Robert Louis Stevenson [52]
had his limitations. But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly long career. As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save that of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in a shroud. Thinking of what his art seemed leading to - for things that would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice- work in his case - it was not safe to bound his limitations. And now it is as if Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four, with the WAVERLEY NOVELS just begun! In originality, in the conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic, are seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his Fancyland; in the union of bracing and heroic character and adventure; in all that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple, his gift was exhaustless. No other such charmer, in this wise, has appeared in his generation. We thought the stories, the fairy tales, had all been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive. Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell out everything as it befell.'
"I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my surprise he opened a conversation - you know there could be nothing more unexpected than that in London - and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New- Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins - that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris - as I learned afterwards when they reappeared in the NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS - I would not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'
"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt - nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the last - he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the
"I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my surprise he opened a conversation - you know there could be nothing more unexpected than that in London - and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New- Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins - that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris - as I learned afterwards when they reappeared in the NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS - I would not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'
"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt - nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the last - he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the