Robert Louis Stevenson [31]
which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified - things that especially attracted him and took his fancy. Thus, if it must be confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch - if no more than a touch - of self-consciousness which will not allow him to forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his sweet, gentle, naive humour. There is, therefore, some truth in the criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate, with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself - the genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has said, Stevenson-cum- Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in WEIR OF HERMISTON, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk - like Miss Grant and Catriona - are studies of himself, and that in all his heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson. Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord Advocate's daughter, THERE IS A GOOD DEAL OF THE AUTHOR HIMSELF DISGUISED IN PETTICOATS. I have thought of Stevenson in many suits, beside that which included the velvet jacket, but - petticoats!
Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what it likes, and ignores all else - it fondly magnifies its favourites, and, after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and presenting itself to us, if we only watch well. This is the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr I. Zangwill held:
"That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same interest in the elemental. Women are not born, but made. They are a social product of infinite complexity and delicacy. For a like reason Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern.... A child to the end, always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was the natural exponent in literature of the child."
But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here recognises and reinforces. That is just about as correct and true as this other deliverance:
"His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. The best of all, THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, ends in a bog; and where the author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs us or himself altogether. We are so long weighing the brothers Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that, scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."
If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey: "ECCOVI, that child has been in hell," we may say, "ECCOVI, that child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child - such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more - he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.
The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who
Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what it likes, and ignores all else - it fondly magnifies its favourites, and, after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and presenting itself to us, if we only watch well. This is the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr I. Zangwill held:
"That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same interest in the elemental. Women are not born, but made. They are a social product of infinite complexity and delicacy. For a like reason Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern.... A child to the end, always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was the natural exponent in literature of the child."
But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here recognises and reinforces. That is just about as correct and true as this other deliverance:
"His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. The best of all, THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, ends in a bog; and where the author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs us or himself altogether. We are so long weighing the brothers Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that, scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."
If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey: "ECCOVI, that child has been in hell," we may say, "ECCOVI, that child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child - such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more - he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.
The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who