Part 9 (1/2)

'Monsieur,' he exclaimed, 'this is not the fas.h.i.+on!'

'It will be the fas.h.i.+on when we have worn the waistcoat once,' was Gautier's reply. And he declares that he delivered the answer with a self-possession worthy of a Brummel or 'any other celebrity of dandyism.'

It is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and good-naturedly extravagant things which Gautier and his companions did, not alone the first night of _Hernani_, but at all times and in all places. They unquestionably saw to it that Victor Hugo had fair play the evening of February 25, 1830. The occasion was an historic one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion.

I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in Gautier's _Histoire du Romantisme_. The narrative is one of much sweetness and humor. It ought to be translated for the benefit of readers who know Gautier chiefly by _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ and that for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least influential.

It is pleasant to find that Renduel confirms the popular view of Gautier's character. M. Jullien says that Renduel never spoke of Gautier but in praise. 'Quel bon garcon!' he used to say. 'Quel brave coeur!' M. Jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give concerning Gautier. But there are eight or nine letters from Gautier to Renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in which the poet says to the publisher, 'Heaven preserve you from historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.'

Gautier must have been both generous and modest. No mere egoist could have been so faithful in his hero-wors.h.i.+p or so unpretentious in his allusions to himself. One has only to read the most superficial accounts of French literature to learn how universally it is granted that Gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was born. Yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master's degree. He quotes one of Goethe's sayings,--a saying in which the great German poet declares that after the practice of many arts there was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of writing in German; in that he was almost a master. Then Gautier exclaims, 'Would that _we_, after so many years of labor, had become almost a master of the art of writing in French! But such ambitions are not for us!'

Yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic.

STEVENSON: THE VAGABOND AND THE PHILOSOPHER

A certain critic said of Stevenson that he was 'incurably literary;'

the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. There is comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. Rather than _do_ anything Stevenson preferred to loaf and to write books. And he early learned that considerable loafing is necessary if one expects to become a writer. There is a sense in which it is true that only lazy people are fit for literature. Nothing is so fruitful as a fine gift for idleness. The most prolific writers have been people who seemed to have nothing to do. Every one has read that description of George Sand in her latter years, 'an old lady who came out into the garden at mid-day in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or wandered slowly about. So she remained for hours looking about her, musing, contemplating. She was gathering impressions, absorbing the universe, steeping herself in Nature; and at night she would give all this forth as a sort of emanation.' One shudders to think what the result might have been if instead of absorbing the universe George Sand had done something practical during those hours. But the Scotchman was not like George Sand in any particular that I know of save in his perfect willingness to bask in the suns.h.i.+ne and steep himself in Nature. His books did not 'emanate.' The one way in which he certainly did not produce literature was by improvisation. George Sand never revised her work; it might almost be said that Robert Louis Stevenson never did anything else.

Of his method we know this much. He himself has said that when he went for a walk he usually carried two books in his pocket, one a book to read, the other a note-book in which to put down the ideas that came to him. This remark has undoubtedly been seized upon and treasured in the memory as embodying a secret of his success. Trusting young souls have begun to walk about with note-books: only to learn that the note-book was a detail, not an essential, in the process.

He who writes while he walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he chooses, write very well. He may turn over the rubbish of his vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which to bring out his meaning. This word need not be unusual; and if it is 'exquisite' then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare exactness to the idea. Stevenson wrote so well in part because he wrote so deliberately. He knew the vulgarity of haste, especially in the making of literature. He knew that finish counted for much, perhaps for half. Has he not been reported as saying that it wasn't worth a man's while to attempt to be a writer unless he was quite willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single sentence? In general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. That scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days, and few authors are willing to take a prophet's chances. But Stevenson was one of the few.

He laid the foundations of his reputation with two little volumes of travel. _An Inland Voyage_ appeared in 1878; _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_, in 1879. These books are not dry chronicles of drier facts. They bear much the same relation to conventional accounts of travel that flowers growing in a garden bear to dried plants in a herbarium. They are the most friendly and urbane things in modern English literature. They have been likened to Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_. The criticism would be better if one were able to imagine Stevenson writing the adventure of the _fille de chambre_, or could conceive of Lawrence Sterne writing the account of the meeting with the Plymouth Brother. 'And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common-house, I have a hope to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.' That was written twenty years ago and the Brother was an old man then. And now Stevenson is gone.

How impossible it is not to wonder whether they have yet met in that 'one common-house.' 'He feared to intrude, but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.'

The _Inland Voyage_ contains pa.s.sages hardly to be matched for beauty.

Let him who would be convinced read the description of the forest Mormal, that forest whose breath was perfumed with nothing less delicate than sweet brier. 'I wish our way had always lain among woods,' says Stevenson. 'Trees are the most civil society.'

Stevenson's traveling companion was a young English baronet. The two adventurers paddled in canoes through the pleasant rivers and ca.n.a.ls of Belgium and North France. They had plenty of rain and a variety of small misadventures; but they also had suns.h.i.+ne, fresh air, and experiences among the people of the country such as they could have got in no other way. They excited not a little wonder, and the common opinion was that they were doing the journey for a wager; there seemed to be no other reason why two respectable gentlemen, not poor, should work so hard and get so wet.

This was conceived in a more adventurous vein than appears at first sight. In an unsubdued country one contends with beasts and men who are openly hostile. But when one is a stranger in the midst of civilization and meets civilization at its back door, he is astonished to find how little removed civilization is from downright savagery.

Stevenson and his companion learned as they could not have learned otherwise how great deference the world pays to clothes. Whether your heart is all right turns out a matter of minor importance; but--_are your clothes all right_? If so, smiles, and good beds at respectable inns; if not, a lodging in a cow-shed or beneath any poor roof which suffices to keep off the rain. The voyagers had constantly to meet the accusation of being peddlers. They denied it and were suspected afresh while the denial was on their lips. The public mind was singularly alert and critical on the subject of peddlers.

At La Fere, 'of Cursed Memory,' they had a rebuff which nearly spoiled their tempers. They arrived in a rain. It was the finest kind of a night to be indoors 'and hear the rain upon the windows.' They were told of a famous inn. When they reached the carriage entry 'the rattle of many dishes fell upon their ears.' They sighted a great field of snowy table-cloth, the kitchen glowed like a forge. They made their triumphal entry, 'a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp India-rubber bag upon his arm.' Stevenson declares that he never had a sound view of that kitchen. It seemed to him a culinary paradise 'crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen, who all turned round from their sauce-pans and looked at us with surprise.' But the landlady--a flushed, angry woman full of affairs--there was no mistaking her. They asked for beds and were told to find beds in the suburbs: 'We are too busy for the like of you!' They said they would dine then, and were for putting down their luggage. The landlady made a run at them and stamped her foot: 'Out with you--out of the door,' she screeched.

I once heard a young Englishman who had been drawn into some altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his own part by saying: 'Now a French cook running amuck with a carving knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.'

There were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. Stevenson says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were out in the rain, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a disappointed mendicant.'

'It's all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil.

I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.'

Stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of Diana on fire that night if it had been handy. 'There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of human inst.i.tutions.' As for the baronet, he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again; and he registered a vow before Heaven never to be uncivil to a peddler. But before making that vow he particularized a complaint for every joint in the landlady's body.

To read _An Inland Voyage_ is to be impressed anew with the thought that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. They are instinctively for being on the move. Like the author of that book they travel 'not to go any where but to go.' If they behold a stage-coach or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard.

They are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when they are on the move. Talk to them of foreign lands and they are seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. Stevenson met an omnibus driver in a Belgian village who looked at him with thirsty eyes because he was able to travel. How that omnibus driver 'longed to be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.' 'Here I am,' said he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My G.o.d, is that life?' Stevenson opined that this man had in him the making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to Africa or to the Indies after Drake. 'But it is an evil age for the gipsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.'

In his _Travels with a Donkey_ the author had no companions.h.i.+p but such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companions.h.i.+p was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. 'My lady-friend' he calls her.

Modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' She gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ign.o.ble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her s.e.x. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty.'

From time to time Modestine's load would topple off. The villagers were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. 'Judge if I was hot!' says Stevenson. 'I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jack-a.s.s, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days before this trouble came upon me.'