The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition, Volume 1. Роберт Льюис Стивенсон
him. And if he fail, why should I hear him weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud, sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the follet of Molière rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.
Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and have a name as Psychologues! Ohé, les Psychologues! Does anyone suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called," as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write 'Macbeth' that you write 'Thérèse Raquin' … In any case, and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces–" We know what he produces, and though his books may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty, mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.
None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them, after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must arise on their darkness—and that is past praying for. There is a burden of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of Louis, when life was at its darkest:
"And werena my heart licht I wad die!"
Having finished "Catriona," at about the age that Scott had when he wrote his first novel, "Waverley," Stevenson thought of "Weir of Hermiston," ("I thought of Mr. Pickwick," says Dickens with admirable simplicity), and fell to that work furiously, as was his wont when a great theme dawned on him. But soon, as usual, came the cold fit; his inspirations being intermittent for some untraced reason, physical or psychological. Possibly he foresaw the practical difficulty of his initial idea: that the Roman Father should sit on the bench of Scottish Themis and try his own son on a capital charge. This would not have been permitted to occur in Scotland, even when "the Fifteen" were first constituted into a Court. If humane emotions did not forbid, it must have been clear that no Scottish judge (they were not "kinless loons") would have permitted his son to be found guilty. Conceivably this damping circumstance occurred to Stevenson. He dropped, for a while, the hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that, early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride of Lammermoor," in tormentis, to Will Laidlaw.
We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish, his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage. He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to use an obsolete piece of slang, is vécu. There were other projects, many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends, no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal Come back! come back!
Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's. Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.
His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work; so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he was in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy; he is approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and disaster; his characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are entirely human, with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate lives in our memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered consciousness—then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me, some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of Scott and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or whether he had merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who outlived themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the fullness of his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and he was mourned like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who had known him, and by many thousands who had never seen his face. There was mourning at home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope that the news was untrue), in England, in Europe, in America, in Australia and the Isles. He who had been such "a friendly writer," who had created for us so many friends in his characters, had made more friends for himself, friends more and more various in age, race, tastes, character, and temper, than any British writer, perhaps, since Dickens. He was taken from us untimely; broken was our strong hope in the future gifts of his genius, and there was a pain that does not attend the peaceful passing, in the fullness of years and wisdom and honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.
Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his "class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most recent publications of its own day. But les délicats will look back on Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking, remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal—time cannot stale Beowulf, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, la mort n'y mord. But it is as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is, I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no competitor.
"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did