Stevenson's attitude to life; with readings from his essays and letters

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Stevenson's attitude to life; with readin

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STEVENSON'S ATTITUDE TO LIFE
JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG

TEVENSON'S ATTITUDE

TO LIFE : WITH READ-
INGS FROM HIS ESSAYS
AND LETTERS. BY JOHN
FRANKLIN GENUNG

THOMAS Y. CROWELL AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS: NEW YORK: MDCCCCI

E..V.

Copyright, 1901, by T. Y. Crowell & Co.

Twelfth Thousand

PR

JY30313S

D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston

PREFATORY NOTE

HE marks of oral discourse,
which this book still bears from
its original form as a lecture, it
has not been thought best to re-
move. What was first read aloud
by the author he now gives, to
those who care for the theme, opportunity to
read for themselves. And if, beyond the sound
of his voice, some fit audience may like to hear
how the deep music of life reverberates from
one of the sanest minds, one of the bravest
hearts, of the century just past, the purpose of
this little volume will be fulfilled.
For the readings, which have a very vital share
in giving the volume whatever value it has,
thankful acknowledgment is hereby made to
Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, who have
kindly given permission to quote from works
of which they hold the copyright. The readings
are taken from the Thistle Edition of Steven-
son's works.

Amherst, Massachusetts, February 6, 1901.

STEVENSON'S ATTITUDE TO LIFE

TEVENSON'S attitude to life:
this is what we now propose to
consider ; a natural enough sub-
ject of inquiry, it would seem;
and yet the very proposal, as
thus phrased, is a departure
from the Stevensonian idiom. If
he had the framing of an ideal for us, his first
counsel, I imagine, would be, Do not assume
an attitude toward life at all, but just live ; do
not be a spectator and critic of the business of
living, but throw yourself into the heart of it,
and be all there, and say no more about it.

t

ROM this consideration radi-
ates our whole subject. In Ste-
venson's implicit philosophy a
formulated attitude would be
too much like attitudinizing;
too self-conscious and put on;
too much sicklied o'er with the uneasy intro-
spectiveness of the tired century. Enough of
posing and irresolution outside the arena of
life ; such, we may be sure, was his thought as
he listened to the utterances that came surging
up to him from the inner heart of his time. And
so what he represents first and wholesomest
of all, what most gives him power on his age,
is the robust reaction against all this which
breathes like an ozone through every page of
his writings. Not that this reaction is overt,
or that he takes it upon himself to set up a pro-

i

J>teWtieofl 1 6 test. One great element of his power, on the
JXttitllbe to contrary, is the entire absence of remonstrance,
iCife or of anything merely negative or repressive.

He simply ignores that benumbing arriere pen-
see which for full half a century has so beset
the faith of the world, and dares to take life
at its positive intrinsic value, without the dis-
quiet of morbid analysis. That is all ; his "atti-
tude" is merely the free joyous erectness of the
undismayed soul.

To approach life with fearless confidence that
it means intensely and means good; to bear
full weight upon itphever letting encroaching
doubts or disillusions chill the youthful spirit
\in which the soul first welcomes the world, —
a hearty gospel this; introduced by him, too,
just at a time when the spirit of the age might
turn to it most gratefully, as to a sunshine out
of fogs and discomfort. And not only Steven-
son's words, but his life no less, ennobled that
gospel ; maintained as it was under such diffi-
culties of physical weakness and enforced exile
that just for this brave service we count him
among the heroes and martyrs of literature ;
classing him as a worthy peer in the same rank
with Walter Scott, breathing forth the rarest
spirit of romance from under his burden of un-
righteous debt, and Charles Lamb, adding to
the world's joy by his immortal words written
from the home where in lifelong renunciation
of conjugal comfort he was caring for a mad
sister. All these buried their hardships in si-
lence away from the world, while they coined
their life's best ore into a mintage of health and
2

cheer. Nor can we count the latest-born the ^tevetieorfe
least of these, when we recall how almost from J(ttitllbc to
earliest years he lived face to face with death, jZife
yet not in defiance but with unflagging buoy-
ancy and courage wrought as he could snatch
respite from disease to fulfil what we may truly
call his message to the world. To work thus
was his animating principle, his life-creed ; and
this very triumph of spirit was his greatest
message.

You remember how bravely this trait of his
comes to expression in his essay Ms Triplex,
an essay not only full of his own life but singu-
larly prophetic of his manner of leaving it. The
whole essay ought to be quoted ; I will read you
merely the last page. "Who would find heart
enough," he says, "to begin to live, if he dallied
with the consideration of death? . . . It is better
to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste
it like a miser. 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
about a month, make one brave push and see
what can be accomplished in a week. It is not
only in finished undertakings that we ought to
honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the
man who means execution, which outlives the
most untimely ending. All who have meant
good work with their whole hearts, have done
good work, although they may die before they
have the time to sign it. Every heart that has
beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful
impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the

3

M>teyetl6on'6 tradition of mankind. And even if death catch
Mttitube to people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career,
jCife laying out vast projects, and planning mon-

strous foundations, flushed with hope, and
their mouths full of boastful language, they
should be at once tripped up and silenced : is
there not something brave and spirited in such
a termination? and does not life go down with
a better grace, foaming in full body over a
precipice, than miserably straggling to an end
in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their
fine saying that those w,hom the gods love die
young, I cannot help believing they had this
sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at
whatever age it overtake the man, this is to
die young. Death has not been suffered to take
so much as an illusion from his heart. In the
hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of
being, he passes at a bound on to the other side.
The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely
quenched, the trumpets' are hardly done blow-
ing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory,
this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots
into the spiritual land."
A "happy-starred, full-blooded spirit," — how
well this phrase describes that man within
Stevenson who so courageously and against
such tyrannous odds struggled toward an ut-
terance that should be, like himself, full of the
glory of life. "Vital," he writes in one of his
letters to Colvin,— "that's what I am at first:
wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life." This was
not an aim that came to him casually; he knew
well what it meant, and how it squared with his
4

limitations. "Quite early in his career," says J§>teven6on'6
Edmund Gosse, "he adjusted himself to the Jfttitube to
inevitable sense of physical failure. He threw {rife
away from him all the useless impediments : he '
sat loosely in the saddle of life. Many men who
get such a warning as he got take up something
to lean against ; according to their education or
temperament, they support their maimed exis-
tence on religion, or on cynical indifference, or
on some mania of the collector or the dilettante.
Stevenson did none of these things. He deter-
mined to make the sanest and most genial use
of so much of life as was left him. As any one who
reads his books can see, he had a deep strain of
natural religion ; but he kept it to himself; he
made no hysterical or ostentatious use of it."
This deep-lying strain in Stevenson's nature,
all the more potent because so sacredly reti-
cent,— which Mr. Gosse calls natural religion,
which in order to avoid an ungenial connota-
tion I prefer to call his attitude to life, — let us
now consider a little more particularly, looking
first at its power and timeliness in the age, and
then at its more salient elements, as springing
from their points of outset in him.

it

N his relation to the age, Steven-
son may be regarded as pioneer
in the new mood or spiritual cur-
rent now well underway ; a mood
much heartier and wholesomer
_ than what it succeeds; nor is it
on the whole less reverent, albeit far Jess ob-

5

J>teWtt6on'6 servant of devotional or philosophical forms.

JXttitube to We ma y in a word call it a spiritual return to

fcxfa nature.

A few moments ago I spoke of that blighting
arriere pensee which has so inveterately clung
to a half-century's faith, and the complete ig-
noring of which gives so invigorating a tone to
Stevenson's work. In 1889 Richard Holt Hutton
described this as "the spiritual fatigue of the
world," and by way of illustration named such
works as Amiel's Journal and Mrs. Humphry
Ward's Robert Elsmere. We also, as we re-
call the period stretching' back from that date,
have a general sense that much of its foremost
utterance was morbid, and very little of it buoy-
antly joyful. We recall how George Eliot sat
in pensive despair over a world to be noble
and unhappy in; how Matthew Arnold was
dejectedly
"Wandering between two worlds, —one dead,

The other powerless to be born;"
how Clough gave up the whole problem, yet
still clung to it in blank bewilderment; how it
was as much as ever that Tennyson, by a dead
lift of faith, succeeded in reaching a point
where on the whole the odds were in favour of
heaven ; how even Browning, with his insistent
optimism, not seldom gave the impression of
whistling to keep his courage up. Every out-
look of life was clouded with difficulty and
gloom. We did not feel the strain of it so much
then; it was the dominant mood of things; but
as we look back now it already seems far-away

and strange, and we feel as if we had survived Mttevewon'e
an epidemic. The world had brooded on the JXttitUbe to
mystery of existence until it was tired out. jtife
Long and stern had the struggle been; no
wonder the great labouring heart of the age
was weary. As long ago as 1833 Carlyle, in true
prophetic spirit, had anticipated the stress and
conflict, and had hurled at it his own character-
istic solution. "Strangely enough," he makes
TeufelsdrBckh say of his spiritual troubles, "I
lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear ; trem-
ulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew
not what ; it seemed as if all things in the Heav-
ens above and the Earth beneath would hurt
me ; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but
boundlessjaws of a devouring monster, wherein
I, palpitating, waited to be dev&Hjred. — Full of
such humour, and perhaps themisehjblestman
in the whole French Capital or Suburfes, was I,
one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation,
toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas
de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a
close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as
Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubt-
less my spirits were little cheered ; when, all at
once, there rose a Thought in me, and. I asked
myself: 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore,
like a coward, dost thou forever pip and pimper,
and go cowering and trembling? Despicable bi-
ped ! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies
before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the
pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and
Man may, will or can do against thee ! Hast thou
not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever

7

^teveneon'6 it be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though out-
Jtttitttbe to cast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while
j£,(fg it consumes thee ? Let it come, then ; I will meet

it and defy it !' And as I so thought, there rushed
like a stream of fire over my whole soul ; and I
shook base Fear away from me forever. I was
strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost
a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my
misery was changed : not Fear or whining Sor-
row was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance."

Great fierce words these ; but they are not so
much a solution as a gage of battle. There is
nothing settling or reposeful in them. They can
issue in an Everlasting No, or in a Yea so
truculent as to seem like a perpetual quarrel
with the order of things, but not in peace or
acquiescent joy. And this mood of defiance is
just as wearing, it just as surely brings spirit-
ual fatigue and depression, as does doubt or
fear. It is not the stable equilibrium of the soul ;
it is in fact only another phase of that same
stress and strain under which our age has so
sadly laboured.

From such a tension as this a reaction sooner
or later is inevitable. And it is fortunate, when
the reaction comes, if the determining influence
of it, the pioneer spirit, guide it in natural ways,
not as revolution and sour lawlessness but as
uplift and enrichment. To have done this, to
have been a leading spirit in making a great
reaction sane and sweet, is Stevenson's incal-
culable service to his age. It was not in protest
but in the spontaneous joy of living, not in re-
8

Cife

bellion against pastorpresent but in the whole- J)tewit60ll'6
hearted desire to add to the wealth of exis- Jfttitttbc to
tence, that he gave to the world his exquisite
essays and adventure stories. All that was es-
tablished he was content to let be, and to build
upon. "New truth," he says, "is only useful to
supplement the old ; rough truth is only wanted
to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often
elegant conventions." He did not set out to rev-
olutionize men's attitude to life ; it is doubtful
if he knew how much he was doing. But some-
how forthwith the tension was relieved, and be-
fore they knew it those melancholy souls who
had brooded over knotty problems of heaven
and earth until they ached with the strain, found
themselves deep in a boy's book of adventure
and treasure hunting which was restful and de-
lightful j ust because it contained no nice balanc-
ing of motives, no calculation of moral chances,
and no conscience at all. Here was the timely
offset to a literature which, keeping to its old
formulas long after their first poignancy was
gone, was beginning to run twaddle. It was
a return to run-wild elemental nature, to the
stratum below the conventionalisms and arti-
ficialities of life ; and it was made in the health-
iest, least-disturbing way possible; not by de-
nial or even propaganda, not by a picnic return
to nature like Rousseau's, but by simply hark-
ing back to the buoyant youthfulness that still
survives in all of us, — das Ewigj ugendliche.
In youth, and in the spirit of youthfulness, we
dare to let our blood bound and our untor-
mented conscience carry off the experiences

9

£>tevetl6on'6 that come. We trust ourselves to the impulses
JXttitUbe to °f a period that has not yet become morbid
j^ife and introspective. Full of energy this morning:

spirit is, but it is the energy of a large and joy-
ous scale of living; a noble manhood-energy
which is its own excuse for being. Such was
the vital truth that Stevenson was concerned
to set forth ; and no lesson ever came in better
time.

The first impression this makes upon us is that
of simplifying things. It bids us come out of the
heat and the worry, and let ourselves enjoy.
"We are in such haste," he says in his essay
on Walking Tours, "to be doing, to be writing,
to be gathering gear, to make our voice audi-
ble a moment in the derisive silence of eternity,
that we forget that one thing, of which these
are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall in
love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the
earth like frightened sheep. And now you are
to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would
not have been better to sit by the fire at home,
and be happy thinking. To sit still and contem-
plate, — to remember the faces of women with-
out desire, to be pleased by the great deeds
of men without envy, to be everything and
everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to
remain where and what you are — is not this
to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell
with happiness? After all, it is not they who
carry flags, but they who look upon it from a
private chamber, who have the fun of the pro-
cession."

That life is a thing to be lived, not brooded over ;
10

that the net result of it, as its problems" are met, Jitewneott'tf
should be joy and confidence, not introspection Jlttitttbe to
and fear;— this is the medicine that Stevenson -fcife
would apply to the spiritual fatigue of his time.
For a man so to do is to be master of himself
and his station and his fate; it is venturing to
take the beauty and the promise of the present
as true and as hiding no treachery for the time
or eternity to come.

A man who holds such a view of life as this
must make his reckoning with the current
ideas of things, evolved as these are from the
desperate earnestness of our science and phi-
losophy, and clouded over by the mystery that
fills this unintelligible world. Nor is Stevenson
wanting here. He is not at all out of touch with
this scientific age, or with the closest and most
searching study of all its conditions; but sci-
ence, he is well aware, has its place, where it
may attend to one department of life, but not
to all, and not to what is really inner and vital.
His centre and citadel is a place that science
can neither invade nor enrich, a place where all
the life, and not the brain alone, has its world.
"There are moments," he says, in his essay
on Pan's Pipes, "when the mind refuses to be
satisfied with evolution, and demands a rud-
dier presentation of the sum of man's expe-
rience. Sometimes the mood is brought about
by laughter at the humorous side of life. . . .
Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and
sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there
will always be hours when we refuse to be put
off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed sci-

II

J>tewn60rt'6 ence; and demand instead some palpitating
JXttitllbe to ima S e of our estate, that shall represent the
fCife troubled and uncertain element in which we

dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art.
Science writes of the world as if with the cold
finger of a starfish ; it is all true ; but what is
it when compared to the reality of which it dis-
courses? where hearts beat high in April, and
death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake,
and there is a glamour Over all the objects of
sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and
Romance herself has made her dwelling among
men?"

The same with philosophy. Brought into the
presence of life, as life was meant to be, all its
laboured explanations shrivel and dry up, leav-
ing us with the feeling that it never saw the
reality of its object at all. What is life, when
all is said? and what shall we do with it? This
is how Stevenson estimates philosophy in his
essay on JEs Triplex: "All literature, from
Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or
Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon
the human state with such largeness of view
as shall enable us to rise from the considera-
tion of living to the Definition of Life. And our
sages give us about the best satisfaction in
their power when they say that it is a vapour,
or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense,
has been at the same work for ages ; and after
a myriad bald heads have wagged over the
problem, and piles of words have been heaped
one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes
12

without end, philosophy has the honour of lay- &t eveneorfe
ing before us, with modest pride, her contri- Jftrtru&e to
bution towards the subject: that life is a Per- jCife
manent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine
result ! A man may very well love beef, or hunt-
ing, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Per-
manent Possibility of Sensation! He may be
afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large
enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's
man; but not certainly of abstract death. We
may trick with the word life in its dozen senses
until we are weary of tricking; we may argue
in terms of all the philosophies on earth ; but
one fact remains true throughout— that we do
not love life, in the sense that we are greatly
preoccupied about its conservation; that we
do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but
living."

If this view of life inveighs against the abys-
mal interpretations propounded by uninspired
intellect, none the less also it is beyond the
maladies of intellect; and herein largely con-
sists its tonic bracing quality for its age. For
it life is a good in itself, centred in its own joys,
its own sufficient resources ; we need not always
be looking round the corner for a hidden pit-
fall, or asking whether life is worth living, or
quarrelling with the untoward circumstances
which are so slow to bring its felicities from
outside. It is the spirit that quickeneth; let
the spirit be sound, and there is no occasion for
depression or fatigue over its problems. In the
same essay last quoted from, Stevenson thus
laughs down the shallowness that sees only

13

^teveneon'6 gloom ahead: "There is a great deal of very
Jfttitube to vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the
£ife matter: tearing divines reducing life to the

dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so
short as to be hardly detent; and melancholy
unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were
a world too far away. Both sides must feel a
little ashamed of their performances now and
again when they draw in their chairs to dinner.
Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an
answer to most standard-works upon the ques-
tion. When a man's heart warms to his viands,
he forgets a great deal Qf sophistry, and soars
into a rosy zone of contemplation." In the same
vein, in his essay on Walt Whitman, he por-
trays the torpor of the age, and in such terms
that we can see he felt upon himself the bur-
den of a mission against it. "We are accus-
tomed nowadays," he says, "to a great deal of
puling over the circumstances in which we are
placed. The great refinement of many poetical
gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit
for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they
record their unfitness at considerable length.
The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint
produces too many flimsy imitators ; for there
is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano be-
comes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, ,
as Whitman calls it, . . . is. in many ways a most 1
humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young '
gentlemen with three or four hundred a year
of private means look down from a pinnacle of
doleful experience on all the grown and hearty
H

men who have dared to say a good word for life §>teyetlGQtC&
since the beginning of the world. There is no Jlttitube to
prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the Cifc
blue devils dance on all our literary wires." In
the words that follow these we get a glimpse of
the impulse that has set him into this somewhat
unusual vein of invective ; it is his impulse, as
one who sees and can guide, to meet the respon-
sibilities of his endowments and make a better
spirit of things prevail. "It would be a poor ser-
vice to spread culture," he goes on to say, "if
this be its result, among the comparatively inno-
cent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little
poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman
and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we
tamper with our ploughmen. Where a= man in
not the best of circumstances preserves com-
posure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco,
and his wife and children, in the intervals of
dull and unremunerative labour; where a man
in this predicament can afford a lesson by the
way to what are called his intellectual supe-
riors, there is plainly something to be lost, as
well as something to be gained, by teaching
him to think differently. It is better to leave him
as he is than to teach him whining. It is better
that he should go without the cheerful lights
of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralyzing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let
us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound
stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolourizes for poor natures
the wonderful pageant of consciousness ; let us
teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and

15

JJtfWtieon'e they will learn for themselves to sympathize;
Rititube to but let us see to it, above all, that we give these
jCife lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the

man up in courage while we demolish its sub-
stitute, indifference."

Here then we may sum up the influence of that
wholesome reaction which Stevenson had a
pioneer's part in bringing to his troubled age.
Addressing itself to the same spiritual malaise
that Teufelsdrbckh felt so many years ago,
and that has so lingered in the heart of the
age since, it asks, not now in truculence but in n n
courage and tender sympathy, the same ques- s- s-
tion that brought Carlyle to his senses : "What ,t ,t
art thou afraid of?" and then, going on to the e e
answer, instead of reducing life to a grim de- :- :-
fiance of Tophet and snarling at the devil, sets
man with hope and joy and the morning purity
of youth before "the wonderful pageant of con-
sciousness," to use and assimilate the glories
of an intensely interesting world. Get the en-
ergetic spirit of man in that attitude, and what
is there to fear or distrust, what is there to in-
duce this torpor and fatigue, after all?
I need not remind you again how seasonable
this is, and what a tonic it has been to these
later days. We have only to think how the em-
phasis of things has shifted: how Mrs. Hum-
phry Ward and her imitators, with their un-
easy exploitation of religious enigmas, have all
the irksomeness of a "back number" ; how Hall
Caine's Christian, when we compare him with
the unspoken ideal of a sturdy sense, is con-
temned as a Christian freak and fool; how Kip-
16

ling and Hope and Weyman, with their frank &teyen$on'e
return to healthy animalism and the scarce re- Rttitube to
strained impulses of the natural man, are call- jZife
ing forth such an answering chord of senti-
ment ; how old Omar Khayyam is living anew,
not so much from his agnosticism and his dis-
position to say audacious things to God, as
from his truce to theological subtilties and his
hearty acceptance of this present life and its
good cheer. From these random instances we
can judge what is coming to be the prevailing
mood and sentiment of the time. It is to the
spirit what ourvogue of athletics is to the body:
it starts a genial warmth and suggests a rub-
down and a hearty meal ; and from it we turn
to our work with a sense of buoyancy and light-
ness, and with a readiness to meet alt the un-
certainties of the future, and have no fear.
Now of course I am not disposed to ascribe all
this to Stevenson. But he was, as I have re-
peatedly said, a pioneer spirit in it, with the
advantage that his utterance came just at the
crest of the time, when a great wearied heart
was ready for it. Another thing too cannot be
spared from the account. His wonderful gift of
expression made the definition of the new move-
ment vital and operative in those minds which
respond to the thrill of language, that finest
vehicle of spiritual communion. On the author-
class especially, whose activities are concerned
with moving the mass of men by language, he
wrought as acknowledged master and model.
"While he lived," said Quiller-Couch at the
time of his death, "he moved men to put their

17

J»tewtl60ti 1 6 utmost even into writings that quite certainly
Jfttitube to would never meet his eye. Surely another age
jZife w iH wonder over this curiosity of letters — that

for five years the needle of literary endeavour
in Great Britain has quivered towards a little
island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic
pole." A man who possesses such an influence
is not the arbiter of style alone. If, as Edmund
Gosse called him, he is "the most inspiriting,
the most fascinating human being that I have
known," and if that fascination glamours not
only his personality but the whole of life as he in-
terprets and lives it, this also will have its power,
this glow of health and insight also, through
those whose utterance in turn is thrilled by it,
will work its work in the age. By its intrinsic
charm it has placed itself so as to control the
channels of uplift and power.

at

URNINGnowto the salient ele-
ments in Stevenson's attitude to
life, with their points of outset
in his personality, we note as the
most outstanding element the
view, or tacit tenet, which in Ste-
venson's disciples and successors has assumed
most the character of a reaction, and which ac-
cordingly has wrought tb traverse a venerable
religious presupposition. Stevenson freely as-
sumes, though still as a balanced sanity and
temperance, what in some of the less-grounded
spirits has become more brutal and glaring,
—that the natural man, the man who has a
18

complete outfit of instincts and appetites im- JtteWtttfOtl'e
planted at birth, has rights which we are bound Jittitube to
to respect and maintain, apart from the dis- jtife
count that we must reckon for depravity and
the duty of spiritualizing him by regeneration. .
He builds, in other words, on the basal assump-
tion that man is in very fair working-order
before the clergy have got hold of him. This as-
sumption was just the thing that a conscience-
morbid age would most naturally grasp at, and
perhaps, by reason of the reactive element in it,
coarsen into a sort of antinomianism. Not so,
however, Stevenson. In him the spirit of the
natural man is still a beauty and a grace, like
the grace of youth and innocence; healthy too,
and racy of the soil. In his relation to that idea
of the natural man which was rooted in his na-
tive tradition, he has an analogue in our Ameri-
can literature. As our own Hawthorne gave
forth his heritage of Puritanism not as an aus-
terity but as a kind of fragrance, so, we may
say, Stevenson distils into a fragrance the in-
herited breath and influence of Scotch Presby-
terianism. He neither denies nor accepts origi-
nal sin and depravity; he simply ignores them,
as if the man for whom he lives and writes were
to reckon himself dead to them. It is not so much
that he has broken with the austere tenets of
Calvinism, as that, like the author of the Epistle
to the Hebrews, he is resolved to leave the ru-
diments of the theory of life, such as dealings
with sin and conversion, and considering these
disposed of once for all, go on unto perfection.
His natural unforced man, then, is not a mere

19

Mfteven&otl'e creature of instincts and appetites, like a finer
Jtttitube to brute, but a being in whom the goodly heritage
Cifc of Christian centuries is so ingrained that he

may trust himself to follow his impulses with-
out thought, while he lives his nobler life as to
the manner born. Surely there is nothing revo-
lutionary in this. It merely assumes that man-
hood has resources of its own to utilize, be-
yond settling the preliminary question how to
get manhood. Instead of taking up his station,
as Evangelism so long has done, before the
threshold of the renewed life, he occupies a
place so far beyond the entrance that the man
may enjoy the freedom and the scenery of that
region, and explore its wealth of beauty, as a
matter of course.

All this is consistent and continuous with that
higher trend of life commonly called the spirit-
ual; it has all the organs and proclivities for
living the life of the spirit. But its power in
literature to-day is mainly on the elemental
side, the side which hitherto has had its rights
for the most part under ecclesiastical protest.
There is something free and bracing in the dis-
covery that Calvin, in his theory of total deprav-
ity, overlooked some things in the penumbra
of totality which may be so enjoyed as to leave
the soul intact ; and we must give the new feel-
ing time to adjust itself to its wider range. We
may be sure that when the various excesses of
coltishness are corrected much good will ac-
crue to the body cogitative from it.
In the whole spiritual movement of which this
is a part Mr. James Lane Allen discerns a vi-
20

rility, a largeness, a deepening, which he names J>te veneon'6
the Masculine Principle coming to expression Jfttitube to
in our literature. "It is striking out boldly," £ifa
he says, "for larger things, —larger areas of
adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer
movements through both: it would have the
wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of
a bird on a woman's hat. . . . And if, finally, it
has any one characteristic more discernible
than another, it is the movement away from the
summits of life downward toward the bases
of life; from the heights of civilization to the
primitive springs of action ; from the thin-aired
regions of consciousness which are ruled over
by Tact to the underworld of unconsciousness
where are situated the mighty workshops, and
where toils on forever the Cyclopean youth, In-
stinct."

All this we may regard as in a sense the pres-
ent-day phase of the answer to Teufelsdrockh's
question, "What art thou afraid of?" And per-
haps the age will bear it if for once we do leave
our inveterate presupposition of man's innate
corruption unregarded, and dare to let self-ex-
pression, trained as it is through a long.growth
of ennobling and Christianizing ideas, be large
and untrammelled. It is well at least to know,
if we may, that when left to his natural self man,
may signify something more than tobacco and!
gin and lust,— that there are, at the bases of
his nature, thoroughly sound and respectable
traits, after all.

Of this natural manhood the note which Ste-
venson has most at heart and strikes most

21

^tewneon'e constantly is its wholeness and wholesome-
Jtttitube to ness, that character which, being its own great
■f£if e sufficiency and reward, can trust itself soul-

forward and without apology to its own self-
expression. Life is not a thing to buy, but to
enjoy as an ultimate fact. It desires no better
thing outside. A kingdom of heaven which is
not a present thing, realizable in all its glory
within, has no appeal to him. "The view taught
at the present time," he says in his Lay Mor-
als, "seems to me to want greatness; and the
dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly ut-
tered is not the dialect of my soul. It is a sort
of postponement of life ; nothing quite is, but
something different is to be; we are to keep
our eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to
the grave. We are to regulate our conduct not
by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future ;
and to value acts as they will bring us money
or good opinion ; as they will bring us, in one
word, profit. . . . We are to live just now as
well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
where we shall be good. We are to worry
through the week in a lay, disreputable way,
but, to make matters square, live a different
life on Sunday." Such a divided life as is here
described, such commercial balancing of im-
pulses and convictions, desires and conven-
tions, incurred his heartiest antipathy. For al-
most anything else he could make allowance;
but this invaded the very citadel of life, where
a man must reckon with the unity of his own
manhood. "If we were to conceive a. perfect
man," he says, "it should be one who was never

22

torn between conflicting impulses, butwho, on £teve motCc
the absolute consent of all his parts and facul- J^ttitube to
ties, submitted in every action of his life to a £\c z
self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as
that which bids him love one woman and be
true to her till death."

In this absoluteness of surrender to the man-
hood current within us Stevenson has taken
us far from the total-depravity school, with its
nervous fear of giving human nature free play.
And if he sets the nature moving according to
its own free bent, and all together, then its direc-
tion must be right, for there is no part left to
apply the brakes if it is headed wrong..Trained
as we are in some reminiscence of the same
school, we are not likely to forget this, or to let
Stevenson do so. Nor does he forget it. Herein
it is that he is the safest and most truly Chris-
tian of guides, that he never loses sight of the
highest ends ; so high that the warring region
of pettiness and passion is left far below. Both
whip and rein, in his programme of life, are in
the hands not of the senses but of the spirit;
his natural man, this latest birth of a rising and
refining evolution, is as it were the Son of man.
Therefore the whole normal man is sound and
sacred. "All that is in the man in the larger
sense," he says in this same work on Lay Mor-
als, "what we call impression as well as what
we call intuition, so far as my argument looks,
we must accept. It is not wrong to desire food,
or exercise, or beautiful surroundings, or the
love of sex, or interest which is the food of the
mind. All these are craved; all these should

23

^tewneon'e be craved; to none of these in itself does the
Jfttitube to sou * demur; where there conies an undeniable
jT{fc want, we recognize a demand of nature. Yet we

know that these natural demands may be su-
perseded; for the demands which are common
to mankind make but a shadowy consideration
in comparison to the demands of the individual
soul."

Superseded, then, these elemental desires may
be? Yes ; it is so,— superseded, not starved nor
pampered; conquered neither by selfish indul-
gence nor selfish asceticism, but by a higher
and harmonizing principle which resides in the
spirit, and enables the man to live as a whole,
with no schism between lower and higher.
"There is another way," Stevenson goes on to
say, "to supersede them by reconciliation, in
which the soul and all the faculties and senses
pursue a common route and share in one de-
sire." Then after exemplifying this reconcilia-
tion from common experience, he sums up:
"Now to me this seems a type of that Tight-
ness which the soul demands. It demands that
we shall not live alternately with our oppos-
ing tendencies in continual seesaw of passion
and disgust, but seek some path on which the
tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve
each other to a common end. It demands that
we shall not pursue broken ends, but great
and comprehensive purposes, in which soul
and body may unite like notes in a harmonious
chord. . . . The soul demands unity of purpose,
not the dismemberment of man ; it seeks to roll
up all his strength and sweetness, all his pas-
24

sion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a £>teveneon 6
perfect man exulting in perfection." Jttttrube to

A man of Stevenson's spiritual antecedents jCifc
could not hold such a conclusion as this idly, or
ignore the elements that make against it. With
a great sum must he purchase his freedom.
There is the fact of sin to be reckoned with.
There are the pains of accusing conscience and
unrealized ideals. These are the discount side
of the book, the prose reality to set over against
our dreams. And Stevenson has reckoned with
them. It is, in fact, when he is dealing with
these stern facts of life that he strikes at once
his most exalted and most practical note. That
free manhood which he has so much at heart
is to move in a region to which the evil we would
shun is absolutely alien ; no more entering our
thought, as a necessary ingredient of life, than
would arson or highway robbery. I have spoken
of this already; it is the Apostle Paul's idea of
reckoning ourselves dead to sin, translated into
modern idiom. "It is probable," Stevenson says
in his Christmas Sermon, "that nearly all who
think of conduct at all, think of it too much ; it
is certain we all think too much of sin. We are
not damned for doing wrong, but for not do-
ing right; Christ would never hear of negative
morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with
which he superseded thou shalt not. To make
our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is
to defile the imagination and to introduce into
our judgments of our fellow-men a secret ele-
ment of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we
should not dwell upon the thought of it; or

25

J>tewil6on'6 we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted plea-
Jittitube to sure. ... A man may have a flaw, a weakness,
fcife that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils

his temper, that threatens his integrity, or that
betrays him into cruelty. It has to be conquered ;
but it must never be suffered to engross his
thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the far-
ther side, and must be attended to with a whole
mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of
the decks has been effected. In order that he
may be kind and honest, it may be needful he
should become a total abstainer; let him be-
come so then, and the next day let him forget
the circumstance. Trying to be kind and hon-
est will require all his thoughts; a mortified
appetite is never a wise companion ; in so far
as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will
still be the worse man i and of such an one a
great deal of cheerfulness will be required in
j udging life, and a great deal of humility in judg-
ing others." Just such sane and sensible treat-
ment he applies also to* conscience, in his Re-
flection and Remarks on Human Life. "Never
allow your mind," he says, "to dwell on your
own misconduct ; that is ruin. The conscience
has morbid sensibilities ; it must be employed
but not indulged, like the imagination or the
stomach. Let each stab suffice for the occa-
sion ; to play with this spiritual pain turns to
penance ; and a person easily learns to feel good
by dallying with the consciousness of having
done wrong. Shut your eyes hard against the
recollection of your sins. Do not be afraid, you
will not be able to forget them. . . . The study
26

of conduct has to do with grave problems ; not M>tevcn60li , 6

every action should be higgled over; one of the Httitube to

leading virtues therein is to let oneself alone. jCife

But if you make it your chief employment, you

are sure to meddle too much. This is the great

error of those who are called pious. Although

the war of virtue be unending except with life,

hostilities are frequently suspended, and the

troops go into winter quarters ; but the pious

will not profit by these times of truce; where

their conscience can perceive no sin, they will

find a sin in that very innocency; and so they

pervert, to their annoyance, those seasons

which God gives to us for repose and a reward."

iv

N this free-moving life, so spon-
taneous and unforced as to sug-
gest the unrestrained natural
man, so true to high possibili-
ties and dead to baseness as to
suggest the pure freedom of
the spirit, there is one comprehensive mark
of health and perfect function. It is happy; it
moves in joy. This is its side as turned to its
own fulfilment and destiny, the music it makes
with all its strings in perfect tune and harmony.
And because it is happy, it is a source and radi-
ator of happiness ; not laying austere exactions
on men but smoothing their way to manhood.
This is its side as turned to the world. The two
sides are natural complements of each other.
By so much as life fails of happiness, by so much /

an alien element is there, a limitation, a power-

27

SttcxeneotCe consuming friction, which ought not and was
Jtttitnbe to never meant to be. By so much as it fails to ra-
■jCife diate and promote happiness, by so much it has

missed or perverted its true design in the sum
of things. The sign of its wholeness is a free
play of good cheer. Carlyle's discovery that the
lack of happiness might be countervailed by
blessedness, as if a man could at once be pro-
foundly miserable on some accounts and on
others be profoundly blissful, — his sum-total
of life being thus a greater or less balance be-
tween contradictory currents, — was entirely
foreign to Stevenson's ideal; it belonged, in
fact, to a disturbed and divided nature, and to
a man who was eternally thinking of himself.
Such a man Stevenson most emphatically was
not. His was the royal wholeness of a nature
moving all together, without apology or evil
discount. He had not to think of self but to be ;
not to cipher out an attitude to life but to live ;
not even to appoint himself a missionary of the
doctrine of happiness to other men, like those
actors who posture and snigger in order to raise
a laugh, but simply to be happy and make that
h appines s, withjtssolid_glow-of heat, its own
excuse for being. Such happiness is conta-
gious; it needs no bolstering of propaganda; it
awakens echoes, it calls out responsive cheer
by its mere self-evidencing wholesomeness.
This happiness in Stevenson was more than
temperamental ; it had based itself in the wise
and penetrative spirit. Nor was it any shal-
low evasion of the deeps of life; it was at polar
remove from the mere physical well-being of
28

a gourmand, or the glee of an empty-headed £>tevetl6Ori'0
dancer. It had made itself good against too JTttttU&e to
much ill health for that ; and underlying it were £ife
centuries of digested thought and doctrine. An
efflorescence, a fruitage, it truly was, culminat-
ing from profound strains of vital meditation;
it was, in a word, Stevenson's religion, and when
we consider all that went to the shaping of it,
a religion fair and sufficient.
As to its point of outset in his personality, there
is not wanting to it a certain note of self-moni-
tion, almost of belligerency, as if he felt it laid
upon him to work out what he calls his "great
task of happiness" from a stubborn experience ;
the spirit of him rejoicing to overcome, rejoic-
ing the more as the foe is fiercer and stronger,
yet resolved to keep the pain of his struggle
from others, while he makes himself, and him-
self alone, the arena. He certainly had stern
enough reason for such self-incitement; and
that he has on the whole so successfully trans-
muted it into the pure outcome of rational hap-
piness is what coming ages will honour as his
lifelong heroism.

To quote passages that give inculcation and
definition to this would be little representative,
either as to bulk or as to wording, of its vital
importance in Stevenson's body of thought ; to
quote passages wherein this is the atmosphere
and presupposition, making itself felt as a pul-
sation, a flavour, a tonic, beyond the crudeness
of words, would be to quote well-nigh all that he
ever wrote. There is a sacredness about it, a ho-
liness as cherished ideal and due, which makes

29

£>teven60n'6 it more fitly a subject of prayer than of disserta-

JittitUbe to tion. You remember that striking prayer of

tf\t t his in verse, entitled The Celestial Surgeon;

one cannot help thinking the whole current of

Stevenson's aspiration flowed through that:

"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain : —
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake ;
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in!"

In his Prayers written for Family Use in Vai-
lima, also, the petition for courage and happi-
ness, and especially for grace to fulfil all the
spontaneous expressions of happiness— mirth,
laughter, gaiety — is the dominant note; it
sounds in some way in every one of them. Here
are some of the petitions, taken as one runs
the collection through: "Give us courage and
gaiety and the quiet mind. . . . The day returns
and brings us the petty round of irritating con-
cerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help
us to perform them with laughter and kind
faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry.
. . . Give us to awake with smiles, give us to
30

£ife

labour smiling. . . . Give us health, food, bright Jtfeveneon'e
weather, and light hearts. . . . Let us lie down Rttitube to
without fear and awake and arise with exul-
tation. . . . Grant us courage to endure lesser
ills unshaken, and to accept death, loss, and dis-
appointment as it were straws upon the tide of
life. . . . When the day returns, return to us, our
sun and comforter, and call us up with morn-
ing faces and with morning hearts — eager to la-
bour—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be
our portion— and if the day be marked for sor-
row, strong to endure it." The day after this last
petition was written was marked, for his family,
by the great sorrow of his sudden death.
But never was this happiness sought as a mere
gratification or self-appeasement. In the large
sympathy of Stevenson, so little aware of self,
it was always valued as if it were a light or
warmth or bracing atmosphere in whose bless-
ing all could share. He sought in order that
he might impart; the two could not be disso-
ciated. In all his literary calling, as well as in
his personal relations, this was so. To make his
neighbour happy was the surest way to do his
neighbour good. Even if the neighbour was in
sin or error, needing to be taught or reformed,
he were best approached by the way Of genial
comradery and entertainment, and taught as
though one taught him not. So, though a potent
source of cheer and sweeter living, nay, of mo-
nition, Stevenson never sets up as a corrector
and reformer, never assumes to force his good-
ness or wisdom on his less-favoured neighbour.
"There is an idea abroad among moral peo-

3i

£>teven6on , &\ pie," he says in his Christmas Sermon, "that
Jlttitube to they should make their neighbours good. One
fCife person I have to make good: myself. But my

duty to my neighbour is much more nearly ex-
pressed by saying that I have to make him
happy— if I may."

Therefore if a person's life, however conven-
tionally upright, is morose or austere, if his
morality is not of that fibre which engenders
joy, it is wrong, it is missing its true power and
function, there is something false in its foun-
dation. "The kingdom of heaven," he says in
this same Christmas Sermon, "is of the child-
like, 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 twopenny concerns,
the shame were indelible if we should lose it.
j Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come be-
fore all morality; they are the perfect duties.
And it is the trouble with moral men that they
have neither one nor other. It was the moral
man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away
with. If your morals make you dreary, depend
upon it they are wrong. I do not say 'give them
up,' for they may be all you have ; but conceal
them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives
of better and simpler people."
If to some solemn-visaged person the gentle-
ness and cheerfulness here praised seems in
Stevenson, as it often must, to have effervesced
in bubbling rollicking fun, let him not be de-
32

ceived. It is not froth nor shallowness; it is an J>tewn6on'0
integral element of that principle on which he Jtttitnbe to
based his comradeship with men. It is in fact no j£ife
necessary sign of superior greatness or good-
ness when we take ourselves with such abys-
mal seriousness. It may rather be a sign of
limitation. Just as— to quote from the delight-
ful Apology for Idlers — "extreme busyness,
whether at school or college, kirk or market,
is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty
for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a
strong sense of personal identity" ; — so; chang-
ing the application but not the principle, we
may say, extreme seriousness and strenuous-
ness, with the thought always troubled for the
propriety and morality of things, is a symptom
that the morality is not quite ingrained ; it is too
unsure of its own integrity to let go and take
itself for granted. If character is the breath of
our manhood, —why, we are not always taking
thought how to breathe. There is something
in Stevenson's abandon, his freedom from the
"prunes and prisms" of conventional conduct,
his large tolerance for men and creeds, the
lightness with which he moves in the pres-
ence alike of the grim and the gay, which is to
life what play is to work, or the easy grace of
an artist hand in the moulding of a master-
piece. It is in fact the free play of the spirit
which takes duty and experience without ef-
fort, and as it were in a kind of leisure and non-
chalance, because it is so easily master of itself.
This was Stevenson's working-ideal ; and if he
reduced the expression of it to the one element

33

£ife

£>tcvcn<$on'6 of happiness, it was because that was its most
Jfttitube to palpable hold and handle. That was a thing
that recommended the life behind it. "There is
no duty we so much underrate," he says further
in the Apology for Idlers, "as the duty of being
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous
benefits upon the world, which remain un-
known even to ourselves, or when they are dis-
closed, surprise nobody so much as the bene-
factor. ... A happy man or woman is a better
thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she
is a radiating focus of good will; and their en-
trance into a room is as though another candle
had been lighted. We need not care whether
they could prove the 6>rty-seventh proposi-
tion; they do a better thing than that, they
practically demonstrate the great Theorem of
the Liveableness of Life."

j]HE great Theorem of the Live-
ableness of Life"— this sums it
up very well; this it was that
Stevenson, in all his wander-
ings and enforced exile, in all
his gallant fight with disease,
set himself with the fervour of an apostle to de-
monstrate ; and the progressive solution of it,
sealed only when his "happy-starred, full-
blooded spirit" vanished' from earth, has sent a
thrill of vigour and good cheer through the
world. My talk about this, with the citations,
has already gone on, I fear, past excusable
length; and yet the subject refuses to be put
34

off without a few words concerning how all Jitewneotl'e
this came to utterance. !Mttit\lbe to

Stevenson was a dedicated spirit — dedicated j£{fe
and predestined to the great art of expression.
It was his joy, it was the breath of hjs being,
to coin that buoyant clear-seeing life of his into
creative forms of word and figure. Not life it-
self was closer to his heart than this. You re-
call that O altitudo which breaks out in one of
his letters to Henley during his happy hard-
working season at Hyeres: "O the height and
depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O
that I am privileged to swim and shoulder
through such oceans! Could one get out of
sight of land— all in the blue? Alas not, being
anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic
being still about us. But what a great space
and a great air there is in these small shallows
where alone we venture! And how new each
sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! ... I sleep upon
my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am
unready for death, because I hate to leave it.
I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor
can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I
can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the
offering of life without my art. I am not but in
my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely."
How he was drawn into his literary art, as it
were into a fate, is a familiar tale. It came by
the natural practical way —the way of appren-
ticeship. He made indeed starts on other roads :
on his father's calling of lighthouse engineer-
ing, for which however his health proved too
precarious; and, to please his father, on the law,

35

£>tevetl6on'6 which he pursued just far enough to pass as
JtttitUbe to advocate, and then left forever. Meanwhile his
j£lfe congenial apprenticeship, self-appointed, was

going on steadily; it was not in him to repress
it, although to begin with he had little forecast
of what it would amount to. All the while he was
studying how to express things in language;
working with the possibilities of words, fit-
ting words to sights and sounds and thoughts,
searching for the essential note and key in
which an idea should be? written, imitating the
effects which in his favourite authors he dis-
covered and enjoyed. It was the artist drawing
from models; the composer aping Mozart or
Haydn; the workman reproducing according
to the patterns of his master. Never mind the
future use to be made of it; the work itself for
the time being was its oWn interest and reward.
"It was not so much," he says, "that I wished
to be an author (though I wished that too) as
that I had vowed that V. would learn to write.
That was a proficiency J:hat tempted me ; and
I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whit-
tle, in a wager with myself. . . . That," he says
a little farther on (it is in his essay on A Col-
lege Magazine), "that, like it or not, is the way
to learn to write ; whether I have profited or not,
that is the way."

I must not let this account of his literary ap-
prenticeship draw me away from my subject ; I
have in fact introduced it not for its own sake
but on account of the reflex influence thereby
revealed, of his art on his attitude to life. His
life coloured and vitalized his art, that is true ;
36

it was art of a certain trend and significance £>teveneon , 6
because of the life he lived and interpreted. Jfttitube to
But also the converse is true : the pursuit of his £jf c
art, from words onward and inward to things,
truths, relations, led him ever to a closer and
clearer vision of life, and a juster proportioning
of its elements. His very achievements in inter-
pretation brought with them greater range and
depth of insight ; and where insight went, there
his allegiance went also. Starting, as he says,
with simple description, fitting what he saw
with appropriate words (a kind of primary ex-
ercise in which he had been paralleled by Ten-
nyson) he soon came to have an exquisite sense
not only of accurate meanings but of what he
calls the "key of words," that delicate 'rapport
in the words and rhythms of a passage which
corresponds to what artists call their colour-
scheme. He chose words not for themselves
alone, but for the help they would give other
words ; and so the finished work was set in one
key, with word and word, image and thing im-
aged homogeneous. So far forth this looks like
mere craftsmanship, or if you will grant it, ar-
tistry. It may easily be despised by Philistines
who know not how much travail of spirit has
gone to their ease of reading. But while mere
word-mongery is a possibility to be shunned,
on the other hand it is easy to underrate words
too much. After all, words are almost the only
means of laying soul upon soul, of effecting that
communion whereby the highest values of life
are transmitted. And with Stevenson they never
stopped with sound and manipulation; they

37

J>teveit60ft'6 stood for something; they were elements in a
Jftfttllbe to world; their very atmosphere and key belonged
■fZife to the artistry not of sounds alone but of life.

The very magic which they wrought became
vital in character and conduct. "One thing," he
says in his essay on Truth of Intercourse, "you
can never make Philistine natures understand;
one thing, which yet lies on the surface, re-
mains as unseizable to their wits as a high
flight of metaphysics — namely, that the busi-
ness of life is mainly carried on by means of
this difficult art of literature, and according to
a man's proficiency in that art shall be the free-
dom and the fulness of his intercourse with
other men." Viewed in this light, the art of
words is simply the art of telling the truth,
with all the colourings, the shadings, the pro-
portions, the implications, the saving-clauses,
essential to making it rounded truth and not
a caricature or distortion.
We hear much nowadays about shifting or
newly determining the emphasis of a creed or
a system. It is mainly a matter of the propor-
tions and perspectives of language, of getting
our dogma into such literary shape and colour
that the sum-total, as laid alike on the discern-
ing mind and the tenderly apprehensive heart,
shall correspond to our deep sense of truth.
There is a kind of crystallization in ideas as
in style, a settling and adjustment of elements
until each part has found its place, its relation,
its fellowship. We come in sight of this as soon
as we get beyond the sound of words to their
inner meaning, as soon as we look beyond the
38

symbol to the thing. Then we become aware ^tevetKJOtl'e
that the thing, whose beginning is the word, .TlttitUOe to
may be the most energetic of acts, the most in- j£ifo
spiring of faiths, the most sacred of ideals, all
implicated in a large homogeneous art of ex-
pression.

Now with this controlling conception of the
subtle congruities and harmonies of his cher-
ished art, there were certain deep elements of
life ready to meet Stevenson, just as soon as his
working-tools were sharpened and subdued to
mastery. It was not all to be Treasure Islands
and Prince Ottos. His sense of the fated mar-
riage of words to ideas, and of the proportion-
ing which should make the whole tissue homo-
geneous, led him duly toward the deep bases
of things; and especially, as he was a Scotch-
man, it had a work cut out for it in the complex-
ities and perplexities of accepted systems. He
was not of the kind, in spite of his genial tem-
perament, to dance by and ignore these. "With
high social spirits," says his biographer Col-
vin, "and a brilliant somewhat fantastic gaiety
of bearing, Stevenson was no stranger to the
storms and perplexities of youth. A restless and
inquiring conscience, perhaps inherited from
covenanting ancestors, kept him inwardly call-
ing in question the grounds of conduct and the
accepted codes of society. At the same time
his reading had shaken his belief in Christian
dogma ; the harsher forms of Scottish Calvin-
istic Christianity being at all times repugnant
to his nature." It is out of such a nature as this,
so exercised, that Stevenson's gospel of cour-

39

Mucveneotl'e age and happiness comes; out of a nature, too,
JXttitube to to whom an unsure word, an untempered col-
jfclfe ouring of idea, is a pain, like the pain of dis-

honesty and falsehood. There are not wanting
evidences of his sense of the crookedness and
perversity of things ; there is an Omar Khayyam
vein in his nature ; you see it, for example, in
his writings of the Pulvis et Umbra period. Yet
how little of this there is in his finished works,
and more especially in the gist and outcome
of the whole ; how little even his trenchant dis-
avowal of religious conventionalisms leaves
of what people call skeptical tendency. He is
no scoffer, no satirist ; nor can you saddle him
with any of the destructive -isms with which
the world reproaches men in order to set them
up as a warning.

That this was no accident but the result of bal-
anced wisdom and sanity, we have indications
in his letters and unfinished sketches. Not only
the artistic finish but the tone, the influence,
the guiding trend of his work was a matter of
solicitude to him, a matter to be accurately ad-
justed. To his father he writes from Hyeres
about a projected work, probably Virginibus
Puerisque: "It is a most difficult work; a touch
of the parson will drive off those I hope to in-
fluence ; a touch of overstrained laxity, besides
disgusting, like a grimace, may do harm." This
casual remark lets us well into the spirit that
governed Stevenson's art, and the sense of a
mission that was upon him. The sturdy prin-
ciple was there ; the insight also, with the de-
sire to emancipate men from the hoary errors
40

that so depressed the tone of life. But in his M>tevet\6on'6
spirit of comradeship and letting-live he shrank Jtttitube to
from setting up as a teacher, with the superior- l£ife
ity implied in that assumption ; he preferred
rather to put his thoughts in story, and in the
non-didactic form of conversational playful es-
say ; and with this he called his masterful art
of word and literary atmosphere to his aid, so
that the reader, responding to the magic thrill,
should find his thoughts and ideals moving in
the congenial region, gathering the spiritual
current and standard from the key of word and
sentiment, thinking himself from the concrete
case into the harmonizing attitude to life, as
Owen thought the organism from the single
bone. So art did his teaching, as though he
taught not, and this by transporting men into
the sunlit and bracing region where, simply by
looking round and learning to be at home, they
could orient themselves.
In the exultant practice of this self-rewarding
art Stevenson's life was a perpetual voyage of
discovery. Whether it was in travel, in com-
ing upon new cities and mountain-chains and
stretches of sea-coast; or in exploring new
tracts of character, motive, psychology; or,
underlying all this, in seeing the true relations
of life fall into place and assume the attire of
reasonable and seemly interpretation, hoary
and outworn systems thus giving way not to
dust and despite but to reconcilement and vital
solution, —all was to him virtually the creation
of a new and happy world, from which nothing
human was alien, in which the regions from

41

Stewneon'e the clear heaven of spiritual beauty down to the
JXttitttbe to S rim and troublous elements of being were
Cifc open to a singularly penetrative and catholic

sympathy. Upborne by this spirit of discovery,
and by the sense of its limitless field and re-
ward, he could bear patiently and with cheer-
fulness to snatch brief reprisals from long pe-
riods of illness, nay, could treat even failure as
a mere incident and stimulus to more. AsGosse
says of him: "He never conceived that he had
achieved a great success, but he never lost hope
that by taking pains he might yet do so." Or as
he himself says, in words that seem coined out
of this conscious trait (I quote from his Reflec-
tion and Remarks on Human Life): "I meant
when I was a young man to write a great poem ;
and now I am cobbling tittle prose articles and
in excellent good spirits, I thank you. So, too,
I meant to lead a life that should keep mount-
ing from the first ; and though I have been re-
peatedly down again below sea-level, and am
scarce higher than when I started, I am as keen
as ever for that enterprise. Our business in this
world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail,
in good spirits."

The whimsical epitaph that he proposed for
himself in his Inland Voyage has a good deal
the flavour of a summary of his character. His
canoe, you remember, had capsized in the Oise,
and he after much exertion had managed to
crawl, more dead than alive, upon an overhang-
ing tree trunk, his paddle still tightly clutched
in his hand. A mishap of no great significance
it was, one such as we daily laugh away. It
42

does not take a great occasion to givethe last ^teveneon'e
nudge of suggestion to a happy saying, nor Jtttitube to
need the saying be magniloquent to reverber- j£ife
ate from a depth of inner nature. If we may
give weight to Carlyle's adage, " Burn your own
smoke"— a thing which he conspicuously failed
to do— and to George Eliot's sombre advice to
"do without opium," surely in this sunnier spir-
itual era with which Stevenson is identified we
may listen to what in his characteristic way he
proposed so lightly. "On my tomb," he says,
"if ever I have one, I mean to get these words
inscribed: 'He clung to his paddle."'
Yes; that is what he did, through a life that
strove not for success but for a happy, hopeful,
helpful self-expression. He clung to his paddle ;
he never gave up. What was there to exchange
that buoyant energy for, if he had relinquished
it? The work, the art, the life, was its own
heaven, its own exceeding reward. Nothing
that was to be thereafter could take the place
of that, until its time came. Let us take leave of
him in these closing words of his essay on El
Dorado :

"A strange picture we make on our way to our
chimsras, ceaselessly marching, grudging our-
selves the time for rest; indefatigable, adven-
turous pioneers. It is true that we shall never
reach the goal ; it is even more than probable
that there is no such place ; and if we lived for
centuries and were endowed with the powers
of a god, we should find ourselves not much
nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling
hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling

43

£>teveti6on'e ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to
JTttttube to you, you must come forth on some conspicu-
£ife ous hilltop, and but a little way further, against

the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.
Little do ye know your own blessedness ; for
to travel hopefully is a better thing than to
arrive, and the true success is to labour."

(ZQe £ni>