Various

“ Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. ”

“ As the years pass they disengage the virtue of a writer, and decide whether or not he has force enough to live. Will Stevenson live? Undoubtedly. He is far more secure of immortality than many very popular writers. The sale of his books may not be great, and he may even disappear from the marts of literature now and then, but he will always be revived, and it may turn out that his reputation will wear as well as that of Charles Lamb. For he engages his readers by the double gift of personality and style.
The personality of Stevenson is strangely arresting. ”

“ I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not—Mill did not—agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error—the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the place of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate. ”

“ Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. ”

“ The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer around that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. ”

“ I know not a more human soul, nor, in any way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress": a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion. ”

“ The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed, and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings—those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies farther back, its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself ”

“ Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that there is among the hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. ”

“ HOME FROM THE HILL [1]
By Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
"Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
⁠And the hunter home from the hill."—R. L. S.
LET the weary body lie
⁠Where he chose its grave,
'Neath the wide and starry sky,
⁠By the Southern wave,
While the island holds her trust
⁠And the hill keeps faith,
Through the watches that divide
⁠The long night of death. ”

“ Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. ”

“ I should never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art; and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. ”

“ But one was there, the stripling of our crew,
⁠Cynthius by name, a tall and nimble wight,
⁠Most indiscreet he was, though kind and true;
⁠In strange adventures both by day and night
⁠This restless being took his sole delight;
⁠And oft we quaked to mark his aspect sly,
⁠As hand on hip, deep in the evening light,
⁠He taught those townsfolk, with an earnest eye,
Of things that never were in earth or sea or sky. ”

“ Stevenson all the time, and are terrified exactly like a three-year-old who sees his father take a rug over his head and "be a bear." The thrill is delicious, for there is just an off-chance that after all the thing may turn out to be a bear; but still we are pretty easy that at the play's end the bearskin will be tossed aside, the villain repent, and John Silver get off with a comfortable tale of pieces of eight. ”

“ New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. ”

“ Stevenson's books is always Mr. Stevenson himself. Some authors (perhaps the greatest) severely sit with the more ancient gods, and serenely keep themselves out of their books. Most of these authors are dead now. Others put their personalities in, indeed; but would do much better to keep them out. Their futilities and pomposities, pose as they may, are no more interesting than those of the chairman of a prosperous limited company. But there are a chosen few who cannot light a cigarette or part their hair in a new place without being interesting. ”

“ It is he who makes love to the heroine; he who fights with the Frenchman "who never can win"; he who climbs the Mountain Perilous with a dirk between his teeth.
But Mr. Stevenson writes the fascination of his personality into all his most attractive creations, and whenever I miss the incarnation, I miss most of the magic as well. Jim Hawkins is only "the Lantern Bearer" of North Berwick Links translated into the language of adventure on the high seas—the healthier also for the change. I love Jim Hawkins. ”

“ It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment—a free grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. ”

“ But we love anything of such excellent breed, and the crossing only improves it. Our hearts dance when Mr. Stevenson lands his cut-throats, with one part of himself as hero and the other as villain. John Silver is an admirable villain, for he is just the author genially cutting throats. Even when he pants three times as he sends the knife home, we do not entirely believe in his villainy. We expect to see the murdered seaman about again and hearty at his meals in the course of a chapter or two. John is a villain at great expense and trouble to himself ”

“ Her head is bowed upon her breast,
⁠And, oh, she's sairly failed the day.
Her breast is old, it will not rise,
⁠Her tearless sobs in anguish choke,
God put His finger on her eyes,
⁠And then it was her tears that spoke. ”

“ And still I clung to my paddle." The paddle with which he plied his course in life, and steered therewith into our hearts was in reality his pen. He clung to it despite adverse currents, and moreover wielded it with a boyish gaiety of spirit which showed his heroic pluck. "Gladly I lived," he truly sang. His contented, happy temperament he owed in a great measure to the help of the petticoats who shielded his youthful years. They never willingly thwarted or out of laziness refused any reasonable request of the delicate boy they cherished. ”

“ They do not care for the prosperous, dominant, athletic, rich and long-lived man. They may conjecture, indeed, that behind all the bravery there is much hidden pain, but if it is not revealed to them they cannot be sure. They love Charles Lamb for the manner in which he went through his trial, and they love him none the less because he was sometimes overborne, because on occasions he stumbled and fell. Charlotte Brontë was an example of fortitude as remarkable as Stevenson, but she was not brave after the same manner. ”

“ The artist is of the same family; he is of the Sons of Joy, chooses his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man." The theory that all art is decoration cannot be seriously considered. It was certainly not true of Stevenson's art. ”

“ Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. ”

“ These two fervent smiths who forged this bright sword [3] of literature had good metal wherewith to fashion their blade and they knew it, for they proudly dreamed of a brilliant future for their little Loo even when he dictated havers to Cummy. He put up a door-plate on 17, Heriot Row, with "R. L. Stevenson, Advocate," thereon, and they knew his deed box in the Parliament House was guiltless of briefs, and everyone thought he was a born idler, or as he himself said, "base," not to follow the profession of his fathers. They believed he would yet shine. ”

“ His mother with keen maternal insight early guessed wherein his genius lay, guessed what would be his ablest weapon, and fostered his inclination to hold by the pen as he held by the truant Arethusa's paddle. In his Table Talk Shirley bears this out. "It was from this cottage (Swanston) that possibly the most charming of our younger Scottish writers went out into the world to try his luck. Hardly anyone except his mother guessed as yet what was in store. But she was prescient as mothers are."
"Be good yourself—make others happy," Mrs. Stevenson wrote as a motto on a quilt after her signature. ”

“ To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. ”

“ I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius; breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in the crowning offence of "Werther" ”

“ Cummy entered heartily into the mystery and conspiracy of the secretive tale-maker. His women-folk were always slavishly good-humoured to their young autocrat, doing his whimsical bidding, when practicable, without hesitation. "I wrote down every word he spoke," says Cummy, "it pleased the bairn, and I read his havers to his mother at the nursery fire." ”

“ She had had the advantage of a sound education, for to finish her schooling she went daily to Dunfermline five miles away. This distance she proudly records she covered in a marvellously short time, for Louis's "Comely Cummy," as he called her, along with her refined features, is still trig and active. When she went back for her holidays to red-roofed Torryburn she received and preserved many letters from her charge. Mrs. Stevenson wrote these early epistles to little Loo's dictation. ”

“ He was not content to dwell in a world where the lines are drawn clear, where the sheep are separated from the goats. He would have a foot in both worlds, content to dwell neither wholly with the sheep, nor wholly with the goats. No doubt his ruling interest was in ethical problems and he could be stern in his moral judgments, as, for example, in his discussion of the character of Burns. ”

“ I am writing at a distance from books and collections of Stevensoniana, so that I cannot quote, but only vaguely follow the romancer through some of his incarnations. Of course every romancer, consciously or unconsciously, incarnates himself, especially if he writes his books in the first person. ”

“ Many writers of charming individuality cannot show themselves in their books. There is as little of themselves in their novels as there would be in a treatise on. mathematics, if they could write it. Perhaps less. ”