This is the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the ******r 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 had intimacy with him.Mr Baildon writes (p.21 of his book):
"I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts -
namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth.For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me - his elder by some fifteen months - as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' HE OF ALL MORTALS, WHO WAS, IN A SENSE, ALWAYS STILL A BOY!"
Mr Gosse tells us:
"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage it.In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little amusements for himself.He played on the flute, or he modelled little groups and figures in clay."
2.One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R.L.Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did.
Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he wrote:
"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, AND SOMETHING OF THE SHORTER CATECHIST."
SOMETHING! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,"
which it inevitably awakens, was much with him - the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect - the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-devilries - Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner.How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been - the same, or different from what it was with those that were there?
His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly."There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson.Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self-
