Robert Louis Stevenson [51]
penalty of too early an escape from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or their CONFRERES, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given to it.
The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.
Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and THE WRECKER - a something which suffices decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially they might be classed.
CHAPTER XIX - EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over forty - the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the WAVERLEY NOVELS; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had A TALE OF TWO CITIES; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written RETALIATION, or tasted the bitter- sweet first night of SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. At the age of forty- four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES. But what a man has already done at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain.
This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in the NEW YORK TRIBUNE:
"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone out. A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life - and now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews
"'The Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,'
that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than wonted grief.
"Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson
The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.
Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and THE WRECKER - a something which suffices decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially they might be classed.
CHAPTER XIX - EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over forty - the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the WAVERLEY NOVELS; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had A TALE OF TWO CITIES; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written RETALIATION, or tasted the bitter- sweet first night of SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. At the age of forty- four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES. But what a man has already done at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain.
This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in the NEW YORK TRIBUNE:
"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone out. A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life - and now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews
"'The Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,'
that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than wonted grief.
"Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson