R. L. Stevenson

“ An artist can distinguish between that part of his work which is the result of intense belief and that part which is agnostic. Stevenson seems not to have been so sure; for his aims, whether they are at “vitality” or at the death of the optic nerve and the adjective, suggest that he [194] invariably adopted the attitude of the craftsman, the professional writer of novels for popular consumption. Even so, he is to be applauded for his freedom from artistic cant. If he is too intent upon rattling the bones, at least that is more candid than the habit of playing the priest. ”

“ The Master of Ballantrae, which falls in two, has any powerful inevitability. These romances are, in fact, the romances of a sick man of tremendous nervous force, but of neither physical nor intellectual nor even imaginative energy. One may see it in the flickering of Alan Breck. Alan Breck is the most famous of all Stevenson’s characters, with the possible exception of Silver: does he remain vivid all the time? He does not. He loses vitality several times in the course of Kidnapped; he hardly attains it in Catriona. There is no fault there; there is a weakness. ”

“ Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from Treasure Island, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to Weir of Hermiston, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power. Treasure Island is an excellent adventure-story ”

“ Stevenson reached the height of his powers as a realistic novelist. Excepting in the handling of Frank Innes, who might almost have been hired out among our dead writers of fiction as a professional seducer, the precision of Weir of Hermiston, the bite of Stevenson’s continuously vigorous imagination, is extraordinary. Continuity of narrative there is not: one must not demand it. But unfailing precision of imagination, a thing of great rarity, marks almost the whole of that portion of the book which we have ”

“ Take a cutlass, him that dares, and I’ll see the colour of his inside, crutch and all, before that pipe’s empty.”
Not a man stirred; not a man answered.
“That’s your sort, is it?” he added, returning his pipe to his mouth. “Well, you’re a gay lot to look at, anyway. Not much worth to fight, you ain’t. P’r’aps you can understand King George’s English. I’m cap’n here by ’lection. I’m cap’n here because I’m the best man by a long sea-mile. You won’t fight, as gentlemen o’ fortune should; then, by thunder, you’ll obey, and you may lay to it! ”

“ In Roads there is a little weak [188] vanity, as of fancy paralysed by self-consciousness, such as one may often see in the work of very young writers; but there seems no doubt that, by 1874, a year after the composition of Roads, Stevenson had reached a degree of proficiency which, given a suitable subject, enabled him to escape the flaccidity which besets a young writer. Poverty of matter, which forces him back upon incident or upon thin moralising, is, throughout, a defect of Stevenson’s writing. ”

“ A little idea, a flash, it may be, of inspiration; and Stevenson had his story complete, ready for that scrupulous handling and manipulation which the actual composition always involved. [117] He did not greatly deal in anecdote; his psychological studies are inclined to be hollow; but he was perfectly effective in his not very powerful vein of fantasy, could tell a fairy tale with distinction, succeeded once without question in picturesque drama, and, when he fell to anecdote, as in The Treasure of Franchard, Providence and the Guitar, and The Beach of Falesá, he was pleasantly triumphant. ”

“ It is held to be a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head and says: ‘Ah, so I thought when I was your age.’ It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.’ And yet the one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver. ”

“ The rough, miserable journey, and the exhaustion consequent upon the undertaking of so long and difficult an expedition, brought Stevenson’s vitality very low; so that, after much strain, much miscellaneous literary work, and many self-imposed privations, he fell [21] seriously ill at San Francisco towards the end of 1879. Only careful nursing, and a genial cable from his father, promising an annual sum of £250, restored health and spirits; and on May 19, 1880, he was married to Mrs. Osbourne. Their life at Silverado has already been described in The Silverado Squatters ”

“ His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances—all are seen nowadays to be consumptive. What remains to us, apart from a fragment, a handful of tales, and two boy’s books (for Kidnapped, although finely romantic, was addressed to boys, and still appeals to the boy in us) is a series of fine scenes—what I have called “plums”—and the charm of Stevenson’s personality. Charm as an adjunct is very well; charm as an asset is of less significance. ”

“ I think that with a sense of style, a habit of spinning tales (which it appears that he possessed, in common with many people with no pretensions to literary skill) , and a desire to write that was keen enough to [187] be a hunger, Stevenson is a credible figure of youth. There must be many youths who get so far and go no further. The point about Stevenson is that he went on. But he went on as he began—as a writer, one who was determined to utilise words. ”

“ With Stevenson, the trouble is, I suppose, that, having thought of him always as a dilettante, his admirers cannot reconcile themselves to his wish to be a real traveller and a real historian. Perhaps they recognise that he had not the necessary equipment? Rather, it is very likely that, being largely uncreative themselves, they had planned for Stevenson a future different from the one into which gradually he drifted. All creative writers have such friends. We may say, perhaps, that a man who was not Stevenson could have written In the South Seas, though I believe that is not the case. ”

“ To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater pleasure. We are displeased in Virginibus Puerisque by the excess of manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case of such essays as The Foreigner at Home and Pastoral, where the matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. ”

“ All these short pieces are of interest because they show the growth of Stevenson as a writer. [39] They are the more interesting because at the same time they illustrate the way in which Stevenson gradually made his work take on the impress of his personality. All young work lacks character, as young hand-writing does, and as young style does; and all young essay-work in particular appears sometimes rather tepid and even silly when the author tries to interest us in his “ego.” ”

“ If we think, in reading them, that they are vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as helpless as boys reading Treasure Island. But Stevenson is always telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. [156] There are ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to his death up the dreadful stair ”

“ One is inclined to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto, where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of detachment powerfully appear. ”

“ Stevenson, alone, had his flat moments of dull mood and tired vanity; Stevenson, in company, thrilled with the life which his friends regarded as his inimitable and unquestionable personal charm.
You are thus to imagine a nervously-moving man, tall, very dark, very thin; his hair generally worn long ”

“ Allan threw on his clothes with trembling hands, and hastened down-stairs. He found Jack already at table, eating hastily.
“Set down,” said the latter, “an’ fill up. It’s mighty uncertain when ye’ll git another square meal.”
“We’re going out?” asked the boy. “Then there’s a wreck?”
“Yes, a wreck—freight, near Vinton. Th’ caller jest come fer me. It’s so bad all th’ section-gangs on this end ’r ordered out. Eat all y’ kin. Better drink some coffee, too. Y’ll need it.” ”

“ The consequence of this is that Stevenson, who wrote very capable verses, does not impress us as a poet. Even in this respect, however, his clearness has its virtue; because the mark of the ostentatiously minor poet is obscurity of diction. Stevenson was not obscure in diction, and he was not obscure in thought, as so many writers with little to say are obscure. ”

“ Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. ”

“ We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts—namely, to live. ”

“ it provided not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., [4] all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his "friend and benefactor Edward Hyde," but that in case of Dr. Jekyll's "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months," the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor's household. ”

“ It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. ”

“ This was healthy, but the life of a squatter has its limitations, and their trials and tribulations during these weeks Stevenson told most amusingly in "The Silverado Squatters."
Gradually a longing began to come to R.L.S. to see those at home once more and have them know his wife. This desire grew so from day to day that July found them bidding good-by to California, and on the 7th of August they sailed from New York for Liverpool. ”

“ We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them ‘like a thing reproved,’ not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of life. ”

“ So it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and held us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken this wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer. They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook for a thrill of nature. ”

“ The authors of all this posthumous gloating over Stevenson’s illnesses have been concerned to make him a horribly piteous figure, to harrow us in order that we should pity. How much more is Stevenson to be pitied for his self-constituted apostles! We shall do ill to pity Stevenson, because pity is the obverse of envy, and is as much a vice. Let us rather praise Stevenson for his real determination and for that work of his which we can approve as well as love. To love uncritically is to love ill. To discriminate with mercy is very humbly to justify one’s privilege as a reader. ”

“ Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with stars to see, Bread I dip in the river— There’s the life for a man like me, There’s the life for ever. ”

“ And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
The flower of the hedgerow and the star of heaven satisfy and delight us: how much more the look of the exquisite being who was created to bear and rear, to madden and rejoice mankind! ”

“ We talk of elusive charm when we cannot remember a single thing that has aroused in us the impression of having been charmed. Exactly in that way was Stevenson remembered by those he met—as a vivid butterfly is remembered; something indescribably strange and curious, not to be caught and held, for its brilliant and wayward fluttering. The charm was the thing that attracted men kinder, more staid, more truly genial, wiser than himself ”