CHAPTER XVII

R. L. S.

"Who is it that says most? which can say more

Than this rich praise,- that you alone are you?"

FOR any who have read the foregoing pages it should be unnecessary here to dwell upon the sources of many qualities which distinguished Stevenson throughout his life, or the degree to which they were called forth in turn or affected by the many variations of his environment. A Scot born, we have seen how Edinburgh and Swanston set the seal upon his nationality, and how from father and mother he drew diverse elements of temperament and character. We have seen the effect of his schooling, such as it was, and the prolonged leisure of his boyhood; of the influence of his friends and his reading; the results of his training as an engineer and as an advocate; of his wanderings in France, his breakdown in America, and the happiness of his married life.

In several respects it must be owned that he was fortunate. His long preludes and painful apprenticeship would clearly have proved impossible had it been necessary for him to make money at an early age, and even the history of his maturity would have been materially changed if he had been compelled to rely solely upon his writing to meet the expenses of his household. His late beginning had, again, this advantage: tardy in some ways as he was, he had left behind him

the ignobler elements of youth before his voice was heard or recognised. The green-sickness of immaturity was over, at the worst only one or two touches of selfconsciousness remained, and even in his earliest published essays there rings out the note of high spirit and cheerfulness which issued from the sick-room of later years, deceived for a time the most penetrating of critics, and was perhaps the best part of his message to a world that had fallen on weary days.

In regarding Stevenson both as man and writer we find that the most unusual fact about him was the coupling of the infinite variety of his character and intellect with the extraordinary degree in which he was moved by every thought and every feeling. Few men are acted upon by so wide a range of emotions and ideas; few men hold even two or three ideas or feel even a few emotions with nearly as much intensity as compelled him under all. When we have considered both number and degree, we shall find other gifts no less remarkable and even more characteristic-the unfailing spirit of chivalry and the combination of qualities that went to make up his peculiar and individual charm. Though it is inevitable thus to take him piecemeal and to dwell upon one side at a time to the exclusion of the others he so rapidly turned upon us, we must never allow this process to efface in our minds what is far more essential-the image of the living whole.

I have spoken of him at once as a man and a writer, for in his case there was no part of the writer which was not visibly present in the man. There are authors

whose work bears so little apparent relation to themselves, that we either wonder how they came to write so good a book, or else in our hearts we wish their books more worthy of the men. To neither of these classes does Stevenson belong. His works are "signed all over," and despite the chameleon-like nature of his style, but few consecutive sentences on any page of his could have been written by any other person. Authorship provided him with a field for his energies and brought him the rewards of success, but did not otherwise change him from what he was, nor did it even exercise the whole of his faculties or exhaust the supply of his ideas.

If I have failed to produce a correct impression of his intense energy, I have quoted him and written to little purpose. The child with his "fury of play"; the boy walking by himself in the black night and exulting in the consciousness of the bull's-eye beneath his coat; the lad already possessed with the invincible resolve of learning to write, which for the time overcame the desire of all other action: these were but the father of the man. So vehement were his emotions, his own breast was too small to contain them. He paid a visit at nineteen to a place he had not seen since childhood. "As I felt myself on the road at last that I had been dreaming of for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence." 2

It is useless to go on quoting: through life he did the 1 Appendix G. 2 Juvenilia, p. 96.

thing he was doing as if it were the one thing in the world that was worth being done. I will give but one more example, premising that its essence lies in its very triviality: the smaller the matter at stake, the more surprising is the blaze of energy displayed. One day he was talking to a lady in his house at Bournemouth, at a time when he was recovering from hemorrhage, and visitors and conversation were both strictly forbidden. A book of Charles Reade's-Griffith Gaunt, I thinkwas mentioned, and nothing would serve Stevenson. but that he should run to a cold room at the top of the house to get the volume. His visitor first tried to prevent it, then refused to wait for his return, and was only dissuaded from her resolve by being told (and she knew it to be true) that if he heard that she had left the house he would certainly run after her down the drive without waiting for either hat or coat.

"The formal man is the slave of words," he said; and as a consequence of his own fiery intensity, no man was ever less imposed upon by the formulas of other people. His railing against the burgess, for example, was no catchword, but the inmost and original feeling of his heart. Consequently, whenever he uttered a commonplace, it will be usually found that he had rediscovered the truth of it for himself, did not say it merely because he had heard it from somebody else, and generally invested it with some fresh quality of his own. Perhaps his most emphatic utterance in this respect, and that most resembling his conversation in certain moods, is the Lay Morals, all the more outspoken because it was never finished for press. It abounds in sayings such as these: "It is easy to be an ass and to

follow tne multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest." "It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die." "Respectability: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on men." "I have only to read books, to think . . . the mass of people are merely speaking in their sleep."

So when he spoke, he spoke direct from his own reflection and experience, and when he prayed, he did not hesitate to pass beyond the decorous ring-fence supposed to include all permissible objects of prayer; he gave thanks for "the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful," and honestly and reverently made his petition that he might be granted gaiety and laughter. These instances are on the surface, but in spiritual matters he had a rare power of leaving on one side the non-essential and going straight to the heart of the difficulty, that was hardly realised by the world at large. Taine's charge against Scott that "he pauses on the threshold of the soul" has been renewed against Stevenson. For one thing, in spite of his apparent frankness, he had a deep reserve on the things that touched him most profoundly, and never wore his heart upon his sleeve. So far as the criticism applies to his writings, it is little less untrue than that which called him "a faddling hedonist," and its injustice has been shown by Mr. Colvin; 1 so far as it ap

1 Letters, i. 18.