Adventures in Criticism Part 11

Dec. 22, 1894. R.L.S. In Memorium.

The Editor asks me to speak of Stevenson this week: because, since the foundation of THE SPEAKER, as each new book of Stevenson's appeared, I have had the privilege of writing about it here. So this column, too, shall be filled; at what cost ripe journalists will understand, and any fellow-cadet of letters may guess.

For when the telegram came, early on Monday morning, what was our first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow pa.s.sed and the selfish instinct began to rea.s.sert itself (as it always does) and whisper "What have _I_ lost? What is the difference to _me_?" Was it not something like this--"Put away books and paper and pen. Stevenson is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is n.o.body left to write for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britain--though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names--we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us--small or more than small--had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters--that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole.

Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.

One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness--a "soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty: that he labored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not.

Had there been another Scott, another Dumas--if I may change the image--to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for--let it be said again--no man had less of the ign.o.ble itch for merely personal success. Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa--to die "far from Argos, dear land of home."

And then consider the brave spirit that carried him--the last of a great race--along this far and difficult path; for it is the man we must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very penumbra of death. Yet Stevenson spoke always as gallantly as his great predecessor. Their "cheerful stoicism," which allies his books with the best British breeding, will keep them cla.s.sical as long as our nation shall value breeding. It s.h.i.+nes to our dim eyes now, as we turn over the familiar pages of _Virginibus Puerisque_, and from page after page--in sentences and fragments of sentences--"It is not altogether ill with the invalid after all" ... "Who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and d.i.c.kens had each fallen in mid-course." [_He_ had two books at least in hand and uncompleted, the papers say.] "Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?" ... "What sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is!" ... "It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.... For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young.... The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land."

As it was in _Virginibus Puerisque_, so is it in the last essay in his last book of essays:--

"And the Kingdom of Heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters, and the builders, and the judges, have lived long and done sternly, and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and two-penny concerns, the shame were indelible if _we_ should lose it. _Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties_...."

I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that, when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous pa.s.sage from his favorite, Sir Thomas Browne: a pa.s.sage beginning "He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure Aerial Nitre of those Parts; and therefore, being so far spent, he quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air of little effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow...." A statelier sentence of the same author occurs to me now--

"To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in n.o.ble believers, it is all one to lie in St.

Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the _moles_ of Adria.n.u.s."

This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the Pacific. At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson's loss. "O captain, my captain!" ... One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill from the base to the peak." For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sea-lights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still s.h.i.+ne upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore; and--though in alien seas, upon a rock of exile--this other light shall continue, unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene.

Nov. 2, 1895. The "Vailima Letters."

Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all our hopes--a gift, I think, almost priceless. It unites in the rarest manner the value of a familiar correspondence with the value of an intimate journal: for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson's thinkings and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the last four romantic years of his life. The first is dated November 2nd, 1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground for their home on the mountain-side of Vaea: the last, October 6th, 1894, just two months before his grave was dug on Vaea top. During his Odyssey in the South Seas (from August, 1888, to the spring of 1890) his letters, to Mr. Colvin at any rate, were infrequent and tantalizingly vague; but soon after settling on his estate in Samoa, "he for the first time, to my infinite gratification, took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his death." These letters, occupying a place quite apart in Stevenson's correspondence, Mr. Colvin has now edited with pious care and given to the public.

But the great, the happy surprise of the _Vailima Letters_ is neither their continuity nor their fulness of detail--although on each of these points they surpa.s.s our hopes. The great, the entirely happy surprise is their intimacy. We all knew--who could doubt it?--that Stevenson's was a clean and transparent mind. But we scarcely allowed for the innocent zest (innocent, because wholly devoid of vanity or selfishness) which he took in observing its operations, or for the child-like confidence with which he held out the crystal for his friend to gaze into.

One is at first inclined to say that had these letters been less open-hearted they had made less melancholy reading--the last few of them, at any rate. For, as their editor says, "the tenor of these last letters of Stevenson's to me, and of others written to several of his friends at the same time, seemed to give just cause for anxiety.

Indeed, as the reader will have perceived, a gradual change had during the past months been coming over the tone of his correspondence.... To judge by these letters, his old invincible spirit of cheerfulness was beginning to give way to moods of depression and overstrained feeling, although to those about him, it seems, his charming, habitual sweetness and gaiety of temper were undiminished." Mr. Colvin is thinking, no doubt, of pa.s.sages such as this, from the very last letter:--

"I know I am at a climacteric for all men who live by their wits, so I do not despair. But the truth is, I am pretty nearly useless at literature.... Were it not for my health, which made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade when I was young, which might have now supported me during these ill years.

But do not suppose me to be down in anything else; only, for the nonce, my skill deserts me, such as it is, or was. It was a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far, I have managed to please the journalists. But I am a fict.i.tious article, and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow-novelists, and by boys; with these _incipit et explicit_ my vogue."

I appeal to all who earn their living by pen or brush--Who does not know moods such as this? Who has not experience of those dark days when the ungrateful canvas refuses to come right, and the artist sits down before it and calls himself a fraud? We may even say that these fits of incapacity and blank despondency are part of the cost of all creative work. They may be intensified by terror for the family exchequer. The day pa.s.ses in strenuous but futile effort, and the man asks himself, "What will happen to me and mine if this kind of thing continues?" Stevenson, we are allowed to say (for the letters tell us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further that, by whatever causes impelled, he certainly worked too hard during the last two years of his life. With regard to the pa.s.sage quoted, what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust, for that is a transitory malady most incident to authors.h.i.+p; but that, could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the side of the friend he addressed--could he for an hour or two have visited London--all this apprehension had been at once dispelled. He left England before achieving his full conquest of the public heart, and the extent of that conquest he, in his exile, never quite realized. When he visited Sydney, early in 1893, it was to him a new and disconcerting experience--but not, I fancy altogether unpleasing--_digito monstrari_, or, as he puts it elsewhere, to "do the affable celebrity life-sized." Nor do I think he quite realized how large a place he filled in the education, as in the affections, of the younger men--the Barries and Kiplings, the Weymans, Doyles and Crocketts--whose courses began after he had left these sh.o.r.es. An artist gains much by working alone and away from chatter and criticism and adulation: but his gain has this corresponding loss, that he must go through his dark hours without support. Even a master may take benefit at times--if it be only a physical benefit--from some closer and handier a.s.surance than any letters can give of the place held by his work in the esteem of "the boys."

We must not make too much of what he wrote in this dark mood. A few days later he was at work on _Weir of Hermiston_, laboring "at the full pitch of his powers and in the conscious happiness of their exercise." Once more he felt himself to be working at his best. The result the world has not yet been allowed to see: for the while we are satisfied and comforted by Mr. Colvin's a.s.surances. "The fragment on which he wrought during the last month of his life gives to my mind (as it did to his own) for the first time the true measure of his powers; and if in the literature of romance there is to be found work more masterly, of more piercing human insight and more concentrated imaginative wisdom, I do not know it."

On the whole, these letters from Vailima give a picture of a serene and--allowance being made for the moods--a contented life. It is, I suspect, the genuine Stevenson that we get in the following pa.s.sage from the letter of March, 1891:--

"Though I write so little, I pa.s.s all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it does not get written; _autant en emportent les vents_; but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companions.h.i.+p.

To-day, for instance, we had a great talk. I was toiling, the sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of rain; methought you asked me--frankly, was I happy? Happy (said I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres; it came to an end from a variety of reasons--decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps; since then, as before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasures still; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place the delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down--I would not change my circ.u.mstances, unless it were to bring you here. And yet G.o.d knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I commune so continually with the thought of you. I say 'I wonder'

for a form; I know, and I know I should not."

In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange--nothing that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already formed in our own minds. Our mental portraits of some other writers, drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private correspondence came to be published. If any of us dreamed of this danger in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at any rate is past. The man of the letters is the man of the books--the same gay, eager, strenuous, lovable spirit, curious as ever about life and courageous as ever in facing its chances. Profoundly as he deplores the troubles in Samoa, when he hears that war has been declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement. "War is a huge _entrainement_," he writes in June, 1893; "there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one. We were all wet, we had been five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at."

And that his was not by any means mere "literary" courage one more extract will prove. One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly gone mad:--

"I was busy copying David Balfour, with my left hand--a most laborious task--f.a.n.n.y was down at the native house superintending the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Bella in her own house cleaning, when I heard the latter calling on my name. I ran out on the verandah; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah, watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it meant?--'Dance belong his place,' they said.--'I think this is no time to dance,' said I. 'Has he done his work?'--'No,' they told me, 'away bush all morning.' But there they all stayed in the back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room and bade him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away; but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of his unresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I can scarce say I was afraid; only I felt it had to be stopped ere he could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house boys protested they were not afraid; all I know is they were all watching him round the back door, and did not follow me till I had the axe. As for the out-boys, who were working with f.a.n.n.y in the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no secret of their fears."

But indeed all the book is manly, with the manliness of Scott's _Journal_ or of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_. "To the English-speaking world," concludes Mr. Colvin, "he has left behind a treasure which it would be vain as yet to attempt to estimate; to the profession of letters one of the most enn.o.bling and inspiriting of examples; and to his friends an image of memory more vivid and more dear than are the presences of almost any of the living." Very few men of our time have been followed out of this world with the same regret. None have repined less at their own fate--

"This be the verse you grave for me:-- 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'"

M. ZOLA

Sept. 23, 1892. La Debacle.

To what different issues two men will work the same notion! Imagine this world to be a flat board accurately parcelled out into squares, and you have the basis at once of _Alice through the Looking-Gla.s.s_ and of _Les Rougon-Macquart_. But for the mere fluke that the Englishman happened to be whimsical and the Frenchman entirely without humor (and the chances were perhaps against this), we might have had the Rougon-Macquart family through the looking-gla.s.s, and a natural and social history of Alice in _parterres_ of existence labelled _Drink, War, Money_, etc. As it is, in drawing up any comparison of these two writers we should remember that Mr. Carroll sees the world in sections because he chooses, M. Zola because he cannot help it.

If life were a museum, M. Zola would stand a reasonable chance of being a Balzac. But I invite the reader who has just laid down _La Debacle_ to pick up _Eugenie Grandet_ again and say if that little Dutch picture has not more sense of life, even of the storm and stir and big furies of life, than the detonating _Debacle_. The older genius

"Saw life steadily and saw it whole"

--No matter how small the tale, he draws no curtain around it; it stands in the midst of a real world, set in the white and composite light of day. M. Zola sees life in sections and by one or another of those colors into which daylight can be decomposed by the prism. He is like a man standing at the wings with a limelight apparatus. The rays fall now here, now there, upon the stage; are luridly red or vividly green; but neither mix nor pervade.

I am aware that the tone of the above paragraph is pontifical and its substance a trifle obvious, and am eager to apologize for both.

Speaking as an impressionist, I can only say that _La Debacle_ stifles me. And this is the effect produced by all his later books. Each has the exclusiveness of a dream; its subject--be it drink or war or money--possesses the reader as a nightmare possesses the dreamer. For the time this place of wide prospect, the world, puts up its shutters; and life becomes all drink, all war, all money, while M. Zola (adaptable Baccha.n.a.l!) surrenders his brain to the intoxication of his latest theme. He will drench himself with ecclesiology, or veterinary surgery, or railway technicalities--everything by turns and everything long; but, like the gentleman in the comic opera, he "never mixes." Of late he almost ceased to add even a dash of human interest.

Mr. George Moore, reviewing _La Debacle_ in the _Fortnightly_ last month, laments this. He reminds us of the splendid opportunity M. Zola has flung away in his latest work.

"Jean and Maurice," says Mr. Moore, "have fought side by side; they have alternately saved each other's lives; war has united them in a bond of inseparable friends.h.i.+p; they have grasped each other's hands, and looked in each other's eyes, overpowered with a love that exceeds the love that woman ever gave to man; now they are ranged on different sides, armed one against the other.

The idea is a fine one, and it is to be deeply regretted that M.

Zola did not throw history to the winds and develop the beautiful human story of the division of friends in civil war. Never would history have tempted Balzac away from the human pa.s.sion of such a subject...."

But it is just fidelity to the human interest of every subject that gives the novelist his rank; that makes--to take another instance--a page or two of Balzac, when Balzac is dealing with money, of more value than the whole of _l'Argent_.

Of Burke it has been said by a critic with whom it is a pleasure for once in a way to agree, that he knew how the whole world lived.

"It was Burke's peculiarity and his glory to apply the imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts and business of life.... Burke's imagination led him to look over the whole land: the legislator devising new laws, the judge expounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching all his goods and extending his credit, the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant, the frugal man slowly acc.u.mulating the store which is to support him in old age, the ancient inst.i.tutions of Church and University with their seemly provisions for sound learning and true religion, the parson in his pulpit, the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eyeing his crops, the painter covering his canvases, the player educating the feelings. Burke saw all this with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye of a lover."

Now all this, which is true of Burke, is true of the very first literary artists--of Shakespeare and Balzac. All this, and more--for they not only see all this immense activity of life, but the emotions that animate each of the myriad actors.

Suppose them to treat of commerce: they see not only the goods and money changing hands, but the ambitions, dangers, fears, delights, the fierce adventures by desert and seas, the slow toil at home, upon which the foundations of commerce are set. Like the G.o.ds,

"They see the ferry On the broad, clay-laden Lone Chorasmian stream;--thereon, With snort and strain, Two horses, strongly swimming, tow The ferry-boat, with woven ropes To either bow Firm-harness'd by the mane; a chief, With shout and shaken spear, Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern The cowering merchants, in long robes, Sit pale beside their wealth...."

Like the G.o.ds, they see all this; but, unlike the G.o.ds, they must feel also:--

"They see the merchants On the Oxus stream;--_but care Must visit first them too, and make them pale_.

Whether, through whirling sand, A cloud of desert robber-horse have burst Upon their caravan; or greedy kings, In the wall'd cities the way pa.s.ses through, Crush'd them with tolls; or fever-airs, On some great river's marge, Mown them down, far from home."