1 subordinated to that of plot, did he materially change his method of treatment. They are either "a certain atmosphere expressed and realized by persons and actions, or characters developed by incidents and situations; for he loved "the art of words and the appearance of things," and it was late when he learned to fit characters successfully to a plot with an underlying motif. The major passion, therefore, found little place in his stories; and his few women were not altogether satisfactorily drawn. For it was not love with its rewards and circumscribed plots and self-sufficiency that set best Stevenson's genius; but life with a hazard life kinetic under an open sky and on a broad field, full of struggle and "tail-foremost morality"; life so circumstanced that the characters, driven forward through clean open-air adventure, act their parts in obedience to natural impulses and practical intelligence without the hesitations of conscience or the halting at questions of conduct. The realities of life, confined within conventional society, statically conceived and set forth with a conscious moral purpose, were subjects which his genius shunned as his spirit shunned the sick-room. They furnish the essential underlying idea to the dramatic novel and to the novel of character, but they offered him none of that spontaneity of action which could give employ to his buoyant spirit and graceful fancy. But let the inn at Burford Bridge, or the old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry,2 but speak to him and there would rise to his mind a tale, epically conceived, fitted to the narrative mood and filled with the poetry of romance, in which the dominant note would be courage; and "to be brave, to be honest, to be kind, and to be contented," the sum of human virtue. Thus it needed but a buried treasure, a wide sea and a fair fight for him to weave a tale as full of the spirit of youth and manly daring as it is rich in 1 Cf. Balfour's Life of Stevenson, Vol. II, p. 168. 2 Cf. "A Gossip on Romance": Memories and Portraits, pp. 253 ff. imagination and perfect in form. Or set David Balfour1 for him somewhere on a desert isle, and get him mixed up somehow in a Highland murder and pursued with Alan Breck by British soldiers, and again you have life with a hazard, into which he will infuse the whole spirit of the Highlands: the color of the sky, the scent of the heather, the joy of falling water, the weariness of fatigue, the pangs of hunger- all instinct with life and throbbing with a full-pulsed vigor, in which Jacobite daring is set off against Whiggish caution, yet both united in a friendship born of common dangers and of the physical joys of living. It was somewhere in this sunny field of life, away from those common experiences that torture and slay, that his fancy delighted to linger; somewhere where he could lose the distressing sense of self in boisterous and robust activity; somewhere where he could people incidents with real men and women, and feel the thrill of human kinship and satisfy a nameless longing. It was a limited view of life, and impotent of real purpose; and the method which he chose to fit to it became rather fixed with him. But when he had found the matter that fitted perfectly his narrative method, he could throw himself with such abandon into his work, fill it all with such a vivid imagination, such a wonderful feeling for beauty, such a magnanimous spirit and a desperate courage and a wholesome morality, that the art that thus passed through the alembic of his personality seemed akin to that of the flight of a bird, and had in it some of the gladness of the sky. But let the matter slip the method and become dramatic, as it does when at the end of the Appin murder trial David Balfour goes abroad;2 let the characters once have time to consider their own conduct and to regard questions of cause and effect, and we are made sensible that the author, in his endeavor to 1 Cf. Kidnapped. 2 Cf. David Balfour, or Catriona of the English edition. sustain his narrative mood and properly dispose of his characters shares some of the feelings of awkwardness that his own David felt with the fair Catriona alone with him in his Leyden lodgings. Or again, in The Master of Ballantrae, where the interest naturally centres around the fall of the House of Darrisdeer, and where the action hinges upon "duty and inclination that come nobly to the grapple" in the two brothers, who has not felt the narrative of the craven Mackeller and the chronicle of Chevalier Burke as impediments to the movement of the plot and to the freer display of passion? And when the actors flee the scene of the struggle for America, who has not been shocked by the incongruity? And again, when the final scene comes in the northern wilderness, who has not been surprised at the appeal to moral judgment, which seeks to make a devilish cunning seem the better part of virtue? Yet we cannot quarrel with an author about questions of treatment, when he has succeeded so admirably in interesting us in his story, any more than we can withhold our approval from Alison Graeme in her preference for the engaging manners of James to the more solid qualities of Henry, when we ourselves take such a delight in an art as is bodied forth in the most invidious and accomplished villain, perhaps, in the whole range of English letters. But Stevenson came at a time of "spiritual fatigue”; when literature had lost much of its freshness and vigor, and was busy puzzling out the weightier problems of existence; when even novelists were laboriously setting forth grave theories, or making commonplace photogravures of life-seeking not so much to interest by their art as to inform by their matter. And the world, long since wearied by introspections and abstractions, was ready to turn away from gloomy forebodings to a more joyous mood. And it was well that at this time there came one with laughter on his lips and with sweetness in his heart to help guide the spiritual currents into healthy and natural ways; one who had no theory of life to expound, no protest to make; who found his interest not so much in life as in joyous, spontaneous living- "earth not grey but rosy," and was glad to bravely make the best of it. And the whole-hearted way that he contributed to the wealth of existence in these exquisite stories of adventure, by which he led perplexed and tired souls away from the distressing sense of self to the virtues in the natural man, and thus helped to make a great reaction " sane and sweet," is Stevenson's inestimable service to his age. "It was a return to run-wild elemental nature, to the stratum below the conventionalisms and artificialities of life; and it was made in the healthiest, least-disturbing way possible; not by denial or even propaganda, not by a picnic return to nature like Rousseau's, but by simply harking 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 untormented conscience carry off the experiences that We trust ourselves to the impulses 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 joyous 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.”1 come. --- It was inuch to master the technique of a literary style and to write a story marred in no respect by mawkish sentiment or by dreary descriptions, nor laden with a conscious moral purpose; but one in which every detail of plot, character, and incident was so skilfully handled as to contribute to a definite unity of effect in the whole, and to rap the reader clean out of himself by the interest of the telling. It was more to seize upon those primary qualities in man's nature and set them forth in incidents so stirring as to idealize active virtues and to glorify mere living. Yet Stevenson did more than this. He affected powerfully the letters of his time; and that healthy spirit of animalism — and 1 Stevenson's Attitude to Life, by John Franklin Genung. shall we not say much of that refinement of form—which we enjoy in the best writers of the present had its beginning with him. "The most inspiriting, the most fascinating human being I have ever known," one1 called him; another 2 declared that "when he lived he moved men to put their utmost into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye, [and that for five years before his death] the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole." And he taught besides many another anew, no less by his life than by his letters, that true art, like perfect service, is the unconscious revelation of, personality. He held that "Acts may be forgiven: not even God can forgive the hanger-back." Again: "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 sickroom 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 honor useful labor. 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 time to sign it."4 And his whole life was an earnest of this; and no part of it more so than the ending. He left England in 1887, immediately after the death of his father, and first sought health in the Adirondacks. But he found the climate here too severe; and the next June he began those cruises (first in the yacht Casco, then in the traders Equator and Janet Nicoll), which during the next two and 1 Edmund Gosse. 2 A. T. Quiller-Couch. 3 It was the opposite of this maxim that "Will o' the Mill" acted on 4 Virginibus Puerisque, p. 169. 5 Cf. In the South Seas. |