Part 11 (1/2)
Dec 22, 1894 RLS 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 raht, as soon as the immediate nuan to reassert itself (as it always does) and whisper ”What have _I_ lost? What is the difference to _ like this--”Put away books and paper and pen Stevenson is dead Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for” Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the livingas he lived, though it were far froh we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names--rote our best for Stevenson To hist us--small or more than sht be poor enough So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive While he lived, he s that quite certainly would never e onder 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 h most of us from tiether inireatness It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triuood books ritten, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote the 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 fro with e, battered and decayed” almost from birth And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly froht chiefly because, for the tier men did not
Had there been another Scott, another Due--to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered hined with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for--let it be said again--no noble itch for le meant for him: how it drove hiht meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung hios, dear land of home”
And then consider the brave spirit that carried hi this far and difficult path; for it is the s Fielding's voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but ale to Lisbon, a voyage in the very penuallantly as his great predecessor Their ”cheerful stoicis, will keep the It shi+nes to our diinibus Puerisque_, and froether ill with the invalid after all””Who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and dickens had each fallen in mid-course” [_He_ had two books at least in hand and uncoin 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-rooin 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 accoe it overtake theThe noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the tru with hilory, 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 s and done sternly, and yet preserved this lovely character; and a 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 res at such ti to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knohy) a trivial, ale fro ”He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and i 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 ain ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble 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 Adrianus”
This one lies, we are told, on athe Pacific At first it seeency 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 ti on the summit of Mount Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea The coffin was carried up the hill by Sah the thick bush which covers the side of the hill frorandfather 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 shi+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 ”Vailierly as aited this voluift, 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 fors and doings fro the last four romantic years of his life The first is dated Noveround for their home on the mountain-side of Vaea: the last, October 6th, 1894, just twohis Odyssey in the South Seas (fro of 1890) his letters, to Mr Colvin at any rate, were infrequent and tantalizingly vague; but soon after settling on his estate in Saratification, took to writing ets as full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until within a feeeks 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 surpass our hopes The great, the entirely happy surprise is their intimacy We all kneho 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 hich 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 --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 saive just cause for anxiety
Indeed, as the reader will have perceived, a gradual change had during the pastover the tone of his correspondence To judge by these letters, his old invincible spirit of cheerfulness was beginning to give way to h to those about hiaiety of te, no doubt, of passages 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 ive myself that I did not stick to an honest, coht have now supportedthese ill years
But do not supposeelse; 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, ied to please the journalists But I a known it I am read by journalists, by my fellow-novelists, and by boys; with these _incipit et explicit_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 coht, 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 passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man asks hi 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 i the last two years of his life With regard to the passage quoted, what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust, for that is a transitory ic 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 hiether 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 s, the Weyan after he had left these shores An artist gainsalone and away froain has this corresponding loss, that he h his dark hours without support Even a master may take benefit at times--if it be only a physical benefit--froive 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 Her ”at the full pitch of his powers and in the conscious happiness of their exercise” Onceat his best The result the world has not yet been allowed to see: for the while we are satisfied and coives 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 ht and inative wisdom, I do not know it”
On the whole, these letters fro enuine Stevenson that we get in the following passage froh I write so little, I pass all inary correspondence I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the et written; _autant en emportent les vents_; but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the coreat talk I was toiling, the sweat dripping froht you asked me--frankly, was I happy? Happy (said I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres; it came to an end froe of place, increase ofsteps; 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 theht of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds And take h, look at it fore and back, and upside down--I would not changeyou here And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I coht 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 e--nothing that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already formed in our own minds Our mental portraits of sos, have had to be readjusted, and sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private correspondence caer in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at any rate is past The er, 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 excitee _entrainement_,” he writes in June, 1893; ”there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one We were all e had been five hours in the saddle,hard; and we cahtness of spirits, and I ahtness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at”
And that his was not by any e one more extract will prove One of his boys, Paatalise by na David Balfour, with my left hand--a most laborious task--fanny 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 reen ferns, dancing I ran downstairs and found all h the dining-roo his place,' they said--'I think this is no time to dance,' said I 'Has he done his work?'--'No,' they told ' But there they all stayed in the back verandah I went on alone through the dining-rooan to walk away; but I called him back, walked up to hi 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 hi 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 followwith fanny in the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no secret of their fears”