Robert Louis Stevenson

by Walter Raleigh
WHEN a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion

with a nervousgeneration to ask is the question, 'Will he live?'
There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and

unprofitable to answer. It is one of the many vanities of
criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to

patronise a writer with the assurance that our great-grandchildren,
whose time and tastes are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his

works with delight. But 'there is no antidote against the opium of
time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find

their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be
buried in our survivors.' Let us make sure that our sons will care

for Homer before we pledge a more distant generation to a newer
cult.

Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary
immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation

of Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has
spread, as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many.

Fifteen years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were
treasured by a small and discerning company of admirers; long

before he chanced to fell the British public with TREASURE ISLAND
and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE he had shown himself a delicate

marksman. And although large editions are nothing, standard
editions, richly furnished and complete, are worthy of remark.

Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our literary history
who have been honoured during their lifetime by the appearance of

such an edition; the best of his public, it would seem, do not only
wish to read his works, but to possess them, and all of them, at

the cost of many pounds, in library form. It would be easy to
mention more voluminous and more popular authors than Stevenson

whose publishers could not find five subscribers for an adventure
like this. He has made a brave beginning in that race against Time

which all must lose.
It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves

with the presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a
world of other business to attend to, in order to establish

Stevenson in the position of a great writer. Let us leave that
foolish trick to the politicians, who never claim that they are

right - merely that they will win at the next elections. Literary
criticism has standards other than the suffrage; it is possible

enough to say something of the literary quality of a work that
appeared yesterday. Stevenson himself was singularly free from the

vanity of fame; 'the best artist,' he says truly, 'is not the man
who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice

of his art.' He loved, if ever man did, the practice of his art;
and those who find meat and drink in the delight of watching and

appreciating the skilful practice of the literary art, will abandon
themselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing

their unborn and possibly illiterateposterity to answer solemn
questions. Will a book live? Will a cricket match live? Perhaps

not, and yet both be fine achievements.
It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death.

In the dedication of PRINCE OTTO he says, 'Well, we will not give
in that we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health

again; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to
launch a masterpiece.' It would be a churlish or a very dainty

critic who should deny that he has launched masterpieces, but
whether he ever launched his masterpiece is an open question. Of

the story that he was writing just before his death he is reported
to have said that 'the goodness of it frightened him.' A goodness

that frightened him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's
ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to

come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none of the
great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no

Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full
tide of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the

aspiration and unconsciousprophecy of one of the early essays:
'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 whom the gods
love die young, I cannot help believing that 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 blowing, when, trailing with

him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots
into the spiritual land.'

But we on this side are the poorer - by how much we can never know.
What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed

himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity,
for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his

earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant
series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure

and occasions so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary
craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was

playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding the graven tool,
the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the

works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques
carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.

All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to
translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's

power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very
profound sense, make game of life. But to make game of life was to

each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be
found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so

that for the first time she may see herself; to 'be a candle-holder
and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder,

would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them
with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the

depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an
instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-

building and iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,'
contributed to a magazine years ago, he compares the artist in

paint or in words to the keeper of a booth at the world's fair,
dependent for his bread on his success in amusing others. In his

volume of poems he almost apologises for his excellence in
literature:

'Say not of me, that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,

The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child;

But rather say: IN THE AFTERNOON OF TIME
A STRENUOUS FAMILY DUSTED FROM ITS HANDS

THE SAND OF GRANITE, AND BEHOLDING FAR
ALONG THE SOUNDING COASTS ITS PYRAMIDS

AND TALL MEMORIALS CATCH THE DYING SUN,
SMILED WELL-CONTENT, AND TO THIS CHILDISH TASK

AROUND THE FIRE ADDRESSED ITS EVENING HOURS.'
Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In

THE WRONG BOX, for instance, there is something very like the card-
game commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous

corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and
a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance.

It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by
the breath of reality, full of fantasticcharacter; the strange

funeral procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its
stages, and finally melts into space.

But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that
Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with

life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to
a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat