold was 
 dejectedly 
 "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 
 The other powerless to be born;" 
 how Clough gave up the whole problem, yet 
 still clung to it in blank bewilderment; how it 
 was as much as ever that Tennyson, by a dead 
 lift of faith, succeeded in reaching a point 
 where on the whole the odds were in favour of 
 heaven ; how even Browning, with his insistent 
 optimism, not seldom gave the impression of 
 whistling to keep his courage up. Every out- 
 look of life was clouded with difficulty and 
 gloom. We did not feel the strain of it so much 
 then; it was the dominant mood of things; but 
 as we look back now it already seems far-away
 
 and strange, and we feel as if we had survived J>tewn0on'0 
 an epidemic. The world had brooded on the Rttitttbe to 
 mystery of existence until it was tired out. 
 Long and stern had the struggle been; no 
 wonder the great labouring heart of the age 
 was weary. As long ago as 1833 Carlyle, in true 
 prophetic spirit, had anticipated the stress and 
 conflict, and had hurled at it his own character- 
 istic solution. "Strangely enough," he makes 
 Teufelsdrb'ckh say of his spiritual troubles, "I 
 lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear ; trem- 
 ulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew 
 not what ; it seemed as if all things in the Heav- 
 ens above and the Earth beneath would hurt 
 me ; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but 
 boundlessjaws of a devouring monster, wherein 
 I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. Full of 
 such humour, and perhaps themiserablestman 
 in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, 
 one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, 
 toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas 
 de 1'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a 
 close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as 
 Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubt- 
 less my spirits were little cheered ; when, all at 
 once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked 
 myself: 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, 
 like a coward, dost thou forever pip and pimper, 
 and go cowering and trembling? Despicable bi- 
 ped ! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies 
 before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the 
 pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and 
 Man may, will or can do against thee ! Hast thou 
 not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever 
 
 7
 
 it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though out- 
 flt titttbc to cast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while 
 it consumes thee ? Let it come, then ; I will meet 
 it and defy it ! ' And as I so thought, there rushed 
 like a stream of fire over my whole soul ; and I 
 shook base Fear away from me forever. I was 
 strong, of unknown strength ; a spirit, almost 
 a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my 
 misery was changed : not Fear or whining Sor- 
 row was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed 
 Defiance." 
 
 Great fierce words these ; but they are not so 
 much a solution as a gage of battle. There is 
 nothing settling or reposeful in them. They can 
 issue in an Everlasting No, or in a Yea so 
 truculent as to seem like a perpetual quarrel 
 with the order of things, but not in peace or 
 acquiescent joy. And this mood of defiance is 
 just as wearing, it just as surely brings spirit- 
 ual fatigue and depression, as does doubt or 
 fear. It is not the stable equilibrium of the soul ; 
 it is in fact only another phase of that same 
 stress and strain under which our age has so 
 sadly laboured. 
 
 From such a tension as this a reaction sooner 
 or later is inevitable. And it is fortunate, when 
 the reaction comes, if the determining influence 
 of it, the pioneer spirit, guide it in natural ways, 
 not as revolution and sour lawlessness but as 
 uplift and enrichment. To have done this, to 
 have been a leading spirit in making a great 
 reaction sane and sweet, is Stevenson's incal- 
 culable service to his age. It was not in protest 
 but in the spontaneous joy of living, not in re- 
 8
 
 bellion against past or present but in the whole- 
 hearted desire to add to the wealth of exis- 
 tence, that he gave to the world his exquisite 
 essays and adventure stories. All that was es- 
 tablished he was content to let be, and to build 
 upon. "New truth," he says, "is only useful to 
 supplement the old ; rough truth is only wanted 
 to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often 
 elegant conventions." He did not set out to rev- 
 olutionize men's attitude to life ; it is doubtful 
 if he knew how much he was doing. But some- 
 how forthwith the tension was relieved, and be- 
 fore they knew it those melancholy souls who 
 had brooded over knotty problems of heaven 
 and earth until they ached with the strain, found 
 themselves deep in a boy's book of adventure 
 and treasure hunting which was restful and de- 
 lightful j ust because it contained no nice balanc- 
 ing of motives, no calculation of moral chances, 
 and no conscience at all. Here was the timely 
 offset to a literature which, keeping to its old 
 formulas long after their first poignancy was 
 gone, was beginning to run twaddle. It was 
 a return to run-wild elemental nature, to the 
 stratum below the conventionalisms and arti- 
 ficialities of life ; and it was made in the health- 
 iest, least-disturbing way possible; not by de- 
 nial or even propaganda, not by a picnic return 
 to nature like Rousseau's, but by simply hark- 
 ing back to the buoyant youthfulness that still 
 survives in all of us, das Ewigjugendliche. 
 In youth, and in the spirit of youthfulness, we 
 dare to let our blood bound and our untor- 
 mented conscience carry off the experiences 
 
 9
 
 J)tewfl6on'6 that come. We trust ourselves to the impulses 
 to of a period that has not yet become morbid 
 and introspective. Full of energy this morning 
 spirit is, but it is the energy of a large and joy- 
 ous scale of living; a noble manhood-energy 
 which is its own excuse for being. Such was 
 the vital truth that Stevenson was concerned 
 to set forth ; and no lesson ever came in better 
 time. 
 
 The first impression this makes upon us is that 
 of simplifying things. It bids us come out of the 
 heat and the worry, and let ourselves enjoy. 
 "We are in such haste," he says in his essay 
 on Walking Tours, "to be doing, to be writing, 
 to be gathering gear, to make our voice audi- 
 ble a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, 
 that we forget that one thing, of which these 
 are but the parts namely, to live. We fall in 
 love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the 
 earth like frightened sheep. And now you are 
 to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would 
 not have been better to sit by the fire at home, 
 and be happy thinking. To sit still and contem- 
 plate, to remember the faces of women with- 
 out desire, to be pleased by the great deeds 
 of men without envy, to be everything and 
 everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to 
 remain where and what you are is not this 
 to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell 
 with happiness? After all, it is not they who 
 carry flags, but they who look upon it from a 
 private chamber, who have the fun of the pro- 
 cession." 
 
 That life is a thing to be lived, not brooded over ; 
 10
 
 that the net result of it, as its problems are met, Jtfewneon'e 
 should be joy and confidence, not introspection Jfttitufce to 
 and fear; this is the medicine that Stevenson 
 would apply to the spiritual fatigue of his time. 
 For a man so to do is to be master of himself 
 and his station and his fate; it is venturing to 
 take the beauty and the promise of the present 
 as true and as hiding no treachery for the time 
 or eternity to come. 
 
 A man who holds such a view of life as this 
 must make his reckoning with the current 
 ideas of things, evolved as these are from the 
 desperate earnestness of our science and phi- 
 losophy, and clouded over by the mystery that 
 fills this unintelligible world. Nor is Stevenson 
 wanting here. He is not at all out of touch with 
 this scientific age, or with the closest and most 
 searching study of all its conditions; but sci- 
 ence, he is well aware, has its place, where it 
 may attend to one department of life, but not 
 to all, and not to what is really inner and vital. 
 His centre and citadel is a place that science 
 can neither invade nor enrich, a place where all 
 the life, and not the brain alone, has its world. 
 "There are moments," he says, in his essay 
 on Pan's Pipes, "when the mind refuses to be 
 satisfied with evolution, and demands a rud- 
 dier presentation of the sum of man's expe- 
 rience. Sometimes the mood is brought about 
 by laughter at the humorous side of life. . . . 
 Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and 
 sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there 
 will always be hours when we refuse to be put 
 off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed sci- 
 
 II
 
 '6 ence; and demand instead some palpitating 
 Jfttitttbe to image of our estate, that shall represent the 
 troubled and uncertain element in which we 
 dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. 
 Science writes of the world as if with the cold 
 finger of a starfish ; it is all true ; but what is 
 it when compared to the reality of which it dis- 
 courses? where hearts beat high in April, and 
 death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, 
 and there is a glamour over all the objects of 
 sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and 
 Romance herself has made her dwelling among 
 men?" 
 
 The same with philosophy. Brought into the 
 presence of life, as life was meant to be, all its 
 laboured explanations shrivel and dry up, leav- 
 ing us with the feeling that it never saw the 
 reality of its object at all. What is life, when 
 all is said? and what shall we do with it? This 
 is how Stevenson estimates philosophy in his 
 essay on JEs Triplex: "All literature, from 
 Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or 
 Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon 
 the human state with such largeness of view 
 as shall enable us to rise from the considera- 
 tion of living to the Definition of Life. And our 
 sages give us about the best satisfaction in 
 their power when they say that it is a vapour, 
 or a show, or made out of the same stuff with 
 dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, 
 has been at the same work for ages ; and after 
 a myriad bald heads have wagged over the 
 problem, and piles of words have been heaped 
 one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes 
 
 12
 
 without end, philosophy has the honour of lay- Jtfewneon'tf 
 ing before us, with modest pride, her contri- JTttitu&e to 
 bution towards the subject: that life is a Per- 
 manent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine 
 result! A man may very well love beef, or hunt- 
 ing 1 , or a woman ; but surely, surely, not a Per- 
 manent Possibility of Sensation ! He may be 
 afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large 
 enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's 
 man ; but not certainly of abstract death. We 
 may trick with the word life in its dozen senses 
 until we are weary of tricking ; we may argue 
 in terms of all the philosophies on earth ; but 
 one fact remains true throughout that we do 
 not love life, in the sense that we are greatly 
 preoccupied about its conservation; that we 
 do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but 
 living." 
 
 If this view of life inveighs against the abys- 
 mal interpretations propounded by uninspired 
 intellect, none the less also it is beyond the 
 maladies of intellect ; and herein largely con- 
 sists its tonic bracing quality for its age. For 
 it life is a good in itself, centred in its own joys, 
 its own sufficient resources ; we need not always 
 be looking round the corner for a hidden pit- 
 fall, or asking whether life is worth living, or 
 quarrelling with the untoward circumstances 
 which are so slow to bring its felicities from 
 outside. It is the spirit that quickeneth; let 
 the spirit be sound, and there is no occasion for 
 depression or fatigue over its problems. In the 
 same essay last quoted from, Stevenson thus 
 laughs down the shallowness that sees only 
 
 13
 
 J>tewn60ffe gloom ahead: "There is a great deal of very 
 Rttitttbe to vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the 
 matter: tearing divines reducing life to the 
 dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so 
 short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy 
 unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were 
 a world too far away. Both sides must feel a 
 little ashamed of their performances now and 
 again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. 
 Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an 
 answer to most standard works upon the ques- 
 tion. When a man's heart warms to his viands, 
 he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars 
 into a rosy zone of contemplation." In the same 
 vein, in his essay on Walt Whitman, he por- 
 trays the torpor of the age, and in such terms 
 that we can see he felt upon himself the bur- 
 den of a mission against it. "We are accus- 
 tomed nowadays," he says, "to a great deal of 
 puling over the circumstances in which we are 
 placed. The great refinement of many poetical 
 gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit 
 for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they 
 record their unfitness at considerable length. 
 The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint 
 produces too many flimsy imitators ; for there 
 is always something consolatory in grandeur, 
 but the symphony transposed for the piano be- 
 comes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, 
 as Whitman calls it, . . . is in many ways a most 
 humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young 
 gentlemen with three or four hundred a year 
 of private means look down from a pinnacle of 
 doleful experience on all the grown and hearty
 
 men who have dared to say a good word for life 
 since the beginning of the world. There is no flttitube to 
 prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the 
 blue devils dance on all our literary wires." In 
 the words that follow these we get a glimpse of 
 the impulse that has set him into this somewhat 
 unusual vein of invective ; it is his impulse, as 
 one who sees and can guide, to meet the respon- 
 sibilities of his endowments and make a better 
 spirit of things prevail. " It would be a poor ser- 
 vice to spread culture," he goes on to say, "if 
 this be its result, among the comparatively inno- 
 cent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little 
 poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman 
 and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we 
 tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in 
 not the best of circumstances preserves com- 
 posure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco, 
 and his wife and children, in the intervals of 
 dull and unremunerative labour; where a man 
 in this predicament can afford a lesson by the 
 way to what are called his intellectual supe- 
 riors, there is plainly something to be lost, as 
 well as something to be gained, by teaching 
 him to think differently. It is better to leave him 
 as he is than to teach him whining. It is better 
 that he should go without the cheerful lights 
 of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralyzing 
 sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let 
 us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound 
 stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind 
 which blurs and decolourizes for poor natures 
 the wonderful pageant of consciousness; let us 
 teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and 
 
 15
 
 Jrtewneon'6 they will learn for themselves to sympathize; 
 JttHtube to but let us see to it, above all, that we give these 
 -jtife lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the 
 
 man up in courage while we demolish its sub- 
 stitute, indifference." 
 
 Here then we may sum up the influence of that 
 wholesome reaction which Stevenson had a 
 pioneer's part in bringing to his troubled age. 
 Addressing itself to the same spiritual malaise 
 that Teufelsdrockh felt so many years ago, 
 and that has so lingered in the heart of the 
 age since, it asks, not now in truculence but in 
 courage and tender sympathy, the same ques- 
 tion that brought Carlyle to his senses: "What 
 art thou afraid of?" and then, going on to the 
 answer, instead of reducing life to a grim de- 
 fiance of Tophet and snarling at the devil, sets 
 man with hope and joy and the morning purity 
 of youth before "the wonderful pageant of con- 
 sciousness," to use and assimilate the glories 
 of an intensely interesting world. Get the en- 
 ergetic spirit of man in that attitude, and what 
 is there to fear or distrust, what is there to in- 
 duce this torpor and fatigue, after all? 
 I need not remind you again how seasonable 
 this is, and what a tonic it has been to these 
 later days. We have only to think how the em- 
 phasis of things has shifted: how Mrs. Hum- 
 phry Ward and her imitators, with their un- 
 easy exploitation of religious enigmas, have all 
 the irksomeness of a "back number" ; how Hall 
 Caine's Christian, when we compare him with 
 the unspoken ideal of a sturdy sense, is con- 
 temned as a Christian freak and fool; how Kip- 
 16
 
 ling and Hope and Weyman, with their frank J>tewn0on'6 
 return to healthy animalism and the scarce re- J^ttitttbe to 
 strained impulses of the natural man, are call- 
 ing forth such an answering chord of senti- 
 ment ; how old Omar Khayyam is living anew, 
 not so much from his agnosticism and his dis- 
 position to say audacious things to God, as 
 from his truce to theological subtilties and his 
 hearty acceptance of this present life and its 
 good cheer. From these random instances we 
 can judge what is coming to be the prevailing 
 mood and sentiment of the time. It is to the 
 spirit what our vogue of athletics is to the body: 
 it starts a genial warmth and suggests a rub- 
 down and a hearty meal ; and from it we turn 
 to our work with a sense of buoyancy and light- 
 ness, and with a readiness to meet all the un- 
 certainties of the future, and have no fear. 
 Now of course I am not disposed to ascribe all 
 this to Stevenson. But he was, as I have re- 
 peatedly said, a pioneer spirit in it, with the 
 advantage that his utterance came just at the 
 crest of the time, when a great wearied heart 
 was ready for it. Another thing too cannot be 
 spared from the account. His wonderful gift of 
 expression made the definition of the new move- 
 ment vital and operative in those minds which 
 respond to the thrill of language, that finest 
 vehicle of spiritual communion. On the author- 
 class especially, whose activities are concerned 
 with moving the mass of men by language, he 
 wrought as acknowledged master and model. 
 "While he lived," said Quiller-Couch at the 
 time of his death, "he moved men to put their 
 
 17
 
 J>tewiT60n'6 utmost even into writings that quite certainly 
 Rttitttbe to would never meet his eye. Surely another age 
 will wonder over this curiosity of letters that 
 for five years the needle of literary endeavour 
 in Great Britain has quivered towards a little 
 island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic 
 pole." A man who possesses such an influence 
 is not the arbiter of style alone. If, as Edmund 
 Gosse called him, he is "the most inspiriting, 
 the most fascinating human being that I have 
 known," and if that fascination glamours not 
 only his personality but the whole of life as he in- 
 terprets and lives it, this also will have its power, 
 this glow of health and insight also, through 
 those whose utterance in turn is thrilled by it, 
 will work its work in the age. By its intrinsic 
 charm it has placed itself so as to control the 
 channels of uplift and power. 
 
 ill 
 
 URNING now to the salient ele- 
 ments in Stevenson's attitude to 
 life, with their points of outset 
 in his personality, we note as the 
 most outstanding element the 
 view, or tacit tenet, which in Ste- 
 venson's disciples and successors has assumed 
 most the character of a reaction, and which ac- 
 cordingly has wrought to traverse a venerable 
 religious presupposition. Stevenson freely as- 
 sumes, though still as a balanced sanity and 
 temperance, what in some of the less-grounded 
 spirits has become more brutal and glaring, 
 that the natural man, the man who has a 
 18
 
 complete outfit of instincts and appetites im- 
 planted at birth, has rights which we are bound Jtttitnbe to 
 to respect and maintain, apart from the dis- 
 count that we must reckon for depravity and 
 the duty of spiritualizing him by regeneration. 
 He builds, in other words, on the basal assump- 
 tion that man is in very fair working-order 
 before the clergy have got hold of him. This as- 
 sumption was just the thing that a conscience- 
 morbid age would most naturally grasp at, and 
 perhaps, by reason of the reactive element in it, 
 coarsen into a sort of antinomianism. Not so, 
 however, Stevenson. In him the spirit of the 
 natural man is still a beauty and a grace, like 
 the grace of youth and innocence ; healthy too, 
 and racy of the soil. In his relation to that idea 
 of the natural man which was rooted in his na- 
 tive tradition, he has an analogue in our Ameri- 
 can literature. As our own Hawthorne gave 
 forth his heritage of Puritanism not as an aus- 
 terity but as a kind of fragrance, so, we may 
 say, Stevenson distils into a fragrance the in- 
 herited breath and influence of Scotch Presby- 
 terianism. He neither denies nor accepts origi- 
 nal sin and depravity; he simply ignores them, 
 as if the man for whom he lives and writes were 
 to reckon himself dead to them. It is not so much 
 that he has broken with the austere tenets of 
 Calvinism, as that, like the author of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, he is resolved to leave the ru- 
 diments of the theory of life, such as dealings 
 with sin and conversion, and considering these 
 disposed of once for all, go on unto perfection. 
 His natural unforced man, then, is not a mere 
 
 19
 
 J>tewn00n'6 creature of instincts and appetites, like a finer 
 to brute, but a being in whom the goodly heritage 
 of Christian centuries is so ingrained that he 
 may trust himself to follow his impulses with- 
 out thought, while he lives his nobler life as to 
 the manner born. Surely there is nothing revo- 
 lutionary in this. It merely assumes that man- 
 hood has resources of its own to utilize, be- 
 yond settling the preliminary question how to 
 get manhood. Instead of taking up his station, 
 as Evangelism so long has done, before the 
 threshold of the renewed life, he occupies a 
 place so far beyond the entrance that the man 
 may enjoy the freedom and the scenery of that 
 region, and explore its wealth of beauty, as a 
 matter of course. 
 
 All this is consistent and continuous with that 
 higher trend of life commonly called the spirit- 
 ual; it has all the organs and proclivities for 
 living the life of the spirit. But its power in 
 literature to-day is mainly on the elemental 
 side, the side which hitherto has had its rights 
 for the most part under ecclesiastical protest. 
 There is something free and bracing in the dis- 
 covery that Calvin, in his theory of total deprav- 
 ity, overlooked some things in the penumbra 
 of totality which may be so enjoyed as to leave 
 the soul intact ; and we must give the new feel- 
 ing time to adjust itself to its wider range. We 
 may be sure that when the various excesses of 
 coltishness are corrected much good will ac- 
 crue to the body cogitative from it. 
 In the whole spiritual movement of which this 
 is a part Mr. James Lane Allen discerns a vi- 
 20
 
 rility, a largeness, a deepening, which he names J)tewtt6on'0 
 the Masculine Principle coming to expression flttitttbe to 
 in our literature. "It is striking out boldly," 
 he says, "for larger things, larger areas of 
 adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer 
 movements through both: it would have the 
 wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of 
 a bird on a woman's hat. . . . And if, finally, it 
 has any one characteristic more discernible 
 than another, it is the movement away from the 
 summits of life downward toward the bases 
 of life ; from the heights of civilization to the 
 primitive springs of action ; from the thin-aired 
 regions of consciousness which are ruled over 
 by Tact to the underworld of unconsciousness 
 where are situated the mighty workshops, and 
 where toils on forever the Cyclopean youth, In- 
 stinct." 
 
 All this we may regard as in a sense the pres- 
 ent-day phase of the answer to Teufelsdrockh's 
 question, "What art thou afraid of?" And per- 
 haps the age will bear it if for once we do leave 
 our inveterate presupposition of man's innate 
 corruption unregarded, and dare to let self-ex- 
 pression, trained as it is through a long growth 
 of ennobling and Christianizing ideas, be large 
 and untrammelled. It is well at least to know, 
 if we may, that when left to his natural self man 
 may signify something more than tobacco and 
 gin and lust, that there are, at the bases of 
 his nature, thoroughly sound and respectable 
 traits, after all. 
 
 Of this natural manhood the note which Ste- 
 venson has most at heart and strikes most 
 
 21
 
 Stevcneon'6 constantly is its wholeness and wholesome- 
 to ness, that character which, being its own great 
 sufficiency and reward, can trust itself soul- 
 forward and without apology to its own self- 
 expression. Life is not a thing to buy, but to 
 enjoy as an ultimate fact. It desires no better 
 thing outside. A kingdom of heaven which is 
 not a present thing, realizable in all its glory 
 within, has no appeal to him. "The view taught 
 at the present time," he says in his Lay Mor- 
 als, "seems to me to want greatness; and the 
 dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly ut- 
 tered is not the dialect of my soul. It is a sort 
 of postponement of life ; nothing quite is, but 
 something different is to be; we are to keep 
 our eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to 
 the grave. We are to regulate our conduct not 
 by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future ; 
 and to value acts as they will bring us money 
 or good opinion ; as they will bring us, in one 
 word, profit. . . . We are to live just now as 
 well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven, 
 where we shall be good. We are to worry 
 through the week in a lay, disreputable way, 
 but, to make matters square, live a different 
 life on Sunday." Such a divided life as is here 
 described, such commercial balancing of im- 
 pulses and convictions, desires and conven- 
 tions, incurred his heartiest antipathy. For al- 
 most anything else he could make allowance ; 
 but this invaded the very citadel of life, where 
 a man must reckon with the unity of his own 
 manhood. "If we were to conceive a perfect 
 man," he says, "it should be one who was never 
 
 22
 
 torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on 
 the absolute consent of all his parts and facul- ^ttitube to 
 ties, submitted in every action of his life to a |ife 
 self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as 
 that which bids him love one woman and be 
 true to her till death." 
 
 In this absoluteness of surrender to the man- 
 hood current within us Stevenson has taken 
 us far from the total-depravity school, with its 
 nervous fear of giving human nature free play. 
 And if he sets the nature moving according to 
 its own free bent, and all together, then its direc- 
 tion must be right, for there is no part left to 
 apply the brakes if it is headed wrong. Trained 
 as we are in some reminiscence of the same 
 school, we are not likely to forget this, or to let 
 Stevenson do so. Nor does he forget it. Herein 
 it is that he is the safest and most truly Chris- 
 tian of guides, that he never loses sight of the 
 highest ends; so high that the warring region 
 of pettiness and passion is left far below. Both 
 whip and rein, in his programme of life, are in 
 the hands not of the senses but of the spirit; 
 his natural man, this latest birth of a rising and 
 refining evolution, is as it were the Son of man. 
 Therefore the whole normal man is sound and 
 sacred. "All that is in the man in the larger 
 sense," he says in this same work on Lay Mor- 
 als, "what we call impression as well as what 
 we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, 
 we must accept. It is not wrong to desire food, 
 or exercise, or beautiful surroundings, or the 
 love of sex, or interest which is the food of the 
 mind. All these are craved; all these should 
 
 23
 
 ^tewneon'6 be craved; to none of these in itself does the 
 to sou l demur; where there comes an undeniable 
 want, we recognize a demand of nature. Yet we 
 know that these natural demands may be su- 
 perseded ; for the demands which are common 
 to mankind make but a shadowy consideration 
 in comparison to the demands of the individual 
 soul." 
 
 Superseded, then, these elemental desires may 
 be? Yes; it is so, superseded, not starved nor 
 pampered ; conquered neither by selfish indul- 
 gence nor selfish asceticism, but by a higher 
 and harmonizing principle which resides in the 
 spirit, and enables the man to live as a whole, 
 with no schism between lower and higher. 
 "There is another way," Stevenson goes on to 
 say, "to supersede them by reconciliation, in 
 which the soul and all the faculties and senses 
 pursue a common route and share in one de- 
 sire." Then after exemplifying this reconcilia- 
 tion from common experience, he sums up: 
 "Now to me this seems a type of that right- 
 ness which the soul demands. It demands that 
 we shall not live alternately with our oppos- 
 ing tendencies in continual seesaw of passion 
 and disgust, but seek some path on which the 
 tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve 
 each other to a common end. It demands that 
 we shall not pursue broken ends, but great 
 and comprehensive purposes, in which soul 
 and body may unite like notes in a harmonious 
 chord. . . . The soul demands unity of purpose, 
 not the dismemberment of man ; it seeks to roll 
 up all his strength and sweetness, all his pas- 
 24
 
 sion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a J>tcvni eon's 
 perfect man exulting in perfection." Jfttitttbe to 
 
 A man of Stevenson's spiritual antecedents 
 could not hold such a conclusion as this idly, or 
 ignore the elements that make against it. With 
 a great sum must he purchase his freedom. 
 There is the fact of sin to be reckoned with. 
 There are the pains of accusing conscience and 
 unrealized ideals. These are the discount side 
 of the book, the prose reality to set over against 
 our dreams. And Stevenson has reckoned with 
 them. It is, in fact, when he is dealing with 
 these stern facts of life that he strikes at once 
 his most exalted and most practical note. That 
 free manhood which he has so much at heart 
 is to move in a region to which the evil we would 
 shun is absolutely alien ; no more entering our 
 thought, as a necessary ingredient of life, than 
 would arson or highway robbery. I have spoken 
 of this already; it is the Apostle Paul's idea of 
 reckoning ourselves dead to sin, translated into 
 modern idiom. "It is probable," Stevenson says 
 in his Christmas Sermon, "that nearly all who 
 think of conduct at all, think of it too much ; it 
 is certain we all think too much of sin. We are 
 not damned for doing wrong, but for not do- 
 ing right; Christ would never hear of negative 
 morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with 
 which he superseded thou shalt not. To make 
 our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is 
 to defile the imagination and to introduce into 
 our judgments of our fellow-men a secret ele- 
 ment of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we 
 should not dwell upon the thought of it; or 
 
 25
 
 we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted plea- 
 to sure. ... A man may have a flaw, a weakness, 
 that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils 
 his temper, that threatens his integrity, or that 
 betrays him into cruelty. It has to be conquered ; 
 but it must never be suffered to engross his 
 thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the far- 
 ther side, and must be attended to with a whole 
 mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of 
 the decks has been effected. In order that he 
 may be kind and honest, it may be needful he 
 should become a total abstainer; let him be- 
 come so then, and the next day let him forget 
 the circumstance. Trying to be kind and hon- 
 est will require all his thoughts; a mortified 
 appetite is never a wise companion ; in so far 
 as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will 
 still be the worse man ; and of such an one a 
 great deal of cheerfulness will be required in 
 judging life, and a great deal of humility in judg- 
 ing others." Just such sane and sensible treat- 
 ment he applies also to conscience, in his Re- 
 flection and Remarks on Human Life. "Never 
 allow your mind," he says, "to dwell on your 
 own misconduct ; that is ruin. The conscience 
 has morbid sensibilities; it must be employed 
 but not indulged, like the imagination or the 
 stomach. Let each stab suffice for the occa- 
 sion ; to play with this spiritual pain turns to 
 penance ; and a person easily learns to feel good 
 by dallying with the consciousness of having 
 done wrong. Shut your eyes hard against the 
 recollection of your sins. Do not be afraid, you 
 will not be able to forget them. . . . The study 
 26
 
 of conduct has to do with grave problems; not J>tewn6on'0 
 
 every action should be higgled over; one of the Jfttitttbe to 
 
 leading virtues therein is to let oneself alone. 
 
 But if you make it your chief employment, you 
 
 are sure to meddle too much. This is the great 
 
 error of those who are called pious. Although 
 
 the war of virtue be unending except with life, 
 
 hostilities are frequently suspended, and the 
 
 troops go into winter quarters; but the pious 
 
 will not profit by these times of truce ; where 
 
 their conscience can perceive no sin, they will 
 
 find a sin in that very innocency; and so they 
 
 pervert, to their annoyance, those seasons 
 
 which God gives to us for repose and a reward." 
 
 iv 
 
 |N this free-moving life, so spon- 
 taneous and unforced as to sug- 
 gest the unrestrained natural 
 man, so true to high possibili- 
 ties and dead to baseness as to 
 suggest the pure freedom of 
 the spirit, there is one comprehensive mark 
 of health and perfect function. It is happy; it 
 moves in joy. This is its side as turned to its 
 own fulfilment and destiny, the music it makes 
 with all its strings in perfect tune and harmony. 
 And because it is happy, it is a source and radi- 
 ator of happiness ; not laying austere exactions 
 on men but smoothing their way to manhood. 
 This is its side as turned to the world. The two 
 sides are natural complements of each other. 
 By so much as life fails of happiness, by so much 
 an alien element is there, a limitation, a power- 
 
 27
 
 ^teveneon'6 consuming friction, which ought not and was 
 to never meant to be. By so much as it fails to ra- 
 diate and promote happiness, by so much it has 
 missed or perverted its true design in the sum 
 of things. The sign of its wholeness is a free 
 play of good cheer. Carlyle's discovery that the 
 lack of happiness might be countervailed by 
 blessedness, as if a man could at once be pro- 
 foundly miserable on some accounts and on 
 others be profoundly blissful, his sum-total 
 of life being thus a greater or less balance be- 
 tween contradictory currents, was entirely 
 foreign to Stevenson's ideal; it belonged, in 
 fact, to a disturbed and divided nature, and to 
 a man who was eternally thinking of himself. 
 Such a man Stevenson most emphatically was 
 not. His was the royal wholeness of a nature 
 moving all together, without apology or evil 
 discount. He had not to think of self but to be ; 
 not to cipher out an attitude to life but to live ; 
 not even to appoint himself a missionary of the 
 doctrine of happiness to other men, like those 
 actors who posture and snigger in order to raise 
 a laugh, but simply to be happy and make that 
 happiness, with its solid glow of heat, its own 
 excuse for being. Such happiness is conta- 
 gious; it needs no bolstering of propaganda; it 
 awakens echoes, it calls out responsive cheer 
 by its mere self-evidencing wholesomeness. 
 This happiness in Stevenson was more than 
 temperamental ; it had based itself in the wise 
 and penetrative spirit. Nor was it any shal- 
 low evasion of the deeps of life ; it was at polar 
 remove from the mere physical well-being of 
 28
 
 a gourmand, or the glee of an empty-headed 
 dancer. It had made itself good against too Jfttttub? to 
 much ill health for that ; and underlying it were 
 centuries of digested thought and doctrine. An 
 efflorescence, a fruitage, it truly was, culminat- 
 ing from profound strains of vital meditation; 
 it was, in a word, Stevenson's religion, and when 
 we consider all that went to the shaping of it, 
 a religion fair and sufficient. 
 As to its point of outset in his personality, there 
 is not wanting to it a certain note of self-moni- 
 tion, almost of belligerency, as if he felt it laid 
 upon him to work out what he calls his "great 
 task of happiness " from a stubborn experience ; 
 the spirit of him rejoicing to overcome, rejoic- 
 ing the more as the foe is fiercer and stronger, 
 yet resolved to keep the pain of his struggle 
 from others, while he makes himself, and him- 
 self alone, the arena. He certainly had stern 
 enough reason for such self-incitement; and 
 that he has on the whole so successfully trans- 
 muted it into the pure outcome of rational hap- 
 piness is what coming ages will honour as his 
 lifelong heroism. 
 
 To quote passages that give inculcation and 
 definition to this would be little representative, 
 either as to bulk or as to wording, of its vital 
 importance in Stevenson's body of thought; to 
 quote passages wherein this is the atmosphere 
 and presupposition, making itself felt as a pul- 
 sation, a flavour, a tonic, beyond the crudeness 
 of words, would be to quote well-nigh all that he 
 ever wrote. There is a sacredness about it, a ho- 
 liness as cherished ideal and due, which makes 
 
 29
 
 it more fitly a subject of prayer than of disserta- 
 to tion. You remember that striking prayer of 
 his in verse, entitled The Celestial Surgeon; 
 one cannot help thinking the whole current of 
 Stevenson's aspiration flowed through that: 
 
 "If I have faltered more or less 
 In my great task of happiness; 
 If I have moved among my race 
 And shown no glorious morning face; 
 If beams from happy human eyes 
 Have moved me not; if morning skies, 
 Books, and my food, and summer rain 
 Knocked on my sullen heart in vain : 
 Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take 
 And stab my spirit broad awake; 
 Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 
 Choose thou, before that spirit die, 
 A piercing pain, a killing sin, 
 And to my dead heart run them in!" 
 
 In his Prayers written for Family Use in Vai- 
 lima, also, the petition for courage and happi- 
 ness, and especially for grace to fulfil all the 
 spontaneous expressions of happiness mirth, 
 laughter, gaiety is the dominant note; it 
 sounds in some way in every one of them. Here 
 are some of the petitions, taken as one runs 
 the collection through: "Give us courage and 
 gaiety and the quiet mind. . . . The day returns 
 and brings us the petty round of irritating con- 
 cerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help 
 us to perform them with laughter and kind 
 faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. 
 . . . Give us to awake with smiles, give us to 
 30
 
 labour smiling. . . . Give us health, food, bright J)tewn6on'6 
 weather, and light hearts. . . . Let us lie down Rttitube to 
 without fear and awake and arise with exul- 
 tation. . . . Grant us courage to endure lesser 
 ills unshaken, and to accept death, loss, and dis- 
 appointment as it were straws upon the tide of 
 life. . . . When the day returns, return to us, our 
 sun and comforter, and call us up with morn- 
 ing faces and with morning hearts eager to la- 
 boureager to be happy, if happiness shall be 
 our portion and if the day be marked for sor- 
 row, strong to endure it." The day after this last 
 petition was written was marked, for his family, 
 by the great sorrow of his sudden death. 
 But never was this happiness sought as a mere 
 gratification or self-appeasement. In the large 
 sympathy of Stevenson, so little aware of self, 
 it was always valued as if it were a light or 
 warmth or bracing atmosphere in whose bless- 
 ing all could share. He sought in order that 
 he might impart; the two could not be disso- 
 ciated. In all his literary calling, as well as in 
 his personal relations, this was so. To make his 
 neighbour happy was the surest way to do his 
 neighbour good. Even if the neighbour was in 
 sin or error, needing to be taught or reformed, 
 he were best approached by the way of genial 
 comradery and entertainment, and taught as 
 though one taught him not. So, though a potent 
 source of cheer and sweeter living, nay, of mo- 
 nition, Stevenson never sets up as a corrector 
 and reformer, never assumes to force his good- 
 ness or wisdom on his less-favoured neighbour. 
 "There is an idea abroad among moral peo- 
 
 31
 
 pie," he says in his Christmas Sermon, "that 
 Jfttttttbe to they should make their neighbours good. One 
 Ctfe person I have to make good: myself. But my 
 
 duty to my neighbour is much more nearly ex- 
 pressed by saying that I have to make him 
 happy if I may." 
 
 Therefore if a person's life, however conven- 
 tionally upright, is morose or austere, if his 
 morality is not of that fibre which engenders 
 joy, it is wrong, it is missing its true power and 
 function, there is something false in its foun- 
 dation. "The kingdom of heaven," he says in 
 this same Christmas Sermon, "is of the child- 
 like, of those who are easy to please, who love 
 and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their 
 hands, the smiters and the builders and the 
 judges, have lived long and done sternly and 
 yet preserved this lovely character; and among 
 our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, 
 the shame were indelible if we should lose it. 
 Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come be- 
 fore all morality; they are the perfect duties. 
 And it is the trouble with moral men that they 
 have neither one nor other. It was the moral 
 man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away 
 with. If your morals make you dreary, depend 
 upon it they are wrong. I do not say 'give them 
 up,' for they may be all you have ; but conceal 
 them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives 
 of better and simpler people." 
 If to some solemn-visaged person the gentle- 
 ness and cheerfulness here praised seems in 
 Stevenson, as it often must, to have effervesced 
 in bubbling rollicking fun, let him not be de- 
 32
 
 ceived. It is not froth nor shallowness; it is an J>tewn60fl'0 
 integral element of that principle on which he Jf (tttlt&e to 
 based his comradeship with men. It is in fact no 
 necessary sign of superior greatness or good- 
 ness when we take ourselves with such abys- 
 mal seriousness. It may rather be a sign of 
 limitation. Just as to quote from the delight- 
 ful Apology for Idlers "extreme busyness, 
 whether at school or college, kirk or market, 
 is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty 
 for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a 
 strong sense of personal identity" ; so, chang- 
 ing the application but not the principle, we 
 may say, extreme seriousness and strenuous- 
 ness, with the thought always troubled for the 
 propriety and morality of things, is a symptom 
 that the morality is not quite ingrained ; it is too 
 unsure of its own integrity to let go and take 
 itself for granted. If character is the breath of 
 our manhood, why, we are not always taking 
 thought how to breathe. There is something 
 in Stevenson's abandon, his freedom from the 
 "prunes and prisms" of conventional conduct, 
 his large tolerance for men and creeds, the 
 lightness with which he moves in the pres- 
 ence alike of the grim and the gay, which is to 
 life what play is to work, or the easy grace of 
 an artist hand in the moulding of a master- 
 piece. It is in fact the free play of the spirit 
 which takes duty and experience without ef- 
 fort, and as it were in a kind of leisure and non- 
 chalance, because it is so easily master of itself. 
 This was Stevenson's working-ideal ; and if he 
 reduced the expression of it to the one element 
 
 33
 
 J>tcwri6on't> of happiness, it was because that was its most 
 to palpable hold and handle. That was a thing 
 that recommended the life behind it. "There is 
 no duty we so much underrate," he says further 
 in the Apology for Idlers, "as the duty of being 
 happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous 
 benefits upon the world, which remain un- 
 known even to ourselves, or when they are dis- 
 closed, surprise nobody so much as the bene- 
 factor. ... A happy man or woman is a better 
 thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she 
 is a radiating focus of good will ; and their en- 
 trance into a room is as though another candle 
 had been lighted. We need not care whether 
 they could prove the forty-seventh proposi- 
 tion; they do a better thing than that, they 
 practically demonstrate the great Theorem of 
 the Liveableness of Life." 
 
 HE great Theorem of the Live- 
 ableness of Life" this sums it 
 up very well; this it was that 
 Stevenson, in all his wander- 
 ings and enforced exile, in all 
 his gallant fight with disease, 
 set himself with the fervour of an apostle to de- 
 monstrate ; and the progressive solution of it, 
 sealed only when his "happy-starred, full- 
 blooded spirit" vanished from earth, has sent a 
 thrill of vigour and good cheer through the 
 world. My talk about this, with the citations, 
 has already gone on, I fear, past excusable 
 length ; and yet the subject refuses to be put 
 34
 
 off without a few words concerning how all 
 this came to utterance. JTttttude to 
 
 Stevenson was a dedicated spirit dedicated 
 and predestined to the great art of expression. 
 It was his joy, it was the breath of his being, 
 to coin that buoyant clear-seeing life of his into 
 creative forms of word and figure. Not life it- 
 self was closer to his heart than this. You re- 
 call that O altitudo which breaks out in one of 
 his letters to Henley during his happy hard- 
 working season at Hyeres: "O the height and 
 depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O 
 that I am privileged to swim and shoulder 
 through such oceans! Could one get out of 
 sight of land all in the blue? Alas not, being 
 anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic 
 being still about us. But what a great space 
 and a great air there is in these small shallows 
 where alone we venture! And how new each 
 sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! ... I sleep upon 
 my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am 
 unready for death, because I hate to leave it. 
 I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor 
 can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I 
 can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the 
 offering of life without my art. I am not but in 
 my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely." 
 How he was drawn into his literary art, as it 
 were into a fate, is a familiar tale. It came by 
 the natural practical way the way of appren- 
 ticeship. He made indeed starts on other roads : 
 on his father's calling of lighthouse engineer- 
 ing, for which however his health proved too 
 precarious; and, to please his father, on the law, 
 
 35
 
 J>tewtl0on'0 which he pursued just far enough to pass as 
 to advocate, and then left forever. Meanwhile his 
 congenial apprenticeship, self-appointed, was 
 going on steadily; it was not in him to repress 
 it, although to begin with he had little forecast 
 of what it would amount to. All the while he was 
 studying how to express things in language; 
 working with the possibilities of words, fit- 
 ting words to sights and sounds and thoughts, 
 searching for the essential note and key in 
 which an idea should be written, imitating the 
 effects which in his favourite authors he dis- 
 covered and enjoyed. It was the artist drawing 
 from models; the composer aping Mozart or 
 Haydn; the workman reproducing according 
 to the patterns of his master. Never mind the 
 future use to be made of it ; the work itself for 
 the time being was its own interest and reward. 
 "It was not so much," he says, "that I wished 
 to be an author (though I wished that too) as 
 that I had vowed that I would learn to write. 
 That was a proficiency that tempted me ; and 
 I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whit- 
 tle, in a wager with myself. . . . That," he says 
 a little farther on (it is in his essay on A Col- 
 lege Magazine), "that, like it or not, is the way 
 to learn to write ; whether I have profited or not, 
 that is the way." 
 
 I must not let this account of his literary ap- 
 prenticeship draw me away from my subject; I 
 have in fact introduced it not for its own sake 
 but on account of the reflex influence thereby 
 revealed, of his art on his attitude to life. His 
 life coloured and vitalized his art, that is true; 
 36
 
 it was art of a certain trend and significance ,J)teven00H'6 
 because of the life he lived and interpreted. Jfttitnbe to 
 But also the converse is true : the pursuit of his 
 art, from words onward and inward to things, 
 truths, relations, led him ever to a closer and 
 clearer vision of life, and a juster proportioning 
 of its elements. His very achievements in inter- 
 pretation brought with them greater range and 
 depth of insight ; and where insight went, there 
 his allegiance went also. Starting, as he says, 
 with simple description, fitting what he saw 
 with appropriate words (a kind of primary ex- 
 ercise in which he had been paralleled by Ten- 
 nyson) he soon came to have an exquisite sense 
 not only of accurate meanings but of what he 
 calls the "key of words," that delicate rapport 
 in the words and rhythms of a passage which 
 corresponds to what artists call their colour- 
 scheme. He chose words not for themselves 
 alone, but for the help they would give other 
 words ; and so the finished work was set in one 
 key, with word and word, image and thing im- 
 aged homogeneous. So far forth this looks like 
 mere craftsmanship, or if you will grant it, ar- 
 tistry. It may easily be despised by Philistines 
 who know not how much travail of spirit has 
 gone to their ease of reading. But while mere 
 word-mongery is a possibility to be shunned, 
 on the other hand it is easy to underrate words 
 too much. After all, words are almost the only 
 means of laying soul upon soul, of effecting that 
 communion whereby the highest values of life 
 are transmitted. And with Stevenson they never 
 stopped with sound and manipulation; they 
 
 37
 
 stood for something; they were elements in a 
 JTttitube to world ; their very atmosphere and key belonged 
 to the artistry not of sounds alone but of life. 
 The very magic which they wrought became 
 vital in character and conduct. "One thing," he 
 says in his essay on Truth of Intercourse, "you 
 can never make Philistine natures understand ; 
 one thing, which yet lies on the surface, re- 
 mains as unseizable to their wits as a high 
 flight of metaphysics namely, that the busi- 
 ness of life is mainly carried on by means of 
 this difficult art of literature, and according to 
 a man's proficiency in that art shall be the free- 
 dom and the fulness of his intercourse with 
 other men." Viewed in this light, the art of 
 words is simply the art of telling the truth, 
 with all the colourings, the shadings, the pro- 
 portions, the implications, the saving-clauses, 
 essential to making it rounded truth and not 
 a caricature or distortion. 
 We hear much nowadays about shifting or 
 newly determining the emphasis of a creed or 
 a system. It is mainly a matter of the propor- 
 tions and perspectives of language, of getting 
 our dogma into such literary shape and colour 
 that the sum-total, as laid alike on the discern- 
 ing mind and the tenderly apprehensive heart, 
 shall correspond to our deep sense of truth. 
 There is a kind of crystallization in ideas as 
 in style, a settling and adjustment of elements 
 until each part has found its place, its relation, 
 its fellowship. We come in sight of this as soon 
 as we get beyond the sound of words to their 
 inner meaning, as soon as we look beyond the 
 38
 
 symbol to the thing. Then we become aware 
 that the thing, whose beginning is the word, JXttitllbe to 
 may be the most energetic of acts, the most in- 
 spiring of faiths, the most sacred of ideals, all 
 implicated in a large homogeneous art of ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Now with this controlling conception of the 
 subtle congruities and harmonies of his cher- 
 ished art, there were certain deep elements of 
 life ready to meet Stevenson, just as soon as his 
 working-tools were sharpened and subdued to 
 mastery. It was not all to be Treasure Islands 
 and Prince Ottos. His sense of the fated mar- 
 riage of words to ideas, and of the proportion- 
 ing which should make the whole tissue homo- 
 geneous, led him duly toward the deep bases 
 of things ; and especially, as he was a Scotch- 
 man, it had a work cut out for it in the complex- 
 ities and perplexities of accepted systems. He 
 was not of the kind, in spite of his genial tem- 
 perament, to dance by and ignore these. "With 
 high social spirits," says his biographer Col- 
 vin, "and a brilliant somewhat fantastic gaiety 
 of bearing, Stevenson was no stranger to the 
 storms and perplexities of youth. A restless and 
 inquiring conscience, perhaps inherited from 
 covenanting ancestors, kept him inwardly call- 
 ing in question the grounds of conduct and the 
 accepted codes of society. At the same time 
 his reading had shaken his belief in Christian 
 dogma; the harsher forms of Scottish Calvin- 
 istic Christianity being at all times repugnant 
 to his nature." It is out of such a nature as this, 
 so exercised, that Stevenson's gospel of cour- 
 
 39
 
 J)tewn0on'0 age and happiness comes; out of a nature, too, 
 to to whom an unsure word, an untempered col- 
 curing of idea, is a pain like the pain of dis- 
 honesty and falsehood. There are not wanting 
 evidences of his sense of the crookedness and 
 perversity of things ; there is an Omar Khayyam 
 vein in his nature; you see it, for example, in 
 his writings of the Pulvis et Umbra period. Yet 
 how little of this there is in his finished works, 
 and more especially in the gist and outcome 
 of the whole ; how little even his trenchant dis- 
 avowal of religious conventionalisms leaves 
 of what people call skeptical tendency. He is 
 no scoffer, no satirist ; nor can you saddle him 
 with any of the destructive -isms with which 
 the world reproaches men in order to set them 
 up as a warning. 
 
 That this was no accident but the result of bal- 
 anced wisdom and sanity, we have indications 
 in his letters and unfinished sketches. Not only 
 the artistic finish but the tone, the influence, 
 the guiding trend of his work was a matter of 
 solicitude to him, a matter to be accurately ad- 
 justed. To his father he writes from Hyeres 
 about a projected work, probably Virginibus 
 Puerisque : " It is a most difficult work ; a touch 
 of the parson will drive off those I hope to in- 
 fluence ; a touch of overstrained laxity, besides 
 disgusting, like a grimace, may do harm." This 
 casual remark lets us well into the spirit that 
 governed Stevenson's art, and the sense of a 
 mission that was upon him. The sturdy prin- 
 ciple was there ; the insight also, with the de- 
 sire to emancipate men from the hoary errors 
 40
 
 that so depressed the tone of life. But in his J>teven6on'6 
 spirit of comradeship and letting-live he shrank Jfttitllbe to 
 from setting up as a teacher, with the superior- 
 ity implied in that assumption; he preferred 
 rather to put his thoughts in story, and in the 
 non-didactic form of conversational playful es- 
 say ; and with this he called his masterful art 
 of word and literary atmosphere to his aid, so 
 that the reader, responding to the magic thrill, 
 should find his thoughts and ideals moving in 
 the congenial region, gathering the spiritual 
 current and standard from the key of word and 
 sentiment, thinking himself from the concrete 
 case into the harmonizing attitude to life, as 
 Owen thought the organism from the single 
 bone. So art did his teaching, as though he 
 taught not, and this by transporting men into 
 the sunlit and bracing region where, simply by 
 looking round and learning to be at home, they 
 could orient themselves. 
 In the exultant practice of this self-rewarding 
 art Stevenson's life was a perpetual voyage of 
 discovery. Whether it was in travel, in com- 
 ing upon new cities and mountain-chains and 
 stretches of sea-coast; or in exploring new 
 tracts of character, motive, psychology; or, 
 underlying all this, in seeing the true relations 
 of life fall into place and assume the attire of 
 reasonable and seemly interpretation, hoary 
 and outworn systems thus giving way not to 
 dust and despite but to reconcilement and vital 
 solution, all was to him virtually the creation 
 of a new and happy world, from which nothing 
 human was alien, in which the regions from 
 
 41
 
 the clear heaven of spiritual beauty down to the 
 to grim and troublous elements of being were 
 open to a singularly penetrative and catholic 
 sympathy. Upborne by this spirit of discovery, 
 and by the sense of its limitless field and re- 
 ward, he could bear patiently and with cheer- 
 fulness to snatch brief reprisals from long pe- 
 riods of illness, nay, could treat even failure as 
 a mere incident and stimulus to more. As Gosse 
 says of him: "He never conceived that he had 
 achieved a great success, but he never lost hope 
 that by taking pains he might yet do so." Or as 
 he himself says, in words that seem coined out 
 of this conscious trait (I quote from his Reflec- 
 tion and Remarks on Human Life): "I meant 
 when I was a young man to write a great poem ; 
 and now I am cobbling little prose articles and 
 in excellent good spirits, I thank you. So, too, 
 I meant to lead a life that should keep mount- 
 ing from the first; and though I have been re- 
 peatedly down again below sea-level, and am 
 scarce higher than when I started, I am as keen 
 as ever for that enterprise. Our business in this 
 world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, 
 in good spirits." 
 
 The whimsical epitaph that he proposed for 
 himself in his Inland Voyage has a good deal 
 the flavour of a summary of his character. His 
 canoe, you remember, had capsized in theOise, 
 and he after much exertion had managed to 
 crawl, more dead than alive, upon an overhang- 
 ing tree trunk, his paddle still tightly clutched 
 in his hand. A mishap of no great significance 
 it was, one such as we daily laugh away. It 
 42
 
 does not take a great occasion to give the last Jrtewneon'e 
 nudge of suggestion to a happy saying, nor flttitttbe to 
 need the saying be magniloquent to reverber- 
 ate from a depth of inner nature. If we may 
 give weight to Carlyle's adage, " Burn your own 
 smoke" a thing which he conspicuously failed 
 to do and to George Eliot's sombre advice to 
 "do without opium,"surely in this sunnier spir- 
 itual era with which Stevenson is identified we 
 may listen to what in his characteristic way he 
 proposed so lightly. "On my tomb," he says, 
 "if ever I have one, I mean to get these words 
 inscribed: 'He clung to his paddle.'" 
 Yes; that is what he did, through a life that 
 strove not for success but for a happy, hopeful, 
 helpful self-expression. He clung to his paddle ; 
 he never gave up. What was there to exchange 
 that buoyant energy for, if he had relinquished 
 it? The work, the art, the life, was its own 
 heaven, its own exceeding reward. Nothing 
 that was to be thereafter could take the place 
 of that, until its time came. Let us take leave of 
 him in these closing words of his essay on El 
 Dorado: 
 
 "A strange picture we make on our way to our 
 chimaeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging our- 
 selves the time for rest; indefatigable, adven- 
 turous pioneers. It is true that we shall never 
 reach the goal ; it is even more than probable 
 that there is no such place ; and if we lived for 
 centuries and were endowed with the powers 
 of a god, we should find ourselves not much 
 nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling 
 hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling 
 
 43
 
 ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to 
 to you, you must come forth on some conspicu- 
 ous hilltop, and but a little way further, against 
 the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. 
 Little do ye know your own blessedness ; for 
 to travel hopefully is a better thing than to 
 arrive, and the true success is to labour."
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 731 947 8