I 6 9$
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
 
 ROBERT LOUIS 
 STEVENSON 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER RALEIGH 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 
 
 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL, AUTHOR OF 
 
 ' THE ENGLISH NOVEL ' 
 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 Pufcitsfjcr to Uje Entita ©fficc 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK 
 
 37 BEDFORD STREET 70 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
 I895
 
 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
 
 r/r 
 
 THE GREATER PART OF THIS 
 
 ESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTURE 
 
 AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION 
 
 ON THE 17TH OF MAY 
 
 1395 
 
 ,45 if!"" <L ' ' *
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 When a popular writer dies, the question 
 it has become the fashion with a nervous 
 generation to ask is the question, ' Will he 
 live ? ' There is no idler question, none 
 more hopelessly impossible and unprofit- 
 able to answer. It is one of the many 
 vanities of criticism to promise immortality 
 to the authors that it praises, to patronise 
 a writer with the assurance that our 
 great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes 
 are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read 
 his works with delight. But 'there is 
 no antidote against the opium of time, 
 which temporally considereth all things : 
 our fathers find their graves in our short
 
 8 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 memories, and sadly tell us how we may- 
 be buried in our survivors.' Let us make 
 sure that our sons will care for Homer 
 before we pledge a more distant generation 
 to a newer cult. 
 
 Nevertheless, without handling the 
 prickly question of literary immortality, it 
 is easy to recognise that the literary repu- 
 tation of Robert Louis Stevenson is made 
 of good stuff. His fame has spread, as 
 lasting fame is wont to do, from the few 
 to the many. Fifteen years ago his essays 
 and fanciful books of travel were treasured 
 by a small and discerniug company of 
 admirers ; long before he chanced to fell 
 the British public with Treasure Island 
 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he had 
 shown himself a delicate marksman. And 
 although large editions are nothing, 
 standard editions, richly furnished and
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 9 
 
 complete, are worthy of remark. Steven- 
 son is one of the very few authors in our 
 literary history who have been honoured 
 during their lifetime by the appearance of 
 such an edition ; the best of his public, it 
 would seem, do not only wish to read his 
 works, but to possess them, and all of them, 
 at the cost of many pounds, in library form. 
 It would be easy to mention more volu- 
 minous and more popular authors than 
 Stevenson whose publishers could not find 
 five subscribers for an adventure like this. 
 He has made a brave beginning in that 
 race against Time which all must lose. 
 
 It is not in the least necessary, after 
 all, to fortify ourselves with the presumed 
 consent of our poor descendants, who may 
 have a world of other business to attend 
 to, in order to establish Stevenson in the 
 position of a great writer. Let us leave 
 
 \r
 
 10 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 that foolish trick to the politicians, who 
 never claim that they are right — merely 
 that they will win at the next elections. 
 Literary criticism has standards other than 
 the suffrage ; it is possible enough to say 
 something of the literary quality of a work 
 that appeared yesterday. Stevenson him- 
 self was singularly free from the vanity 
 of fame ; ' the best artist/ he says truly, 
 'is not the man who fixes his eye on 
 posterity, but the one who loves the prac- 
 tice of his art.' He loved, if ever man 
 did, the practice of his art; and those 
 who find meat and drink in the delight 
 of watching and appreciating the skilful 
 practice of the literary art, will abandon 
 themselves to the enjoyment of his 
 masterstrokes without teasing their un- 
 born and possibly illiterate posterity to 
 answer solemn questions. Will a book
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 11 
 
 live ? Will a cricket match live ? Perhaps 
 not, and yet both be fine achievements. 
 
 It is not easy to estimate the loss to 
 letters by his early death. In the dedication 
 of Prince Otto he says, ' Well, we will not 
 give in that we are finally beaten. ... I 
 still mean to get my health again ; I still 
 purpose, by hook or crook, this book or 
 the next, to launch a masterpiece.' It 
 would be a churlish or a very dainty 
 critic who should deny that he has 
 launched masterpieces, but whether he 
 ever launched his masterpiece is an open 
 question. Of the story that he was 
 writing just before his death he is reported 
 to have said that ' the goodness of 
 it frightened him.' A goodness that 
 frightened him will surely not be visible, 
 like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of 
 eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to
 
 12 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 come. Had Dry den died at his age, we 
 should have had none of the great satires ; 
 had Scott died at his age, we should have 
 had no Waverley Novels. Dying at the 
 height of his power, and in the full tide 
 of thought and activity, he seems almost 
 to have fulfilled the aspiration and un- 
 conscious prophecy of one of the early 
 essays : 
 
 ' 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 that 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-
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 13 
 
 ing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, 
 this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots 
 into the spiritual land.' 
 
 But we on this side are the poorer — 
 by how much we can never know. What 
 strengthens the conviction that he might 
 yet have surpassed himself and dwarfed 
 his own best work is, certainly no im- 
 maturity, for the flavour of wisdom and 
 old experience hangs about his earliest 
 writings, but a vague sense awakened by 
 that brilliant series of books, so diverse in 
 theme, so slight often in structure and 
 occasion, so gaily executed, that here was 
 a finished literary craftsman, who had 
 served his period of apprenticeship and 
 was playing with his tools. The pleasure 
 of wielding the graving tool, the itch of 
 craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and 
 many of the works he has left are the
 
 14 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques 
 carved on the rock in the artist's painless 
 hours. 
 
 All art, it is true, is play of a sort ; the 
 ' sport-impulse ' (to translate a German 
 phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's 
 power ; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, 
 and Goethe, in a very profound sense, 
 make game of life. But to make game of 
 life was to each of these the very loftiest 
 and most imperative employ to be found 
 for him on this planet ; to hold the mirror 
 up to Nature so that for the first time 
 she may see herself, to ' be a candle-holder 
 and look on ' at the pageantry which, but 
 for the candle-holder, would huddle along 
 in the undistinguishable blackness, filled 
 them with the pride of place. Stevenson 
 had the sport-impulse at the depths of 
 his nature, but he also had, perhaps he
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 15 
 
 had inherited, an instinct for work in more 
 blockish material, for lighthouse-building 
 and iron- founding. In a 'Letter to a 
 Young Artist,' contributed to a magazine 
 years ago, he compares the artist in 
 paint or in words to the keeper of a 
 booth at the world's fair, dependent for 
 his bread on his success in amusing others. 
 In his volume of poems he almost apolo- 
 gises for his excellence in literature : 
 
 ' Say not of me, that weakly I declined 
 The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, 
 The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, 
 To play at home with paper like a child ; 
 But rather say : In the afternoon of time 
 A strenuous family dusted from its hands 
 The sand of granite, and beholding far 
 Along the sounding coasts its pyramids 
 And tall memorials catch the dying sim, 
 Smiled well-content, and to this childish task 
 Around the fire addressed its evening hoiirs.' 
 
 Some of his works are, no doubt, best 
 described as paper-games. In The Wrong
 
 16 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Box, for instance, there is something very 
 like the card-game commonly called ' Old 
 Maid ' ; the odd card is a superfluous 
 corpse, and each dismayed recipient in 
 turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym 
 and bravely passes on that uncomfortable 
 inheritance. It is an admirable farce, 
 hardly touched with grimness, unshaken 
 by the breath of reality, full of fantastic 
 character ; the strange funeral procession 
 is attended by shouts of glee at each 
 of its stages, and finally melts into 
 space. 
 
 But, when all is said, it is not with 
 work of this kind that Olympus is stormed; 
 art must be brought closer into relation 
 with life, these airy and delightful freaks 
 of fancy must be subdued to a serious 
 scheme if they are to serve as credentials 
 for a seat among the immortals. The
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 17 
 
 decorative painter, whose pencil runs so 
 freely in limning these half-human pro- 
 cessions of outlined fauns and wood- 
 nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel 
 picture. 
 
 Stevenson is best where he shows most 
 restraint, and his peculiarly rich fancy, 
 which ran riot at the suggestion of every 
 passing whim, gave him, what many a 
 modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to re- 
 strain, an exuberant field for self-denial. 
 Here was an opportunity for art and 
 labour ; the luxuriance of the virgin forests 
 of the West may be clipped and pruned 
 for a lifetime with no fear of reducing 
 them to the trim similitude of a Dutch 
 garden. His bountiful and generous 
 nature could profit by a spell of training 
 that would emaciate a poorer stock. From 
 the first, his delight in earth and the 
 
 B
 
 18 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 earth-born was keen and multiform ; his 
 zest in life 
 
 'put a spirit of youth in everything, 
 That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him'; 
 
 and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, 
 made of the world around him an en- 
 chanted pleasance. The realism, as it is 
 called, that deals only with the banalities 
 and squalors of life, and weaves into the 
 mesh of its story no character but would 
 make you yawn if you passed ten minutes 
 with him in a railway carriage, might well 
 take a lesson from this man, if it had the 
 brains. Picture to yourself (it is not hard) 
 an average suburb of London. The long 
 rows of identical bilious brick houses, 
 with the inevitable lace curtains, a symbol 
 merely of the will and power to wash ; the 
 awful nondescript object, generally under 
 glass, in the front window — the shrine of
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 19 
 
 the unknown god of art ; the sombre in- 
 variable citizen, whose garb gives no sug- 
 gestion of his occupation or his tastes — a 
 person, it would seem, only by courtesy ; 
 the piano-organ the music of the day, and 
 the hideous voice of the vendor of half- 
 penny papers the music of the night ; 
 could anything be less promising than 
 such a row of houses for the theatre of 
 romance ? Set a realist to walk down one 
 of these streets: he will inquire about milk- 
 bills and servants' wages, latch-keys and 
 Sunday avocations, and come back with 
 a tale of small meannesses and petty 
 respectabilities written in the approved 
 modern fashion. Yet Stevenson, it seems 
 likely, could not pass along such a line 
 of brick bandboxes without having his 
 pulses set a-throbbing by the imagina- 
 tive possibilities of the place. Of his
 
 20 ROBEUT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he 
 
 says : 
 
 ' The succession of faces in the lamplight 
 stirred the lieutenant's imagination ; and it 
 seemed to him as if he could walk for ever 
 in that stimulating city atmosphere and sur- 
 rounded by the mystery of four million private 
 lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled 
 what was passing behind those warmly lighted 
 windows ; he looked into face after face, and 
 saw them each intent upon some unknown 
 interest, criminal or kindly.' 
 
 It was that same evening that Prince 
 Florizel's friend, under the name of Mr. 
 Morris, was giving a party in one of the 
 houses of West Kensington. In one at 
 least of the houses of that brick wilderness 
 human spirits were being tested as on an 
 anvil, and most of them tossed aside. So 
 also, in The Rajah's Diamond, it was a quiet 
 suburban garden that witnessed the sud- 
 den apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 21 
 
 his treasures precipitated over the wall ; it 
 was in the same garden that the Rev. 
 Simon Holies suddenly, to his own sur- 
 prise, became a thief. A monotony of bad 
 building is no doubt a bad thing, but it 
 cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate 
 the agonies of the mind of man. 
 
 To a man with Stevenson's live and 
 searching imagination, every work of 
 human hands became vocal with possible 
 associations. Buildings positively chat- 
 tered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, 
 which even for Scott had meant only 
 mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 
 ' vera weel preserved,' gave him the car- 
 dinal incident of Kidnapped. How should 
 the world ever seem dull or sordid to one 
 whom a railway- station would take into 
 its confidence, to whom the very flagstones 
 of the pavement told their story, in whose
 
 22 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 mind ' the effect of night, of any flowing 
 water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, 
 of ships, of the open ocean,' called up 'an 
 army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? 
 To have the ' golden-tongued Romance 
 with serene lute' for a mistress and 
 familiar is to be fortified against the 
 assaults of tedium. 
 
 His attitude towards the surprising and 
 momentous gift of life was one prolonged 
 passion of praise and joy. There is none 
 of his books that reads like the medita- 
 tions of an invalid. He has the readiest 
 sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive 
 energy ; his heart goes out to a sailor, and 
 leaps into ecstasy over a generous adven- 
 turer or buccaneer. Of one of his earlier 
 books he says : ' From the negative point 
 of view I flatter myself this volume has a 
 certain stamp. Although it runs to con-
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 23 
 
 siderably upwards of two hundred pages, 
 it contains not a single reference to the 
 imbecility of God's universe, nor so much 
 as a single hint that I could have made 
 a better one myself.' And this was an 
 omission that he never remedied in his 
 later works. Indeed, his zest in life, 
 whether lived in the back gardens of a 
 town or on the high seas, was so great that 
 it seems probable the writer would have 
 been lost had the man been dowered with 
 better health. 
 
 ' Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 
 The way that takes the town, 
 Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book, 
 And wrap me in a gown,' 
 
 says George Herbert, who, in his earlier 
 ambitions, would fain have ruffled it with 
 the best at the court of King James. 
 But from Stevenson, although not only
 
 24 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the town, but oceans and continents, 
 beckoned him to deeds, no such wail 
 escaped. His indomitable cheerfulness 
 was never embarked in the cock-boat of 
 his own prosperity. A high and simple 
 courage shines through all his writings. 
 It is supposed to be a normal human feel- 
 ing for those who are hale to sympathise 
 with others who are in pain. Stevenson 
 reversed the position, and there is no 
 braver spectacle in literature than to see 
 him not asking others to lower their voices 
 in his sick-room, but raising his own voice 
 that he may make them feel at ease and 
 avoid imposing his misfortunes on their 
 notice. ' Once when I was groaning aloud 
 with physical pain,' he says in the essay 
 on Child's Play, ' a young gentleman came 
 into the room and nonchalantly inquired 
 if I had seen his bow and arrow. He
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 25 
 
 made no account of my groans, which he 
 accepted, as he had to accept so much else, 
 as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of 
 his elders ; and, like a wise young gentle- 
 man, he would waste no wonder on the 
 subject/ Was there ever a passage like 
 this % The sympathy of the writer is 
 wholly with the child, and the child's 
 absolute indifference to his own sufferings. 
 It might have been safely predicted that 
 this man, should he ever attain to pathos, 
 would be free from the facile, maudlin 
 pathos of the hired sentimentalist. 
 
 And so also with what Dr. Johnson 
 has called ' metaphysical distresses.' It is 
 striking enough to observe how differently 
 the quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and 
 Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew 
 Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 
 his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew
 
 26 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Arnold likens his own state to that of the 
 monks : 
 
 1 Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 Witli nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 Like these on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride— 
 I come to shed them at their side.' 
 
 To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady 
 of the Snows is a mistaken divinity, and 
 the place a monument of chilly error, — for 
 once in a way he takes it on himself to be 
 a preacher, his temperament gives voice in 
 a creed : 
 
 'And ye, brethren, what if God, 
 When from Heaven's top He spies abroad, 
 And sees on this tormented stage 
 The noble war of mankind rage, 
 What if His vivifying eye, 
 monks, should pass your corner^ by ? 
 
 
 For still the Lord is Lord of might ; 
 In deeds, iu deeds, he takes delight ; 
 The plough, the spear, the laden barks, 
 The field, the founded city, marks ;
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 27 
 
 He marks the srailer of the streets, 
 The singer upon garden seats ; 
 He sees the climber in the rocks ; 
 To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks ; 
 For those He loves that underprop 
 With daily virtues Heaven's top, 
 And bear the falling sky with ease, 
 Unfrowning Caryatides. 
 Those He approves that ply the trade, 
 That rock the child, that wed the maid, 
 That with weak virtues, weaker hands, 
 Sow gladness on the peopled lands, 
 And still with laughter, song, and shout 
 
 ■ 
 
 Spin the great wheel of earth about. 
 
 But ye ? — ye who linger still 
 Here in your fortress on the hill, 
 With placid face, with tranquil breath, 
 The unsought volunteers of death, 
 Our cheerful General on high 
 With careless looks may pass you by ! ' 
 
 And the fact of death, which has damped 
 and darkened the writings of so many 
 minor poets, does not cast a pallor on 
 his conviction. Life is of value only 
 because it can be spent, or given ; and 
 the love of God coveted the position, and
 
 28 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 assumed mortality. If a man treasure 
 and hug his life, one thing only is certain, 
 that he will be robbed some day, and cut 
 the pitiable and futile figure of one who 
 has been saving candle-ends in a house 
 that is on fire. Better than this to have 
 a foolish spendthrift blaze and the loving 
 cup going round. Stevenson speaks al- 
 most with a personal envy of the conduct 
 of the four marines of the Wager. There 
 was no room for them in the boat, and 
 they were left on a desert island to a 
 certain death. ' They were soldiers, they 
 said, and knew well enough it was their 
 business to die ; and as their comrades 
 pulled away, they stood upon the beach, 
 gave three cheers, and cried, "God bless 
 the king ! ' : Now, one or two of those 
 who were in the boat escaped, against all 
 likelihood, to tell the story. That was
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 29 
 
 a great thing for us ' — even when life is 
 extorted it may be given nobly, with 
 ceremony and courtesy. So strong was 
 Stevenson's admiration for heroic graces 
 like these that in the requiem that appears 
 in his poems he speaks of an ordinary 
 death as of a hearty exploit, and draws 
 his figures from lives of adventure and toil : 
 
 ' Under the wide and starry sky- 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die, 
 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 This be the verse you grave for me : 
 Here he lies where he longed to be, 
 Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
 
 And the hunter home from the hill. 1 
 
 This man should surely have been honoured 
 with the pomp and colour and music of 
 a soldier's funeral. 
 
 The most remarkable feature of the 
 work he has left is its singular combina- 
 tion of style and romance. It has so
 
 30 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 happened, and the accident has gained 
 almost the strength of a tradition, that 
 the most assiduous followers of romance 
 have been careless stylists. They have 
 trusted to the efficacy of their situation 
 and incident, and have too often cared 
 little about the manner of its presentation. 
 By an odd piece of irony style has been 
 left to the cultivation of those who have 
 little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott 
 himself, with all his splendid romantic and 
 tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly 
 just phrase, ' fobs us off with languid and 
 inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote care- 
 lessly and genially, and then breakfasted, 
 and began the business of the day. But 
 Stevenson, who had romance tingling in 
 every vein of his body, set himself labo- 
 riously and patiently to train his other 
 faculty, the faculty of style.
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 31 
 
 I. Style. — Let no one say that ' read- 
 ing and writing comes by nature,' unless 
 he is prepared to be classed with the 
 foolish burgess who said it first. A poet 
 is born, not made, — so is every man, — but 
 he is born raw. Stevenson's life was a 
 grave devotion to the education of himself 
 in the art of writing. 
 
 ' The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, 
 Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.' 
 
 Those who deny the necessity, or decry the 
 utility, of such an education, are generally 
 deficient in a sense of what makes good 
 literature — they are ' word-deaf,' as others 
 are colour-blind. All writing is a kind 
 of word-weaving ; a skilful writer will 
 make a splendid tissue out of the diverse 
 fibres of words. But to care for words, 
 to select them judiciously and lovingly, 
 is not in the least essential to all writing,
 
 32 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 all speaking ; for the sad fact is this, that 
 most of us do our thinking, our writing, 
 and our speaking in phrases, not in words. 
 The work of a feeble writer is always 
 a patchwork of phrases, some of them 
 borrowed from the imperial texture of 
 Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up 
 from the rags in the street. We make 
 our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's 
 carpet. How many overworn quotations 
 from Shakespeare suddenly leap into mean- 
 ing and brightness when they are seen in 
 their context ! ' The cry is still, " They 
 come ! " ' — ' More honoured in the breach 
 than the observance,' — the sight of 
 these phrases in the splendour of their 
 dramatic context in Macbeth and Hamlet 
 casts shame upon their daily degraded 
 employments. But the man of affairs 
 has neither the time to fashion his speech,
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 33 
 
 nor the knowledge to choose his words, 
 so he borrows his sentences ready-made, 
 and applies them in rough haste to pur- 
 poses that they do not exactly fit. Such 
 a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, 
 monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs 
 of thought in the material that has been 
 woven into consistency by others. It 
 is a matter of natural taste, developed 
 and strengthened by continual practice, to 
 avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases. 
 The artist in words, on the other hand, 
 although he is a lover of fine phrases, 
 in his word- weaving experiments uses no 
 shoddy, but cultivates his senses of touch 
 and sight until he can combine the raw 
 fibres in novel and bewitching patterns. 
 To this end he must have two things : 
 a fine sense, in the first place, of the 
 sound, value, meaning, and associations of 
 
 c
 
 34 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 individual words, and next, a sense of 
 harmony, proportion, and effect in their 
 combination. It is amazing what nobility 
 a mere truism is often found to possess 
 when it is clad with a garment thus 
 woven. 
 
 Stevenson had both these sensitive 
 capabilities in a very high degree. His 
 careful choice of epithet and name have 
 even been criticised as lending to some 
 of his narrative-writing an excessive air 
 of deliberation. His daintiness of diction 
 is best seen in his earlier work; thereafter 
 his writing became more vigorous and 
 direct, fitter for its later uses, but never 
 unillumined by felicities that cause a 
 thrill of pleasure to the reader. Of the 
 value of words he had the acutest apprecia- 
 tion. Virginibus Puerisque, his first book 
 of essays, is crowded with happy hits and
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 35 
 
 subtle implications conveyed in a single 
 word. ' We have all heard/ he says in 
 one of these, ' of cities in South America 
 built upon the side of fiery mountains, 
 and how, even in this tremendous neigh- 
 bourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot 
 more impressed by the solemnity of mortal 
 conditions than if they were delving gar- 
 dens in the greenest corner of England.' 
 You can feel the ground shake and see 
 the volcano tower above you at that word 
 ' tremendous neighbourhood.' Something 
 of the same double reference to the 
 original and acquired meanings of a word 
 is to be found in such a phrase as { sedate 
 electrician/ for one who in a back office 
 wields all the lights of a city ; or in that 
 description of one drawing near to death, 
 who is spoken of as groping already with 
 his hands ' on the face of the impassable.'
 
 36 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 The likeness of this last word to a very 
 different word, ' impassive' is made to do 
 good literary service in suggesting the 
 sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, 
 as here, this subtle sense of double mean- 
 ings almost leads to punning. In Across 
 the Plains Stevenson narrates how a bet 
 was transacted at a railway station, and 
 subsequently he supposes ' liquidated at 
 the bar.' This is perhaps an instance of 
 the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess 
 to be found plentifully in the works of 
 Milton. 
 
 His loving regard for words bears good 
 fruit in his later and more stirring works. 
 He has a quick ear and appreciation for 
 live phrases on the lips of tramps, beach- 
 combers, or Americans. In The Beach of 
 Falesd the sea-captain who introduces the 
 new trader to the South Pacific island,
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 37 
 
 where the scene of the story is laid, gives 
 a brief description of the fate of the last 
 dealer in copra. It may serve as a single 
 illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, 
 and imaginative slang : 
 
 ' " Do you catch a bit of white there to the 
 east'ard ? " the captain continued. " That 's 
 your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, 
 he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've 
 dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. ' So you 
 have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny ! I never saw 
 him again but the once . . . and the next time 
 we came round there he was dead and buried. 
 I took and put up a bit of a stick to him : ' John 
 Adams, obit eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou 
 and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never 
 could see much harm in Johnny." 
 
 '"What did he die of?" I inquired. 
 
 ' " Some kind of sickness," says the captain. 
 " It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got 
 up in the night, and filled up on Pain-Killer 
 and Kennedy's Discovery. No go — he was 
 booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to 
 open a case of gin. No go again : not strong 
 enough. . . . Poor John ! " '
 
 38 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 There is a world of abrupt, homely talk 
 like this to be found in the speech of 
 Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in 
 The Wrecker; and a wealth of Scottish 
 dialect, similar in effect, in Kidnapped, 
 Catriona, and many other stories. It 
 was a delicate ear and a sense trained by 
 practice that picked up these vivid turns 
 of speech, some of them perhaps heard 
 only once, and a mind given to dwell on 
 words, that remembered them for years, 
 and brought them out when occasion arose. 
 
 But the praise of Stevenson's style can- 
 not be exhausted in a description of his 
 use of individual words or his memory 
 of individual phrases. His mastery of 
 syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrange- 
 ment of words in sentences, a branch of 
 art so seldom mastered, was even greater. 
 And here he could owe no great debt
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 39 
 
 to his romantic predecessors in prose. 
 Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, 
 but he wrote in French, and a style will 
 hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sen- 
 tences are, many of them, shambling, 
 knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked 
 further back for his models, and fed his 
 style on the most vigorous of the prose 
 writers of the seventeenth and early 
 eighteenth centuries, the golden age of 
 English prose. ' What English those fel- 
 lows wrote ! ' says Fitzgerald in one of 
 his letters ; ' I cannot read the modern 
 mechanique after them.' And he quotes 
 a passage from Harrington's Oceana : 
 
 ' This free-born Nation lives not upon the 
 dole or Bounty of One Man, but distributing 
 her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her 
 own hand, is herself King People.' 
 
 It was from writers of Harrington's
 
 
 40 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 time and later that Stevenson learned 
 something of his craft. Bunyan and 
 Defoe should be particularly mentioned, 
 and that later excellent worthy, Captain 
 Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever- 
 memorable Lives of Pirates and Highway- 
 men. Mr. George Meredith is the chief 
 of those very few modern writers whose 
 influence may be detected in his style. 
 
 However it was made, and whencesoever 
 the material or suggestion borrowed, he 
 came by a very admirable instrument for 
 the telling of stories. Those touches of 
 archaism that are so frequent with him, 
 the slightly unusual phrasing, or unex- 
 pected inversion of the order of words, 
 show a mind alert in its expression, and 
 give the sting of novelty even to the 
 commonplaces of narrative or conversa- 
 tion. A nimble literary tact will
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 41 
 
 work its will on the phrases of current 
 small-talk, remoulding them nearer to 
 the heart's desire, transforming them to 
 its own stamp. This wa3 what Stevenson 
 did, and the very conversations that 
 pass between his characters have an air 
 of distinction that is all his own. His 
 books are full of brilliant talk — talk real 
 and convincing enough in its purport and 
 setting, but purged of the languors and 
 fatuities of actual commonplace conversa- 
 tion. It is an enjoyment like that to be 
 obtained from a brilliant exhibition of 
 fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at 
 the talking bouts of David Balfour and 
 Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, 
 Alexander Mackellar and the Master of 
 Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John 
 Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces 
 of special pleading to be found in A
 
 42 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Lodging for the Night and The Sire de 
 MaUtroit's Door. But people do not talk 
 like this in actual life — ' 'tis true, 'tis pity ; 
 and pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not ; in 
 actual life conversation is generally so 
 smeared and blurred with stupidities, so 
 invaded and dominated by the spirit of 
 dulness, so liable to swoon into meaning- 
 lessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books 
 is like an escape into mountain air from 
 the stagnant vapours of a morass. The 
 exact reproduction of conversation as it 
 occurs in life can only be undertaken by 
 one whose natural dulness feels itself in- 
 commoded by wit and fancy as by a grit 
 in the eye. Conversation is often no more 
 than a nervous habit of body, like twid- 
 dling the thumbs, and to record each 
 particular remark is as much as to describe 
 each particular twiddle. Or in its more
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 43 
 
 intellectual uses, when speech is employed, 
 for instance, to conceal our thoughts, how 
 often is it a world too wide for the 
 shrunken nudity of the thought it is 
 meant to veil, and thrown over it, form- 
 less, flabby, and black — like a tarpaulin ! 
 It is pleasant to see thought and feeling 
 dressed for once in the trim, bright 
 raiment Stevenson devises for them. 
 
 There is an indescribable air of distinc- 
 tion, which is, and is not, one and the same 
 thing with style, breathing from all his 
 works. Even when he is least inspired, 
 his bearing and gait could never be mis- 
 taken for another man's. All that he writes 
 is removed by the width of the spheres 
 from the possibility of commonplace, and 
 he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls 
 of genius with noble and unconscious skill. 
 
 If he ever fell into one of these — which
 
 44 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 may perhaps be doubted — it was through 
 too implicit a confidence in the powers of 
 style. His open letter to the Kev. Dr. 
 Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is 
 perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a 
 matchless piece of scorn and invective, not 
 inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. 
 But that it was well done is no proof 
 that it should have been done at all. 
 ' I remember Uzzah and am afraid/ said 
 the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to 
 undertake the defence of Holy Church ; 
 ' it is not every one who is permitted 
 to support the Ark of the Covenant.' 
 And the only disquietude suggested by 
 Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he 
 really has a claim to be Father Damien's 
 defender, whether Father Damien had need 
 of the assistance of a literary freelance. 
 The Saint who was bitten in the hand
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 45 
 
 by a serpent shook it off into the fire 
 and stood unharmed. As it was in the 
 Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, 
 and there is something officious in the 
 intrusion of a spectator, something irrele- 
 vant in the plentiful pronouns of the first 
 person singular to be found sprinkled 
 over Stevenson's letter. The curse 
 spoken in Eden, ' Upon thy belly shalt 
 thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the 
 days of thy life,' surely covered by antici- 
 pation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde. 
 
 II. Romance. — The faculty of romance, 
 the greatest of the gifts showered on 
 Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will 
 suffer no course of development ; the most 
 that can be done with it is to preserve 
 it on from childhood unblemished and 
 undiminished. It is of a piece with
 
 46 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Stevenson's romantic ability that his own 
 childhood never ended ; he could pass back 
 into that airy world without an effort. 
 In his stories his imagination worked on 
 the old lines, but it became conscious of 
 its working. And the highest note of 
 these stories is not drama, nor character, 
 but romance. In one of his essays he defines 
 the highest achievement of romance to be 
 the embodiment ' of character, thought, or 
 emotion in some act or attitude that shall 
 be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' 
 His essay on Victor Hugo shows how 
 keenly conscious he was that narrative 
 romance can catch and embody emotions 
 and effects that are for ever out of the 
 reach of the drama proper, and of the 
 essay or homily, just as they are out of 
 the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, 
 it is precisely in these effects that the
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 47 
 
 chief excellence of romance resides ; it was 
 the discovery of a world of these effects, 
 insusceptible of treatment by the drama, 
 neglected entirely by the character-novel, 
 which constituted the Romantic revival of 
 the end of last century. ' The artistic 
 result of a romance,' says Stevenson, ' what 
 is left upon the memory by any powerful 
 and artistic novel, is something so compli- 
 cated and refined that it is difficult to 
 put a name upon it, and yet something as 
 simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that 
 art is working far ahead of language as 
 well as of science, realising for us, by all 
 manner of suggestions and exaggerations, 
 effects for which as yet we have no direct 
 name, for the reason that these effects do 
 not enter very largely into the necessities 
 of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of 
 vagueness that often hangs about the pur-
 
 48 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 pose of a romance ; it is clear enough to us 
 in thought, but we are not used to consider 
 anything clear until we are able to formu- 
 late it in words, and analytical language 
 has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.' 
 He goes on to point out that there is an 
 epical value about every great romance, 
 an underlying idea, not presentable always 
 in abstract or critical terms, in the stories 
 of such masters of pure romance as Victor 
 Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
 The progress of romance in the present 
 century has consisted chiefly in the dis- 
 covery of new exercises of imagination 
 and new subtle effects in story. Fielding, 
 as Stevenson says, did not understand 
 that the nature of a landscape or the 
 spirit of the times could count for any- 
 thing in a story ; all his actions consist of 
 a few simple personal elements. With
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 49 
 
 Scott vague influences that qualify a 
 man's personality begin to make a large 
 claim ; ' the individual characters begin to 
 occupy a comparatively small proportion 
 of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre 
 and great hills pile themselves upon each 
 other's shoulders.' And the achievements 
 of the great masters since Scott — Hugo, 
 Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those 
 in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry — 
 have added new realms to the domain of 
 romance. 
 
 What are the indescribable effects that 
 romance, casting far beyond problems of 
 character and conduct, seeks to realise ? 
 What is the nature of the great informing, 
 underlying idea that animates a truly 
 great romance— The Bride ofLammermoor, 
 Monte Christo, Les Miser ables, The Scarlet 
 Letter, The Master of Ballantrae ? These 
 
 D
 
 50 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 questions can only be answered by de- 
 forming the impression given by each of 
 these works to present it in the chop-logic 
 language of philosophy. But an approach 
 to an answer may be made by illustration. 
 In his American Notebooks Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne used to jot down subjects for 
 stories as they struck him. His successive 
 entries are like the souls of stories await- 
 ing embodiment, which many of them 
 never received ; they bring us very near 
 to the workings of the mind of a great 
 master. Here are some of them : — 
 
 ' A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, 
 a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject 
 of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes 
 about the streets haranguing most eloquently, 
 and is on the point of making many converts, 
 when his labours are suddenly interrupted by 
 the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse 
 whence he has escaped. Much may be made of 
 this idea.'
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 51 
 
 ' The scene of a story or sketch to be laid 
 within the light of a street lantern; the time, 
 when the lamp is near going out; and the 
 catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last 
 flickering gleam.' 
 
 'A person to be writing a tale and to rind 
 it shapes itself against his intentions ; that the 
 characters act otherwise than he thought, and a 
 catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to 
 avert. It might shadow forth his own fate — he 
 having made himself one of the personages.' 
 
 ' Two persons to be expecting some occurrence 
 and watching for the two principal actors in it, 
 and to find that the occurrence is even then 
 passing, and that they themselves are the two 
 actors.' 
 
 ' A satire on ambition and fame from a statue 
 of snow.' 
 
 Hawthorne used this idea in one of his 
 sketches. 
 
 ' A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or 
 otherwise get possession of a human being, 
 and to use him for the sake of experiment 
 by trying the operation of a certain vice on 
 him.'
 
 52 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 M. Bourget, the French romancer, has 
 made use of this idea in his novel called Le 
 Disciple. Only it is not a slave, but a young 
 girl whom he pretends to love, that is the 
 subject of the moral philosopher's experi- 
 ment ; and a noisy war has been waged 
 round the book in France. Hawthorne 
 would plainly have seized the romantic 
 essence of the idea and would have avoided 
 the boneyard of ' problem morality.' 
 
 ' A story the principal personage of which 
 shall seem always on the point of entering on 
 the scene, but shall never appear.' 
 
 This is the device that gives fascination 
 to the figures of Richelieu in Marion 
 Delorme and of Captain Flint in Treasure 
 Island. 
 
 ' The majesty of death to be exemplified in a 
 beggar, who, after being seen humble and cring- 
 ing in the streets of a city for many years, at
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 53 
 
 length by some means or other gets admittance 
 into a rich man's mansion, and there dies — 
 assuming state, and striking awe into the 
 breasts of those who had looked down upon 
 him.' 
 
 These are all excellent instances of the 
 sort of idea that gives life to a romance — 
 of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves 
 upon the mind's eye. Some of them 
 appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others 
 are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for 
 the most part, the romantic kernel of a 
 story is neither pure picture nor pure 
 allegory, it can neither be painted nor 
 moralised. It makes its most irresistible 
 appeal neither to the eye that searches for 
 form and colour, nor to the reason that 
 seeks for abstract truth, but to the blood, 
 to all that dim instinct of danger, mys- 
 tery, and sympathy in things that is 
 man's oldest inheritance — to the super-
 
 54 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 stitions of the heart. Romance vindicates 
 the supernatural against science and 
 rescues it from the palsied tutelage of 
 morality. 
 
 Stevenson's work is a gallery of roman- 
 tic effects that haunt the memory. Some 
 of these are directly pictorial : the fight 
 in the round-house on board the brig 
 Covenant ; the duel between the two 
 brothers of Ballantrae in the island of 
 light thrown up by the candles from that 
 abyss of windless night ; the flight of the 
 Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes 
 of the wood, — all these, although they 
 carry with them subtleties beyond the 
 painter's art, yet have something of picture 
 in them. But others make entrance to 
 the corridors of the mind by blind and 
 secret ways, and there awaken the echoes 
 of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 55 
 
 — 'Pieces of eight' — the tapping of the 
 stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws 
 near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects 
 of inexplicable terror wrought by the 
 introduction of the blind catechist in 
 Kidnapped, and of the disguise of a blind 
 leper in The Black Arrow, are beyond 
 the reach of any but the literary form of 
 romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, 
 in the play of Admiral Guinea, written in 
 collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is 
 perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes 
 of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of 
 panic fear, when he puts his groping hand 
 into the burning flame of the candle in 
 the room where he believed that he was 
 unseen, and so realises that his every move- 
 ment is being silently watched, is indeed 
 ' the horrors come alive.' 
 
 The animating principle or idea of
 
 56 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Stevenson's longer stories is never to be 
 found in their plot, which is generally built 
 carelessly and disjointedly enough around 
 the central romantic situation or concep- 
 tion. The main situation in The Wrecker 
 is a splendid product of romantic inspira- 
 tion, but the structure of the story is in- 
 coherent and ineffective, so that some of 
 the best passages in the book — the scenes 
 in Paris, for instance — have no business 
 there at all. The story in Kidnapped and 
 Catriona wanders on in a single thread, 
 like the pageant of a dream, and the reader 
 feels and sympathises with the author's 
 obvious difficulty in leading it back to the 
 scene of the trial and execution of James 
 Stewart. The Master of Ballantrae is 
 stamped with a magnificent unity of con- 
 ception, but the story illuminates that 
 conception by a series of scattered episodes.
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 57 
 
 That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, 
 part vampire, part Mephistopheles, whose 
 grand manner and heroic abilities might 
 have made him a great and good man but 
 for ' the malady of not wanting,' is the 
 light and meaning of the whole book. 
 Innocent and benevolent lives are thrown 
 in his way that he may mock or distort 
 or shatter them. Stevenson never came 
 nearer than in this character to the sub- 
 lime of power. 
 
 But an informing principle of unity is 
 more readily to be apprehended in the 
 shorter stories, and it is a unity not so 
 much of plot as of impression and atmo- 
 sphere. His islands, whether situated in 
 the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, 
 have each of them a climate of its own, 
 and the character of the place seems to 
 impose itself on the incidents that occur,
 
 58 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 dictating subordination or contrast. The 
 events that happen within the limits of 
 one of these magic isles could in every 
 case be cut off from the rest of the story 
 and framed as a separate work of art. 
 The long starvation of David Balfour on 
 the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime 
 and monsters of blasphemy that break the 
 peace of the shining tropical lagoons in 
 Treasure Island and The Ebb Tide, the 
 captivity on the Bass Bock in Catriona, 
 the supernatural terrors that hover and 
 mutter over the island of The Merry Men, 
 — these imaginations are plainly generated 
 by the scenery against which they are 
 thrown ; each is in some sort the genius 
 of the place it inhabits. 
 
 In his search for the treasures of 
 romance, Stevenson adventured freely 
 enough into the realm of the supernatural.
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 59 
 
 When he is handling the superstitions of 
 the Scottish people, he allows his humorous 
 enjoyment of their extravagance to peep 
 out from behind the solemn dialect in 
 which they are dressed. The brief tale of 
 Thrawn Janet, and Black Andy's story of 
 Tod Lapraik in Catriona, are grotesque 
 imaginations of the school of Tarn o' 
 Shanter rather than of the school of 
 Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy 
 ghosts. They are turnip -lanterns swayed 
 by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears 
 he can awaken. Even The Strange Case 
 of Dr. Jehjll and Mr. Hyde and the 
 story of The Bottle Imp are manufactured 
 bogeys, that work on the nerves and not 
 on the heart, whatever may be said by 
 those who insist on seeing allegory in 
 what is only dream -fantasy. The super- 
 natural must be rooted deeper than these
 
 GO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 in life and experience if it is to reach an 
 imposing stature : the true ghost is the 
 shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows 
 a sense of this in two of his very finest 
 stories, the exquisite idyll of Will o' the 
 Mill and the grim history of Markheim. 
 Each of these stories is the work of a poet, 
 by no means of a goblin-fancier. The 
 personification of Death is as old as 
 poetry ; it is wrought with moving gentle- 
 ness in that last scene in the arbour of 
 Will's inn. The wafted scent of the 
 heliotropes, which had never been planted 
 in the garden since Marjory's death, the 
 light in the room that had been hers, 
 prelude the arrival at the gate of the 
 stranger's carriage, with the black pine 
 tops standing above it like plumes. And 
 Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance 
 of his physician and friend, and goes at
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 61 
 
 last upon his travels. In the other story, 
 Markheim meets with his own double in 
 the house of the dealer in curiosities, whom 
 he has murdered. It is not such a double 
 as Kossetti prayed for to the god of 
 Sleep : 
 
 ' Ah ! inight I, by thy good grace, 
 
 Groping in the windy stair, 
 (Darkness and the breath of space 
 
 Like loud waters everywhere,) 
 Meeting mine own image there 
 
 Face to face, 
 Send it from that place to her ! ' 
 
 but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, 
 not unfriendly, who lays bare before him 
 his motives and his history. At the close 
 of that wonderful conversation, one of the 
 most brilliant of its author's achievements, 
 Markheim gives himself into the hands of 
 the police. These two stories, when com- 
 pared with the others, serve to show how 
 Stevenson's imagination quickened and
 
 62 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 strengthened when it played full upon 
 life. For his best romantic effects, like 
 all great romance, are illuminative of life, 
 and no mere idle games. 
 
 III. Morality. — His genius, like the 
 genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was 
 doubly rich, in the spirit of romance and 
 in a wise and beautiful morality. But 
 the irresponsible caprices of his narrative 
 fancy prevented his tales from being the 
 appropriate vehicles of his morality. He 
 has left no work — unless the two short 
 stories mentioned above be regarded as 
 exceptions — in which romance and morality 
 are welded into a single perfect whole, 
 nothing that can be put beside The Scarlet 
 Letter or The Marble Faun for deep in- 
 sight and magic fancy joined in one. 
 Hence his essays, containing as they do 
 
 ¥*
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 63 
 
 the gist of his reflective wisdom, are 
 ranked by some critics above his stories. 
 
 A novel cannot, of course, be moral as 
 an action is moral ; there is no question in 
 art of police regulations or conformity to 
 established codes, but rather of insight 
 both deep and wide. Polygamy and 
 monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and canni- 
 balism, are all acceptable to the romancer, 
 whose business is with the heart of man 
 in all times and places. He is not bound 
 to display allegiance to particular moral 
 laws of the kind that can be broken ; he 
 is bound to show his consciousness of that 
 wider moral order which can no more 
 be broken by crime than the law of 
 gravitation can be broken by the fall of 
 china — the morality without which life 
 would be impossible; the relations, namely, 
 of human beings to each other, the feel-
 
 64 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 ings, habits, and thoughts that are the 
 web of society. For the appreciation of 
 morality in this wider sense high gifts of 
 imagination are necessary. Shakespeare 
 could never have drawn Macbeth, and 
 thereby made apparent the awfulness of 
 murder, without some sympathy for the 
 murderer — the sympathy of intelligence. 
 These gifts of imagination and sympathy 
 belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; 
 in all his romances there are gleams from 
 time to time of wise and subtle reflection 
 upon life, from the eternal side of things, 
 which shine the more luminously that 
 they spring from the events and situations 
 with no suspicion of homily. In The 
 Black Arrow, Dick Shelton begs from the 
 Duke of Gloucester the life of the old 
 shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had 
 taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 65 
 
 the story. The Duke of Gloucester, who, 
 in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor 
 mercy-mongers,' yields the favour reluc- 
 tantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster. 
 
 ' " Come," said Dick, ' a life is a life, old 
 shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. 
 Say you forgive me, for if your life is worth 
 nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings 
 of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly ; 
 be not so churlish." 
 
 '"An I had my ship," said Arblaster, " I 
 would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas — 
 I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, 
 gossip, and I 'm a beggar ; and for my man 
 Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down. 
 ' Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again. 
 ' Murrain ' was the last of his words, and the 
 poor spirit of him passed. A will never sail no 
 more, will my Tom." 
 
 ' Dick was seized with unavailing penitence 
 and pity ; he sought to take the skipper's hand, 
 but Arblaster avoided his touch. 
 
 ' " Nay," said he, " let be. Y' have played the 
 devil with me, and let that content you." 
 
 'The words died in Richard's throat. He 
 
 E
 
 66 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused 
 with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, 
 with bowed head, across the snow, and the un- 
 noticed dog whimpering at his heels ; and for 
 the first time began to understand the desperate 
 game that we play in life, and how a thing once 
 done is not to be changed or remedied by any 
 penitence.' 
 
 A similar wisdom that goes to the 
 heart of things is found on the lips of 
 the spiritual visitant in Markheim. 
 
 ' " Murder is to me no special category," 
 replied the other. " All sins are murder, even 
 as all life is war. I behold your race, like 
 starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts 
 out of the hands of famine, and feeding on each 
 other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment 
 of their acting ; I find in all that the last con- 
 sequence is death ; and to my eyes the pretty 
 maid, who thwarts her mother with such taking 
 graces on a question of a ball, drips no less 
 visibly with human gore than such a murderer 
 as yourself." ' 
 
 The wide outlook on humanity that
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 67 
 
 expresses itself in passages like these is 
 combined in Stevenson with a vivid 
 interest in, and quick appreciation of, 
 character. The variety of the characters 
 that he has essayed to draw is enormous, 
 and his successes, for the purposes of his 
 stories, are many. Yet with all this, the 
 number of lifelike portraits, true to a 
 hah*, that are to be found in his works 
 is very small indeed. In the golden glow 
 of romance, character is always subject to 
 be idealised ; it is the effect of character 
 seen at particular angles and in special 
 lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson 
 paints ; he does not attempt to analyse 
 the complexity of its elements, but boldly 
 projects into it certain principles, and 
 works from those. It has often been said 
 of Scott that he could not draw a lady 
 who was young and beautiful ; the glamour
 
 68 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his 
 eyes and described his emotions and as- 
 pirations. Something of the same dis- 
 ability afflicted Stevenson in the presence 
 of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only 
 less than he loved heroic virtue, and was 
 always ready to idealise his villains, to 
 make of them men who, like the Master 
 of Ballantrae, ' lived for an idea.' Even 
 the low and lesser villainv of Israel Hands, 
 in the great scene where he climbs the 
 mast to murder the hero of Treasure Island, 
 breathes out its soul in a creed : 
 
 ' " For thirty years," he said, " I 've sailed the 
 seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, 
 provisions running out, knives going, and what 
 not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good 
 come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is 
 my fancy ; dead men don't bite ; them 's my 
 views — Amen, so be it." ' 
 
 John Silver, that memorable pirate,
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 69 
 
 with a face like a ham and an eye like 
 a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads 
 a career of whole-hearted crime that can 
 only be described as sparkling. His un- 
 alloyed maleficence is adorned with a 
 thousand graces of manner. Into the 
 dark and fetid marsh that is an evil 
 heart, where low forms of sentiency are 
 hardly distinguishable from the all per- 
 vading mud, Stevenson never peered, un- 
 less it were in the study of Huish in The 
 Ebb Tide, 
 
 Of his women, let women speak. They 
 are traditionally accredited with an in- 
 tuition of one another's hearts, although 
 why, if woman was created for man, as 
 the Scriptures assure us, the impression 
 that she makes on him should not count 
 for as much as the impression she makes 
 on some other woman, is a question that
 
 70 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 cries for solution. Perhaps the answer 
 is that disinterested curiosity, which is 
 one means of approach to the knowledge 
 of character, although only one, is a rare 
 attitude for man to assume towards the 
 other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late 
 in awaking ; the heroine of The Black 
 Arrow is dressed in boy's clothes through- 
 out the course of the story, and the 
 novelist thus saved the trouble of describ- 
 ing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, 
 in The Master of Ballantrae, is a charm- 
 ing veiled figure, drawn in the shadow ; 
 Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the 
 continuation of Kidnapped are real enough 
 to have made many suitors for their 
 respective hands among male readers 
 of the book ; — but that is nothing, reply 
 the critics of the other party : a walking 
 doll will find suitors. The question must
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 71 
 
 stand over until some definite principles 
 of criticism have been discovered to guide 
 us among these perilous passes. 
 
 One character must never be passed 
 over in an estimate of Stevenson's work. 
 The hero of his longest work is not David 
 Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, 
 proud and precise, but ' a very pretty 
 gentleman,' is transfigured at times by 
 traits that he catches, as narrator of the 
 story, from its author himself. But 
 Alan Breck Stewart is a greater creation, 
 and a fine instance of that wider morality 
 that can seize by sympathy the soul of 
 a wild Highland clansman. ' Impetuous, 
 insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner of 
 murder (for ' them that ha venae dipped 
 their hands in any little difficulty should 
 be very mindful of the case of them that 
 have ; ), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-
 
 72 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 some as a turkey-cock, and as vain and 
 sensitive as a child, Alan Breck is one 
 of the most lovable characters in all 
 literature ; and his penetration — a great 
 part of which he learned, to take his own 
 account of it, by driving cattle ' through 
 a throng lowland country with the black 
 soldiers at his tail' — blossoms into the 
 most delightful reflections upon men and 
 things. 
 
 The highest ambitions of a novelist 
 are not easily attainable. To combine 
 incident, character, and romance in a 
 uniform whole, to alternate telling drama- 
 tic situation with effects of poetry and 
 suggestion, to breathe into the entire 
 conception a profound wisdom, construct 
 it with absolute unity, and express it in 
 perfect style, — this thing has never yet 
 been done. A great part of Stevenson's
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 73 
 
 subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest 
 outlet in his essays. In these, whatever 
 their occasion, he shows himself the clear- 
 est-eyed critic of human life, never the 
 dupe of the phrases and pretences, the 
 theories and conventions, that distort the 
 vision of most writers and thinkers. He 
 has an unerring instinct for realities, and 
 brushes aside all else with rapid grace. 
 In his lately published Amateur Emigrant 
 he describes one of his fellow -passengers 
 to America : 
 
 ' In truth it was not whisky that had ruined 
 him ; he was ruined long .before for all good 
 human purposes but conversation. His eyes 
 were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. 
 He could see nothing in the world but money 
 and steam engines. He did not know what you 
 meant by the word happiness. He had 
 forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and 
 perhaps never encountered the delights of 
 youth. He believed in production, that useful
 
 74 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 figment of economy, as if it had been real, like 
 laughter; and production, without prejudice to 
 liquor, was his god and guide.' 
 
 This sense of the realities of the world, 
 — laughter, happiness, the simple emotions 
 of childhood, and others, — makes Steven- 
 son an admirable critic of those social 
 pretences that ape the native qualities 
 of the heart. The criticism on organised 
 philanthropy contained in the essay on 
 Beggars is not exhaustive, it is expressed 
 paradoxically, but is it untrue ? 
 
 ' We should wipe two words from our vocabu- 
 lary : gratitude and charity. In real life, help 
 is given out of friendship, or it is not valued ; 
 it is received from the hand of friendship, or it 
 is resented. We are all too proud to take a 
 naked gift; we must seem to pay it, if in 
 nothing else, then with the delights of our 
 society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the 
 rich man ; here is that needle's eye in which he 
 stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 75 
 
 to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever; that he 
 has the money, and lacks the love which should 
 make his money acceptable. Here and now, 
 just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to 
 dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his 
 pleasure: and when his turn comes to be 
 charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. 
 His friends are not poor, they do not want ; the 
 poor are not his friends, they will not take. To 
 whom is he to give ? Where to find — note this 
 phrase — the Deserving Poor ? Charity is (what 
 they call) centralised ; offices are hired ; societies 
 founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid : the 
 hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily 
 forward. I think it will take a more than 
 merely human secretary to disinter that 
 character. What ! a class that is to be in want 
 from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager 
 to receive from strangers ; and to be quite re- 
 spectable, and at the same time quite devoid of 
 self-respect ; and play the most delicate part of 
 friendship, and yet never be seen ; and wear the 
 form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the 
 laws of human nature: — and all this, in the 
 hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a 
 needle's eye ! Oh, let him stick, by all means ;
 
 76 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 and let his polity tumble in the dust ; and let 
 his epitaph and all his literature (of which my 
 own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) 
 be abolished even from the history of man ! 
 For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there 
 can be no salvation ; and the fool who looked 
 for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to 
 the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor.' 
 
 An equal sense of the realities of life 
 and death gives the force of a natural law 
 to the pathos of Old Mortality, that essay 
 in which Stevenson pays passionate tribute 
 to the memory of his early friend, who ' had 
 gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like 
 one who condescended ; but once ruined, 
 with the lights all out, he fought as for a 
 kingdom.' The whole description, down 
 to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan 
 that closes it, is one of the sovereign 
 passages of modern literature ; the pathos 
 of it is pure and elemental, like the rush
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 77 
 
 of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the 
 legions commanded by 
 
 ' The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord, 
 That all the misbelieving and black Horde 
 
 Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul 
 Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.' 
 
 Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect 
 review of the works of a writer who has 
 left none greater behind him, Stevenson 
 excels at what is perhaps the most 
 delicate of literary tasks and the utmost 
 test, where it is successfully encountered, 
 of nobility, — the practice, namely, of self- 
 revelation and self-delineation. To talk 
 much about oneself with detail, composure, 
 and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy 
 and no whiff or taint of indecent famili- 
 arity, no puling and no posing, — the 
 shores of the sea of literature are strewn 
 with the wrecks and forlorn properties of
 
 78 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 those who have adventured on this danger- 
 ous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson 
 is happy in this, that from the writer it 
 can pass with perfect trust and perfect 
 fluency to the man. He shares with 
 Goldsmith and Montaigne, his own 
 favourite, the happy privilege of making 
 lovers among his readers. ' To be the most 
 beloved of English writers — what a title 
 that is for a man ! ' says Thackeray of Gold- 
 smith. In such matters, a dispute for 
 pre-eminence in the captivation of hearts 
 would be unseemly ; it is enough to say 
 that Stevenson too has his lovers among 
 those who have accompanied him on his 
 Inland Voyage, or through the fastnesses 
 of the Cevennes in the wake of Modestine. 
 He is loved by those who never saw his 
 face ; and one who has scaled that dizzy 
 height of ambition may well be content,
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 79 
 
 without the impertinent assurance that, 
 when the Japanese have taken London 
 and revised the contents of the British 
 Museum, the yellow scribes whom they 
 shall set to produce a new edition of 
 the Biographie Universelle will include 
 in their entries the following item : — 
 ' Stevenson, R. L. A prolific writer of 
 stories among the aborigines. Flourished 
 before the Coming of the Japanese. His 
 works are lost.' 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
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