Part 2

And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.' It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold likens his own state to that of the monks:

'Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride-- I come to shed them at their side.'

To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady of the Snows is a mistaken divinity, and the place a monument of chilly error,--for once in a way he takes it on himself to be a preacher, his temperament gives voice in a creed:

'And ye, O brethren, what if God, When from Heaven's top He spies abroad, And sees on this tormented stage The noble war of mankind rage, What if His vivifying eye, O monks, should pass your corner by? For still the Lord is Lord of might; In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight; The plough, the spear, the laden barks, The field, the founded city, marks; He marks the smiler of the streets, The singer upon garden seats; He sees the climber in the rocks; To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks; For those He loves that underprop With daily virtues Heaven's top, And bear the falling sky with ease, Unfrowning Caryatides. Those He approves that ply the trade, That rock the child, that wed the maid, That with weak virtues, weaker hands, Sow gladness on the peopled lands, And still with laughter, song, and shout Spin the great wheel of earth about.

But ye?--O ye who linger still Here in your fortress on the hill, With placid face, with tranquil breath, The unsought volunteers of death, Our cheerful General on high With careless looks may pass you by!'

And the fact of death, which has damped and darkened the writings of so many minor poets, does not cast a pallor on his conviction. Life is of value only because it can be spent, or given; and the love of God coveted the position, and assumed mortality. If a man treasure and hug his life, one thing only is certain, that he will be robbed some day, and cut the pitiable and futile figure of one who has been saving candle-ends in a house that is on fire. Better than this to have a foolish spendthrift blaze and the loving cup going round. Stevenson speaks almost with a personal envy of the conduct of the four marines of the Wager. There was no room for them in the boat, and they were left on a desert island to a certain death. 'They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried, "God bless the King!" Now, one or two of those who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing for us'--even when life is extorted it may be given nobly, with ceremony and courtesy. So strong was Stevenson's admiration for heroic graces like these that in the requiem that appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death as of a hearty exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure and toil:

'Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. 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.'

This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour and music of a soldier's funeral.

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accident has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous followers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty of style.

I. STYLE.--Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature,' unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it first. A poet is born, not made,--so is every man,--but he is born raw. Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the art of writing,

'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.'

Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature--they are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind. All writing is a kind of word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the diverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in their context! 'The cry is still, "They come!"'--'More honoured in the breach than the observance,'--the sight of these phrases in the splendour of their dramatic context in Macbeth and Hamlet casts shame upon their daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so he borrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by others. It is a matter of natural taste, developed and strengthened by continual practice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases.

The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of fine phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but cultivates his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the raw fibres in novel and bewitching patterns. To this end he must have two things: a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, meaning, and associations of individual words, and next, a sense of harmony, proportion, and effect in their combination. It is amazing what nobility a mere truism is often found to possess when it is clad with a garment thus woven.

Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high decree. His careful choice of epithet and name have even been criticised as lending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive air of deliberation. His daintiness of diction is best seen in his earlier work; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and direct, fitter for its later uses, but never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrill of pleasure to the reader. Of the value of words he had the acutest appreciation. Virginibus Puerisque, his first book of essays, is crowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a single word. 'We have all heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England.' You can feel the ground shake and see the volcano tower above you at that word 'tremendous neighbourhood.' Something of the same double reference to the original and acquired meanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedate electrician,' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of a city; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the impassable.'

The likeness of this last word to a very different word, 'impassive,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meanings almost leads to punning. In Across the Plains Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes, 'liquidated at the bar.' This is perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works of Milton.

His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more stirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In The Beach of Falesa the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang;

'"Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain continued. "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. 'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of stick to him: 'John Adams, obit eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny."

'"What did he die of?" I inquired.

'"Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go--he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again: not strong enough. . . . Poor John!"'

There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in The Wrecker; and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in Kidnapped, Catriona, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose.

But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.' And he quotes a passage from Harrington's Oceana:

'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own hand, is herself King People.'

It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style.

However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp. This was what Stevenson did, and the very conversations that pass between his characters have an air of distinction that is all his own. His books are full of brilliant talk--talk real and convincing enough in its purport and setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actual commonplace conversation. It is an enjoyment like that to be obtained from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in A Lodging for the Night and The Sire de Maletroit's Door. But people do not talk like this in actual life--''tis true, 'tis pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not; in actual life conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to describe each particular twiddle. Or in its more intellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and black--like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them.

There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for another man's. All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.

If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.

II. ROMANCE.--The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. 'The artistic result of a romance,' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.' He goes on to point out that there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements. With Scott vague influences that qualify a man's personality begin to make a large claim; 'the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.' And the achievements of the great masters since Scott--Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry--have added new realms to the domain of romance.