Arthur Ransome’s Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson

Throughout the chronicle of illness, adventures, and all kinds of play, have been scattered the names of books, and with them implicit reference to quite another life, ceaselessly carried on in the midst of most various activities, the life of a writer, an obstinate determined struggle with intangible difficulties, most of them not to be perceived even by those who were most often with him. It is the business of the rest of this book to consider that other intricate life, and to follow its progress, to observe a series of adventures on a plane quite different from that on which its hero played the penny whistle, loved, learnt the ways of boats, and weeded in a Samoan plantation.

Although Stevenson wrote essays even at the end of his life, and Scottish stories at the beginning, yet it is not only convenient but essentially just to discuss each one of the many facets of his art in an order almost chronological, following generally the times when each of these facets was so brightly illuminated as to leave the rest at least in partial shadow. My plan¹ is, to begin with an analysis of Stevenson’s attitude towards the techniques of literature, and to follow it with chapters on his essays, criticism, short stories, boy’s books and Prince Otto, poems, fables, the Scotch novels, the South Seas, collaborations, and unfinished work, ending with a summary of his character and achievements.

I have sketched other plans,² but rejected them one after another, this because it permitted insufficient detail, that because it insisted on too much, this other because it seemed to me to concentrate the light unfairly, that because it hid the proportions which I believed more just. Let me hope that it will not seem tedious to follow as pedestrians³ the road he galloped and to stop at the inns, one after another, to consider the adventures of the day.

Perhaps the reason why Stevenson remained a charming, a skilful writer, and in life a delightful but not a commanding personality lay in his attitude towards life and towards art. In life he looked for romance, and made of his own a romantic adventure: in art he was preoccupied with technique so largely that all he did seems now to have been by way of experiment during a prolonged adventure in the discovery of technical perfection. He will not be remembered as a great man of action: he will not, except by a few enthusiasts of special temper, be counted among the greater writers: but, even by men who are impatient of all his finished achievements, he will be counted as one of the greatest exponents of the objects and the methods of literature. And in the history of writing there are few more romantic tales than this of the man who knew himself when all his efforts failed, and died at last, suddenly, in the full glow of a work which would perhaps have been perfect, and certainly had not gone far enough to show a sign of eventual failure.

I have been led, almost against my will, to chronicle poem and story, fable, novel and essay, with a mind that looked forward to a discussion of what in Stevenson’s mind was more important than any of his actual achievements, the gradual development of his idea of art, the lineaments of the dryad who fled him through the brushwood and undergrowth of realising dreams, seemed ever and again to be within his reach, and came near enough at last to let him die with something of the exultation of capture.

His pleasure then, as in life, was to be on the way. He talked of writing an ‘Art of Literature’, but he never sketched its contents, and could scarcely have done so, for his ideas were always those of the craftsman, not the systematic falsehood of the philosopher. There is falsehood even in the ideas of the craftsman, but of a different kind. Stevenson, as craftsman, knew how, but he did not always know why, and in stating ultimate aims he was nearly always so far in error as almost to disguise the truth of his original observation.

It is not possible to describe enthusiasm, and to say that a man was enthusiastic is a cold speech that may either be a complement or a reproof. I cannot do better, if I wish to show Stevenson’s attitude towards these technical matters than illustrate it by quotation. And if it were not to be illustrated his pursuit of technical knowledge, and of technical proportion, would lose its most imprinting quality. In October 1883, he wrote to Mr W. H. Low:

Yet I now draw near to the Middle Ages; nearly three years ago, that fatal Thirty struck; and yet the great work is not yet done – not yet even conceived …

Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I should have thought myself well on the road after Shakespeare; and now – I find I have only got a pair of walking-shoes and not yet begun to travel. And art is still away there on the mountain summit. But I need not continue; for, of course, this is your story just as much as it is mine; and, strange to think, it was Shakespeare’s too, and Beethoven’s, and Phidias’s. It is a blessed thing that, in this forest of art, we can pursue our wood-lice and sparrows, and not catch them, with almost the same fervour of exhilaration as that with which Sophocles hunted and brought down the Mastodon.⁴

And a month or two earlier he wrote to Henley in a more lyrical spirit, a letter which though long I must enrich my book by quoting in full:

I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Brashiana⁵ and other works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare to make a first start at trying to understand my profession. O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such oceans! Could one get out of sight of land – all in the blue? Alas not, being anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic being still about us.

But what a great space and a great air there is in these small shallows where alone we venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love – to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art. I am not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.

And yet I produce nothing, am the author of Brashiana and other works: tiddy-iddity – as if the works one wrote were anything but prentice’s experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks, the real works and all the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see.

Sursum Corda:
Heave ahead:
Here’s luck.
Art and Blue Heaven,
April and God’s Larks.
Green reeds and the sky-scattering river.
A stately music.
Enter God!

Ay, but you know, until a man can write that ‘Enter God,’ he has made no art! None! Come, let us take counsel together and make some!⁶

Stevenson always heightens the pitch of voice and thought when he is writing to Henley.

The realism of which Stevenson warned his friends to beware, the realism of which he was heartily frightened himself, and into which he had once or twice fallen in error, needs a more precise definition than ever he gave it. His remarks on the subject are for the most part negative, with the exception of perhaps a few examples of thing itself. For example: he thought he had trodden in realism by mistake when he wrote the last sentence in ‘The Treasure of Franchard’:⁷ ‘“Tiens,” said Casimir. I thought it was what Casimir would have said and I put it down.’ I suppose what he means here is, that it was more harmonious with Casimir than with the whole story. By defining his error as realism, he meant that that sentence was true to ordinary life⁸ instead of to ‘The Treasure of Franchard’. And so we may use this tentative interpretation as a rushlight⁹ in our explanation of what realism in general meant to Stevenson and why he distrusted it.

1. Keep an intelligent eye upon all the others. It is only by doing so that you will come to see what Art is: Art is the end common to them all, it is none of the points by which they differ.

3. In your own art, bow your head over technique. Think of technique when you rise and when you go to bed. Forget purposes in the meanwhile; get to love technical processes; to glory in technical successes; get to see the world entirely through technical spectacles, to see it entirely in terms of what you can do. Then when you have anything to say, the language will be apt and copious. …

4. Beware of realism; it is the devil; ’tis one of the means of art, and now they make it the end! And such is the farce of the age in which a man lives, that we all, even those of us who most detest it, sin by realism.¹⁰

There is but one art – to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.¹¹

It is not by looking at the sea that you get ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine,’ nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find ‘And visited all night by troops of stars.’ A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols.¹²

If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it’s amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to be long, to fill up hours; the story-teller’s art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off their bones.¹³

‘Or opulent rotunda strike the sky,’ said the shopman to himself, in the tone of one considering a verse. ‘I suppose it would be too much to say ‘orotunda,’ and yet how noble it were! Or opulent orotunda strike the sky.’ But that is the bitterness of arts; you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.’¹⁴

The shopman was Mr Somerset, newly employed by Prince Florizel in his cigar divan, and his sentiments are Stevenson’s own. He had a delightful consciousness of the effect of words as words, or rather of syllables as syllables, regardless of their meanings, and his most difficult battle, although he won it, was in subduing to the needs of sense elaborate and tantalising designs of consecutive sounds. ‘Style’ meant different things for him at different periods of his life, as we shall presently see, but whatever was its meaning it included always a rhythmical, musical purpose, sound for its own sake, sonorous, reading well, an amber (if I may change to such a metaphor) an amber very nearly if not quite as valuable in his eyes as the carefully collected coleoptera¹⁵ he intended to embed in it.

And so in Stevenson’s books (except perhaps Treasure Island, and for a more honourable reason Weir of Hermiston) we are conscious of the style as well as of the book. We are conscious of it as a separate, a separately admirable thing. It produces an illusion of being a veil not obscuring the significant object behind it, but itself of great price and not to be duplicated. This illusion, sometimes pleasant, sometimes a little exasperating, I ascribe to the touch of Somerset in Somerset’s inventor.

It is not a question merely of marked personality. It was too wilful an illusion for that. It is a question of Stevenson’s attitude of mind towards his work, which allowed him in his own view of what he was doing, to separate matter and manner, as few other writers have ever been able so to separate them. Remembering the significant phrase in the paragraph where he describes the novelist’s task: ‘for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style’ – we can find a score of other sentences indicative of this preoccupation. He speaks for instance of ‘the constipated mosaic manner’ he needed for Weir of Hermiston, and had adopted successfully in The Ebb Tide.¹⁶ Then there were The New Arabian Nights and Otto, ‘pitched pretty high and stilted.’¹⁷ Then the pathetic little episode of Mr Somerset, and again flat, direct statements as in a letter to Henry James in 1893:

Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book. ’Tis true, and unless I make a greater effort – and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity – it will be more true I fear in the future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims may be described as –

2nd. Death to the optic nerve. Admitted we live in the age of the optic nerve in literature. For how many centuries did literature get along without it? However, I’ll consider your letter.¹⁸

We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.¹⁹

In 1878²⁰ Stevenson had finished An Inland Voyage²¹ and written Travels with a Donkey.²² In the next year he had his first experience of real travel, voyaging done without too firm a consciousness of the Savile Club at home, without an immediate translation of experience into telling and humorous anecdote. The travelling he did in pursuit of his private romance was touched by realism, whereas the little journeys he had undertaken for fun were at least gilded by the sunset of the Romantic movement – a very different thing. In the two little sentimental journeys,²³ Stevenson pervaded his material: in the journey dictated by a real sentiment he was a dragon fly tossed by a wind of irresistible experiences, blown far from his accustomed reeds, and taking notes while in immediate danger of not finding his way back. In some such way I represent the change in character between An Inland Voyage and, for example, The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook.²⁴

‘Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it.²⁶ They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.’²⁷ The first of these sentences from the dedication of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is strictly true; except in a few rare cases, and of the books of great and isolated men. The third is an ingenious, charming corollary to the second. And the second is not by any means generally true, though it is so²⁸ of much of Stevenson’s own work, and partly explains its peculiar intimate quality. He was thinking of Otto when he wrote to Mr Gosse²⁹ that it was a deadly fault ‘to forget that art is a diversion and a decoration, that no triumph or effort is of value, nor anything worth reaching except charm’;³⁰ but the opinion had long been his, and the expression of it is in the manner of writing, dangerously infectious, easily recognisable, that he early developed for himself.

Style is so far a man’s personal rhythm, that it is as difficult to analyse as a personality. Its characteristics, its differences from other styles, are like a man’s differences from other men. Yet something we can seize, in his choice of words, is the tone in which he uses them: and a vocabulary does not make so utterly flexible a vehicle of thought that a writer is not to be known by the repetition of particular effects varied only in detail, and as it were midway between perfect expression and a private convention of his own. He thinks in these effects, but they are approximations stamped with a trademark; he moulds a bust with them, but they do not precisely follow the curves and hollows that they represent. Dr Johnson always spoke in thunder but sometimes his thunder was a loud and roaring imitation of some smaller noise. Bottom³¹ will roar you like the lion, or as gently as a sucking-dove, but the roar is always Bottom’s and lion or sucking-dove must be attributed by courtesy to his wild wood-notes.³² In so far, every artist is another Bottom, another Johnson where little fishes talk like whales,³³ or, commoner case, when whales converse like little fishes. The wise know the gamut of their own voices and are careful not to stretch them to points where courtesy breaks down and the illusion passes.

This is very unsatisfactory, but it is illustrated with particular clarity by Stevenson’s early books.

Charm is the power of impressing on the minds of your hearers a love-able picture of yourself, and, in describing your experiences to make them share a pleasurable participation. It is, however, achieved in many indirect ways. It is to participate pleasurably in prodding a donkey with a pinpointed stick over unknown boulders in the pitch dark. But the reader is not called upon so to do; he is only asked to sympathize with a philosophic mood of reminiscence in which such adventures, most obnoxious at the time, are playthings with just that quality of safe danger that a pair of scissors in a cork or a closed box of matches has for an imaginative child. It is never merely delightful to walk in wet clothes: but few things are more pleasant than the warm caress of approval and fearful admiration that the dry man sitting besides a fire gives to that uncomfortable memory of himself.

Here I think we are near the scent of at least one kind of literary charm. It depends not on the description of circumstances pleasurable in themselves, but on tenderness exhibited by the writer for his subject, on the infectious quality of a mood in which a man looks affectionately upon the past. Examples are not difficult to find. The title of one of Daudet’s books betrays this purpose: Le Petit Chose,³⁴ the little thing, applied to an early edition of the long-haired married man then writing of himself. And in Lettres de mon Moulin,³⁵ there are many specimens of mutual caresses bestowed upon the past. I am without the book;³⁶ but I remember particularly the chapter in which Daudet remembers himself sitting in the cottage of two old people, and pretending for their sakes to like some cherry brandy from which some essential ingredient was missing. Nor need it always be self-reminiscence: at the end of that same story³⁷ of Daudet’s the old woman begs the old man, who sees his visitor some hundred yards upon his way, not to be out too late, and he makes a whimsical reply ‘quite like a grown up man’³⁸ instead of a weak, white-haired, baby. Stevenson does all that Daudet does and more. He trusts his reader not to laugh at his weaknesses: he describes himself lovingly beneath the stars: he overflows with affection for the stout lay brother who carried him home in both his arms: he greatly dares and describes himself hitting his unresisting donkey over the head, no pleasant picture in real life, and yet softened by a pity less for the donkey than at his defection from himself: he even throws the mood of gentle personal reminiscence over the echoes of the fierce and bloody fighting of the Camisards³⁹ where men were burnt, and hundreds of villages made desert places, two hundred years ago.

And within this governing mood of tender memory, subservient to it, dictated by it, are a continuous series of small fancies, only to be stolen from serious thought in such light-hearted moments as it is a pleasure to share. Of them are his recognition in the donkey he was belabouring of ‘a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased the horror of my cruelty’: the flight of the inland voyagers from competition with the champion canoeist, ‘this infernal paddler’:⁴⁰ the unsuccessful stove ‘voyaged like a gentleman in the locker of the Cigarette.’⁴¹

And then there are point blank discharges of charm at the head of the reader. These I do not like so well. You can see the charmer loading his cannon, training it to hit you between the eyes, firing, and expectantly looking to see the destruction he has wrought. I will give two examples. The first is the payment for lodging under the stars by leaving money by the side of the road: not only wilful but thoroughly false, since, if he were paying God for his hospitality he would never have done, and Stevenson adjudged a certain amount and no more. The second is the last paragraph of the book: on the sale of the Modestine, the donkey:

Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion.

Now that is pure feu d’artifice,⁴² with materials borrowed from Sterne,⁴³ betrayed by the phrase ‘agreeable young men’. We have time to watch its preparation, and, since it is the last paragraph of the book, time to be amazed at its effect.

Most of my examples have been taken from Travels with a Donkey, but they could be paralleled without difficulty from An Inland Voyage, the earlier book. I am not sure which is the pleasanter of the two. Both have their defects that follow on the too resolute, the too industrious pursuit of charm; but both are actually charming, idle little books full of a sort of philosophy that is sometimes very welcome; both are tributes to the romance of life, written by a young man in love, and in love also with himself, with the world, and with a wisdom which has not yet been paid for in sad experience, but as it were bought on credit and not the worse for that. The gentle, cheerful insistence on death, on the pleasures of chance meetings, of handkerchiefs waved by persons one has known for two minutes or not at all and will never see again; the combination of romance and sanity makes these books among the friendliest that Stevenson wrote. ‘The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek,’⁴⁴ and the purposeful cannonades of charm fade into silence and are forgotten as we read the half-serious half-smiling theorising which Stevenson had not to seek but found in the legacy from his Scottish ancestry which he softened and sweetened before he passed it on.

Edinburgh, originally a series of short essays published in The Portfolio⁴⁵ and called Picturesque Notes is, like the other ten little earlier books, an exercise in style. The manner was everything: Edinburgh itself was less important in Stevenson’s mind than the even mellifluous harmony of sentences for which it was the ostensible excuse. ‘’Tis a kind of book nobody would ever care to read; but none of the young men could have done it better than I have, which is always a consolation.’⁴⁶ For all that, in spite of the many little hints that it is a tour de force, and an admirable piece of juggling, it is a delightful miniature, and does indeed convey between its smooth Italianate sentences much of the Gothic air of that pinnacled grey northern town, with the crags above it, the blue hills at the end of each long street, and the continual memory of old events, all of which have a kind of dry robustness, quite different from the histories of other towns.

‘Day by day,’ says Stevenson, ‘when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood … we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature favourably.’⁴⁷ ‘As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man’s towns, and situate certainly on the baldest of God’s bays.’ Here Stevenson uses a deliberate but lively cleverness or smartness, ‘man’s towns’, ‘God’s bays’, and the ‘certainly’ is put in carefully to lessen the prepared impromptu effect of that antithesis, to colour the memory of the baldness and meanness of the place.⁴⁸ Most of his essays are a kind of practice in this art. ‘I regard them,’ he says, ‘as contributions towards a friendlier and more thoughtful way of looking about one,’⁴⁹ and indeed one of their qualities, and one which accounts for much of the fervour with which their lovers love them, is a benignance so confidently attributed to this world that, for those who have just risen from Essays of Travel for example, this would seem entirely smiling and benign. Here may be a touch of Hazlitt, as when the countryman bewildered in a town remarks ‘there seems to be a deal of meeting hereabouts.’⁵⁰ Here may a hint of the firm jawed manner of Borrow:⁵¹ ‘While she was telling all this in the most matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man, with a high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half-salutation.’⁵² So do strangers appear in Wild Wales. But Borrow, or Hazlitt, or their ghosts manipulated by Stevenson, or Stevenson himself, are all sweetened, become tolerant, kindly, smiling men who bring the world into tune with their own cheerful hearts.

The persons they meet are kindlier than those we meet in sullener works. The coarse language of the lacewomen of Monastier⁵³ becomes a social grace. The officious hatmaker of Cockermouth turns into a benevolent maker of memories for other people.

He began by saying that he had little things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the recollection.⁵⁴

One of the best of the essays of travel is called ‘An Autumn Effect.’⁵⁵ It is rich with sketches of persons, of scenery, and of philosophical digression, all gleaned upon a three day walking tour. It amused me to take the map and learn that the total distance covered did not exceed twenty-four miles of which the last six were conquered in a dog cart. This is not Hazlitt’s ‘thirty, forty miles along the Great North Road,’⁵⁶ but something much nearer the gentlemanly dalliance of Sterne with his calèche.⁵⁷

In this essay (‘An Autumn Effect’) it is amusing to see that Stevenson anticipates Wilde by more than ten years in saying that nature imitates art.⁵⁸ It is worthwhile to give the quotation:

The whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, ‘How like a picture!’ for once that we say, ‘How like the truth!’ The forms in which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got from painted canvas.

How different from Wilde’s is his comment: ‘Any man can see and understand a picture; it is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.’⁵⁹ And in reading that, and comparing it with Wilde, it is worthwhile also to remember that they had both read Musset’s Fantasio, with his ‘Comme ce soleil couchant est manqué ce soir!’⁶⁰

We may illustrate his romantic attitude to art from his opinion of The Silverado Squatters,⁶¹ as he wrote to Low: ‘I have never at command that press of spirits that are necessary to strike out a thing red-hot. Silverado is an example of stuff worried and pawed about, God knows how often, in poor health, and you can see for yourself the result: good pages, an imperfect fusion, a certain languor of the whole. Not, in short, art;’⁶² and again, by comparing the familiarity and charm of his carefully crafted book An Inland Voyage, with the straightforward utterance of a letter written on the voyage itself, to Balfour:

We have had deplorable weather quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers; and generally much wind and cold wind forby … I must say it has sometimes required a stout heart; and sometimes one could not help sympathising inwardly with the French folk who hold up their hands in astonishment over our pleasure journey. Indeed I do not know how I would have stuck to it as I have done, if it had not been for professional purposes.⁶³

A friend of mine who had read little of Stevenson⁶⁴ and had not liked what he read, explained his dislike by saying that ‘Stevenson was a great deal too familiar.’ He went on to remark that he did not like an author to pat him on the shoulder or to be too sure of his sympathy. This qualification of his made me enquire whether he was sure that Stevenson’s familiarity was with his reader or with his subject.⁶⁵ He replied, ‘I felt he presumed a great deal on my slight acquaintance; I have only read one or two of his books, but in both he seemed to trust me as if I had not only read them all, but admired them very much.’ There: it seemed to me that he was in error, translating to his own person a familiarity that Stevenson certainly shows in his dealings with his imaginary characters. It is true, we are sometimes, if critically minded, led to ask whether Stevenson is not a little too sure of his knowledge of his men; if he does not a little presume on being ‘an observer of human nature,’⁶⁶ and if the effect of smallness sometimes produced by his characterization is not due to a certainty in the author’s mind that he sees all round his characters. There is an air of patronage, of smiling toleration which, with an unconscious compliment to Stevenson, we resent on behalf of David Balfour, even on behalf of Mr Utterson.⁶⁷ The impression on the mere reader is that of being beckoned up into a church tower to look down on the amusing revolutions of men as small as ants. He is tempted to reply rather rudely that the observer is an ant himself, or to be annoyed at the condescension with which he has been picked out from among the antlike multitude to look at the movements of his kind. Nor is it as if Stevenson worked on a big canvas, chronicling crowds: he concentrates himself on the adventures of a single ant, with whom he might just as well be standing face to face. I think my friend, a man of sober dignity, resented in his own person the indignity offered by Stevenson to his characters. However that may be, he set his finger on the most noticeable quality in Stevenson’s critical essays, a quality indicated quite unconsciously, or with a misplaced pride, in their title; Familiar Studies of Men and Books.⁶⁸ It is nothing to the point that he had not read them.

Familiarity, of the kind that I have tried to describe, is the key-note of all these essays, written between his twenty fourth and thirtieth year. Less noticeable in ‘Victor Hugo’, which was Stevenson’s first adventure in the kind written before Leslie Stephen’s congratulations and publication in the Cornhill⁶⁹ had given him too much confidence,⁷⁰ it is clear in the ‘Burns’ in spite of occasional phrases like ‘a burly figure in literature’;⁷¹ clearer in the ‘Pepys’:⁷² Stevenson’s finished style would be unbearable on such a book, as Pepys’s. We should want to tear it aside; it would suggest a too serious, and a less pleasurable, intensity of contemplation: it would not be written ‘to his own address’. His style is annoying now and then in the admirable ‘Villon,’⁷³ in the too much simplified ‘Thoreau’; frightened out of sight almost by the big shouting ‘Whitman’; and it spoils the ‘Charles d’Orléans’ which came so near to being charming.⁷⁴ This familiarity is not shown by any patronage of⁷⁵ his subjects on the score of literature, but by an assumption of too sure an understanding of their moral difficulties. Perhaps it seemed to Stevenson that his own severe trials of conscience, his own debates over this or that ethical question, his own naïf preoccupation with any action of his own that he considered good (see several of his letters to Mrs Sitwell), had made him something of a doctor in the art of righteousness. Perhaps it was that recognising in each man some phase through which he had himself passed, he was a little too ready to adopt with regard to the whole character, the attitude of personal experience which he could not unjustly assume with regard to the part.

After having said so much, we must turn to the ‘Preface by way of Criticism’, which he wrote when these short essays in criticism were united in a book.⁷⁶ ‘One and all,’ he says, ‘were written with genuine interest in the subject: many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in their style of writing.’ Some of the disadvantages he enumerates explain, if not the familiarity, at least its consistent reappearance in one study after another. He points out that the writer of short studies must ‘view his subject throughout in a peculiar illumination’, presenting it from one side only, and that as he points out in the essay on Burns, must be chosen by reason of some personal relationship.

Stevenson presents in his critical essays the same phenomenon that is noticeable in his novels. He is a romantic in temperament with respect for a closer technique than the earlier romantics employed, and a willingness to use the details in calm, even prose instead of carrying them on a wave of rhetoric. He is very seldom grandiloquent: on the other hand he is very seldom a mere communicator, and he does not, like Sainte-Beuve,⁷⁷ get out of the way of his sitters. His attitude is creative: he wishes his critical essay to be a work of art, and his tendency is to make it the character sketch of the hero of an unwritten novel. He is only tempted away from this main purpose by his interest in technique. There are remarks in the ‘Hugo’, in the ‘Burns’, indeed in most of those papers which I shall hope to use later in this book, when I come to consider Stevenson’s not unimportant contribution to the knowledge of literary technique.⁷⁸ The main purpose is almost certainly romantic portraiture, and these remarks are not an end in themselves but are worked into the background of the picture, if indeed they are not more justly to be considered as part of the preparation of the canvas.

Stevenson’s manner is altogether unlike the gay paradox of Wilde. It is earnest, sober, almost professional. When Wilde, impatient of lumbering explanation, says with a smile that ‘Nature imitates art’, Stevenson, more serious, younger, solemnly shows that ‘those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner.’ It is only by putting two and two together, that we can learn not indeed what was Stevenson’s view of art, but in what direction his opinions on that subject tended. Beside that sentence, for example, we have to set this from a later passage in the same essay:

Art, thus conceived (as by Victor Hugo), realises for men a larger portion of life, and that portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and, besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the average man in ordinary moods.⁷⁹

And before we have time to guess that he is approaching in his own mind a statement of the aim of art being an intensified consciousness of life, he goes hurriedly on to obscure his point with stuff about man realising ‘the responsibilities of his place in society.’

He says of his essay on Hugo that he was perhaps dazzled by that ‘master of wordmanship’, but ‘it is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often overlooked’. Yet, summing up the book, Hugo and Pepys apart, he says:

I have found myself ever too grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner … these were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them and lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs; and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly courteous and seldom wholly just.⁸⁰

He wonders why. Are there, perhaps, two reasons. The first, that tendency to familiarity first noticed, noticeable even in the terms of his apology; and the second stranger, more humiliating, known however to everyone who has essayed with zealous care the difficult business of criticism; did he read his books so well that he saw them with their blemishes? Did his lively interest in technique show him the way to dissatisfaction with what he could not himself have equalled? It requires a mind with great momentum, greater perhaps than he possessed, to pass, as Swinburne⁸¹ used to pass, beyond the doubtings of intimate knowledge, to the recovery of his first enthusiasm.

‘The readings of a literary vagrant’⁸² acquire a serious, critical, biographical significance when the vagrant is himself so versatile a writer as Stevenson. If we add to the familiar studies, one or two later essays, the ‘Gossip on Romance’, the cheerful dissertation on The Vicomte de Bragelonne, we get a fairly sound idea of the cosmopolitan literary background⁸³ that Stevenson found for his own work. The Covenanters, of course, are absent, but he read them early, and only on re-reading late in life did he discover that he owed them anything. But Knox⁸⁴ is there, and Burns and Scott, Victor Hugo who began the movement from Scott that, for the moment at any rate may be said to have ended in Stevenson. Lothian Road, and the hot gazes and tepid sentiment of youth give him a lead through Burns’ love affairs. His delight in his own life as a pictorial, dramatic affair gives him an insight into Pepys, and Fontainebleau and the making of valueless but exciting little imitations of old French rondeaux and ballades give him at least a reflection of one side of the experience of Charles d’Orléans.

And there is much in the essays themselves that must have suggested to contemporary observers that here was a man not wholly absorbed in criticism. As he goes on, his criticism concerns itself more and more with literature qua⁸⁵ literature; a good example of this is his summing up of Cashel Byron’s Profession, Shaw’s fourth novel (1882); some of his words were used positively to help sell the book, but on the whole he is disparaging, calling one part ‘blooming gaseous folly’. It was a very long time before Shaw found his true métier as a dramatist. Stevenson too was long in finding his true vein as a novelist.

On a very large scale Merezhkovsky⁸⁶ has shown how it is possible to write magnificent critical romances⁸⁷ in which a period of thought, the Renaissance, the times of Julian the Apostate in Italy, of Peter the Great in Russia, is flowing into vivid drama. On a very much smaller scale Stevenson attempted the same thing, when he took his own suggestion from his essay on Villon and wrote ‘A Lodging for the Night’,⁸⁸ which is, I think, the better criticism of the two. The essay on Charles d’Orléans is very much less concerned with an inadequate criticism of his powers than with just such picturesque anecdote of the time, as a novelist would choose to furnish an historical romance. Nothing could be better for such a purpose than the paragraph on tapestry; nothing could better betray the storyteller than the paragraph on the widow of Louis of Orléans. ‘Yoshida Torajiro’ is a miniature biography, and no one has been able to read ‘Burns’, unless perhaps an indignant moralist, and remember that he was not reading a story.⁸⁹ Of another writer he wrote when he was thirty-three: ‘Let him beware of vanity, and he will go higher; let him be still discontented, and let him (if it might be) see the merits and not the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm at last to the top-gallant. There is no other way. Admiration is the only road to excellence; and the critical spirit kills, but envy and injustice are putrefaction on its feet.’⁹⁰

Stevenson began his novel-writing late and with difficulty. He notices, for instance, how few novels are written with an intention that he can recognise as artistic: ‘the purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount.’⁹¹ He turns gratefully to Hawthorne.⁹² In Victor Hugo, he distinguishes well between the romantic novel and the novel of Fielding,⁹³ in which there is nothing but a stage background, and the novelist thinks like the dramatist and does not perceive how much he can do with his more flexible medium.

As for landscape, he (Fielding) was content to underline stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into his hero’s way.⁹⁴

In Scott the personality of a man ‘is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution of things.’ Stevenson notices that Hugo’s advance on Scott is an advance in self-consciousness, that is to say, in the direction of himself.

On Scott, Stevenson is more than most authors obliging to his critics, in giving them examples out of his own mouth for his own conviction or better definition. When we notice a quality in his stories we have but to look in his essays to find that quality the subject of special illustration. We have noticed that with more than a mere memory of the Romantic attitude he had nothing of the free carelessness of technique with which the Romantics set that attitude on paper. We have but to look at his ‘Gossip on Romance’⁹⁵ to find a delightful example of his admiration of the one, his craftsman’s pain in contemplating the other. He is writing of Guy Mannering.⁹⁶ ‘The scene,’ he says, ‘when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method’:

‘I remember the tune well,’ he says, ‘though I cannot guess what should at present so strongly recall it to my memory.’ He took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel. … She immediately took up the song –

For Stevenson, ‘this famous touch of the flageolet and the old song’ strikes one of the four strong notes that sound in the mind when the book is laid aside. But, even while exulting in it, he has had to cut away a little of the matter: ‘Well,’ he says, here is how it runs in the original: ‘A damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.’ A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the ‘damsel’; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.

And his final summing up of Scott still further emphasises his own position. Scott he says, ‘conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly patience to describe it. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great romantic – an idle child.’⁹⁷ This, precisely, is the difference between Stevenson and the generation of Dumas and Scott. For them there was not yet much question of being artists ‘in the manful sense.’ Narrative for them was a flexible, compressible, expansible medium, like soft indiarubber. Gautier, while chiseling his cameos, saw and sang that

And the artists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, with a highly developed critical faculty, made prose a difficult medium, and set themselves to a sturdier labour than ever Scott had imagined, a smaller output, but bought by just these toils and vigils of which he knew nothing whatever.

He gets at Pepys by remembering his own habit of making notes of the circumstances of his reading, garden, cockcrow or other detail, to be recalled in later years. He remembers the planned pleasure of building memories, and constructs a credible Pepys out of the reminiscence. ‘The whole book’ (the diary) ‘if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys’s own address.’ And he proceeds to show how much that is puzzling is explicable on this hypothesis. ‘Now when the artist has found something, word or deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act mean.’⁹⁹

We may applaud his attitude towards realism.¹⁰⁰ He complains of Hugo: ‘We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the Ourque go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship.’ In replying to Henley about Treasure Island he says again: ‘I make these paper people to please Skelt, myself, and God Almighty:’ and construct a statement of ‘the laws of the game’¹⁰¹

It requires little courage to say that Stevenson is a very much greater storyteller¹⁰² than novelist, and even less to say that his short stories are better than his longer tales. He confessed again and again to shortness of breath, and, in an amusing passage, expressed his wonder at the man who could both begin and finish a novel: a thing he was himself incapable of doing. The Master of Ballantrae¹⁰³ changes key at the end; Catriona,¹⁰⁴ Kidnapped,¹⁰⁵ are spread too thin. He died too soon to finish St Ives¹⁰⁶ or Weir of Hermiston.¹⁰⁷ And the wonderful Ebb Tide¹⁰⁸ is a long short story, and in no sense a novel. Treasure Island¹⁰⁹ alone is without blemish or error in construction. And it is not a novel,¹¹⁰ though Stevenson called it a novel in his essay on ‘My First Book,’¹¹¹ when he says: ‘although I had attempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All – all my pretty ones – had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy’s watch.’ And:

It is the length that kills. … For so long a time, the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.¹¹²

And indeed length, with him, was always a willed thing, like the conquest of a dragon. The pity is that it was the unnecessary conquest of a dragon who for other people is merely a comfortable ambling palfrey.¹¹³

In writing of his novels we cannot but have an uncomfortable disquiet, in spite of their many pleasant qualities. It is a different thing when we consider his short stories. Then, all our trouble is to choose and classify remembered moments of enthusiastic admiration. Indeed these moments are of many colours, some purple and grey with heather and rock, some lead and white with the anger of the sea, some neat, rich moments of black and white with colour only in a tie-pin or a ring or a pink slip worn under a Mechlin,¹¹⁴ and others again tinted with old sunlight through mediaeval windows of stained glass.

These last are the earliest, and with ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ and ‘Providence and the Guitar’ complete that small section of Stevenson’s work which has a strange air of being translated from the French. I mean ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ and ‘A Lodging for the Night’. They were first published in Temple Bar, in 1878 and 1877 respectively, and are now included in the volume called New Arabian Nights, with ‘Providence and the Guitar’ and ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, which fall into a different category.

‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door’ (‘door’ being substituted for the original ‘mousetrap’) was invented in France, first told over the fire one evening in Paris, and ultimately written at Penzance.’ In this story,¹¹⁵ there is something of the careful aloofness from life that makes the Comedy of Manners¹¹⁶ so charming with its little dancing serpents of immorality who have all of them lost their fangs. But it excuses not immorality but a sort of suriced¹¹⁷ sugar sentiment which would be sickly if it was not so light, so airy a construction. There is the opening with its night town in the possession of mixed troops of England and Burgundy, setting the time; there is the watch passing like one of the prose poems of Gaspard de la Nuitf;¹¹⁸ there is the little playful terror of the door, the delicious wickedness of the old gentleman; the threatened death so airily carried off in the suggestion of ‘a very efficacious rope’; and then the pretty cross-purposes of the youth and the damsel, weaving a cat’s cradle of tenuous loveable sentiment. A translation from the French; yet no Frenchman has ever touched quite these notes, so airy, so fantastic, so humane.¹¹⁹

‘Providence and the Guitar’ was one of the spoils of Fontainebleau. Stevenson made friends with a pair of travelling actors, and, in the end, sent them the money he earned by the story they suggested.¹²⁰ It is one of the most loveable stories in the world, though I am not sure how much of the love we give it is not given to its characters. Leon Berthelini possessing the grand air, with a Spanish touch and a remembrance of Rembrandt, swimming ‘like a kite on a fair wind, high above earthly troubles’; his wife with ‘a little air of melancholy, attractive enough in its way, but not good to see like the wholesome, sky-scraping, boyish spirits of her lord’: these two, the key note of whose external life is sounded so admirably in their dour reception by the innkeeper, following so close on the affectionate description of their souls, those two are the embodiment of the kind.

No one who has lived in France is not reminded by them of other such; as I am reminded of the conductor of a certain orchestra in a cafe in a small Tourangean¹²¹ town, with his great gestures, and his announcement of a violin solo by himself: composer – a bow – Himself. And the black devil of travelling artists in them is the red Commissary. I remember such another, when I happened to be in company with the keepers of some performing bears. We met him in his shirt-sleeves, and he ordered us out of the town. But in his shirt-sleeves even a Commissary is only a man, and we baited him with taunts and jeers, and refused to believe he was a Commissary at all. He plunged away from us into his house, and soon we had the noble spectacle of a half-naked Commissary at an upper window, pulling on his uniform from behind while he threatened us from in front. And how perfectly has Stevenson caught the spirit of the office which has become the spirit of the man. My digressions are justified by this illustration of the excellence of the portraits. For all good portraits plunge their spectators in digression.¹²²

The incidents, inevitable as in grand tragedy, follow in a sedate minuet, realistic, painful, somehow smiling to the precipitate, or was it more than precipitate¹²³ flight of Leon and his wife after their serenade of the Commissaire. And then their little game under the lime trees, and the guitar touched to comfort Elvira’s spirits, awaking the Cambridge undergraduate who asks with no suspicion of wrong, if they too are camping out? – and, almost immediately is urged, he also, to become an artist. Then the quarrelling painter and his wife, the supper, at which ‘to see Leon eating a single cold sausage was to see a triumph; by the time he had done he had got through as much pantomime as would have sufficed for a baron of beef, and he had the relaxed expression of the over-eaten.’¹²⁴ Then perhaps most sympathetic of all,¹²⁵ the discussion of art by the two incompetents, the reconciliation of the quarrelled, and the perfect summary by the reflective Stubbs: ‘They are all mad,’ thought he, ‘all mad – but wonderfully decent.’¹²⁶ There are few short stories which bear so well repeated reading; few so easy to begin, on glancing through a book, few so hard to relinquish partly read.

Stevenson discovered a new romance; silent upon the peak of Hyde Park Corner, he looked eastward with a wild surmise,¹²⁷ and the swift sophisticated world disclosed its strange perils, its romantic promises. Lieutenant Brackenbury:

glanced at the houses and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly … “They talk of war,” he thought, “but this is the great battlefield of mankind.’¹²⁸

Hansom cabs become the gondolas of London, and that phrase strikes the note of the transformation scene that resulted from Stevenson’s discovery. The golden lights, the shining silver of the wet streets, the blue sky deepened by the lights, the distant stars, the glowing windows were suddenly made Eastern, made Southern, Venetian, with a hint of Byron, Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad, polite death lurking at the street corners, young men distributing cream tarts, and, warm in the air, curling spurts of cigar smoke, an incense at once magic and urbane. He discovered the secret of the metamorphosis, and we owe to him the many miraculous Londons¹²⁹ that have been discovered in these latter years.

And with the new London came a new atmosphere of narrative. The Arabian Nights¹³⁰ did no more than suggest the form, and provide a delightful name. Stevenson took nothing from them than the idea of interdependent stories. He could have parodied them, had he wished: but all his opportunities were scorned. Meredith in Shaving of Shagpat¹³¹ had beaten the Arabian Nights in Araby itself, and Stevenson had no intention of emulating his master. We look in vain for the delightful philosophic tags of verse. We look in vain for the machinery of the East. We are given the new London, a city of infinite probabilities, and in dealing with new place a manner now serious, now whimsical, ‘high and stilted’ as Stevenson put it,¹³² smooth and courteous as the voice of Brackenbury’s cabman, and capable of the sedatest nonsense, the most fantastic seriousness. The prince sets the key when he remarks to the young man of the Cream Tarts whom he is entertaining in a café in Soho: ‘I must tell you that my friend and I are persons very well worthy to be entrusted with a secret. We have many of our own, which we are continually revealing to improper ears.’ All is impossible, all is sublime, and yet when all is done and the Prince, hurled from his throne on account of ‘his edifying neglect of public business’, is become the handsomest tobacconist in Fleet Street, he sells cigars under such a halo of gallantry and honour and humanity that we approach even the idea of entering his shop with a fine romantic reverence.¹³³

If it had not been for this discovery of Stevenson’s, Wilde could never have written: ‘Let us go out into the night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?’¹³⁴

The two short stories in the Lowland dialect, ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Story of Tod Lapraik’,¹³⁵ are among the best of Stevenson’s achievements. The dialect seems to knit the words together so that there are no interstices to allow reality to slip out. These two stories are the best examples of dialect prose that have been written in modern times. Expressive, vigorous, firm, and always with that curious feeling of close construction; almost any sentence in either would suffice to illuminate the quality of their excellent vernacular prose. ‘Grandfather’s silver tester in the puddock’s heart of him’, is really better than ‘Grandfather’s silver sixpence in his toad’s heart,’¹³⁶ and it would be impossible to repeat in other words the precise effect¹³⁷ of ‘He cam’ a step nearer to the corp; an’ then his heart fair whammled in his inside. For, by what cantrip it wad ill-beseem a man to judge, she was hingin’ frae a single nail an’ by a single wursted thread for darnin’ hose.’¹³⁸ It seems curious that these especially local stories should be those that most clearly illustrate the influence of Hawthorne; yet it is not so really, for in the spirit of the Covenanters, in the remembrance of the persecution, he found just such a background of religious feeling, that the New England of the witch-burnings offered to the author of The Scarlet Letter, ‘Ethan Brand’ and ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’.¹³⁹

‘The Treasure of Franchard’¹⁴⁰ is a sort of genial Candide,¹⁴¹ with the philosophy that believes that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’ illustrated in a quite different manner. Nothing could be more lovable than that small family party, the garrulous doctor, his wife who was devoted to him ‘for her own sake rather than for his’, had an imperturbable good nature, no idea of self-sacrifice, and an aptitude for falling asleep, and the wise little offspring of the mountebank. It also is a character story, unlike most of Stevenson’s; the few events are only to illuminate these three delightful persons, and events and persons have a warm, sunny air about them, and seem, like Fontainebleau, to be offering an easy hospitality.

Stevenson’s first three tales of adventure were Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and Prince Otto.¹⁴² Stevenson’s attitude towards Treasure Island is partly represented in the cheerful lines he addressed to the hesitating purchaser:

He offered it as a pious ritual to gods who had stirred his boyhood.¹⁴⁴ He did, piously, what they had done, following their careless furrow with his steel plough in a sentimental emulation. And readers who remembered The Last of the Mohicans,¹⁴⁵ White Ice¹⁴⁶ and Coral Island¹⁴⁷ recovered some of their lost youth in reading these more accomplished pages. More accomplished, and more civilised; for in spite of what he said, the brave adventures of Silver and the others are not ‘retold exactly in the ancient way’. There is the old pleasure in hair’s-breadth escape, enriched with something of the actuality of adventure-books older still, the actuality of Defoe in Captain Singleton,¹⁴⁸ which book he had not read when he wrote Treasure Island, the delight in immediate detail that dictated Crusoe’s entrancing catalogue of the things found in the wreck, and somehow intellectualizing all this, a sophisticated delight in the goriness of the performance. I remember a later poet’s lines:

Something of that quite modern attitude, something of the delight in Grand Guignol,¹⁵⁰ mix with the vigorous love of action and tropical, lurid colour which the great romantics had bequeathed to the boys’ storytellers of the preceding generation.

Never were circumstances more apt for such a tale’s production. Stevenson, himself a boy, with his young stepson aged thirteen and his father, children both in the simplicity of their imaginative tastes;¹⁵¹ the drawing of a map in playful imitation of the ancient way, in which maps were not cold-blooded plans but lively pictures, with ships sailing, full-rigged upon the sea, and mountains visible, not merely marked, upon the land;¹⁵² and then with this map a tangible, credible testimony ‘to witness if he lied’,¹⁵³ the construction, for the storyteller’s own pleasure and for that of the other two children,¹⁵⁴ of a tale to give the touch of human memory to its hills and creeks. All this too, with no thought of literature or larger publication than to the company about the fire in the small Scotch cottage in the northern summer evenings. Its publication was an accident, due to the presence of a critical guest at some of the tellings, and as modest as might be, sharing with many another story less happily conceived, less delicately executed, the columns of a cheap, children’s paper, and showing none of its success until two years afterwards when it was issued, quite without trumpets, as a children’s book.

We are faced with a strange problem; what is it that makes this tale superior, not only to The Black Arrow which won greater esteem in its serial form, but to Catriona and Kidnapped which in Stevenson’s opinion touched his highest level, indeed to The Master of Ballantrae, and so indeed to his longer narratives except the stern clean drawing of Weir of Hermiston? Nineteen chapters of it were written straight off, a chapter a day, ‘no writing, just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch.’¹⁵⁵ Hawkins in the apple barrel was suggested by his father on The Regent sailing in the northern seas, who as a lad crept into an apple barrel, and happened to hear the language of a ‘vulgar and truculent ruffian’ proceeding from the lips of the deferential captain who was wont to make polite appearances in the cabin, to dine courteously with the new engineer of the lights.¹⁵⁶

Dr Alexander Japp visited Braemar, and, delighted with the story, immediately arranged its publication in Young Folks,¹⁵⁷ at £2.10s a page of 4500 words as Stevenson calculated, with the comment ‘not noble is it? But I have my copyright safe … I’ll make this boys’ book business pay; but I have to make a beginning.’¹⁵⁸ At once he foresaw other such cheerful books: there was to be Jerry Abershaw: a Tale of Putney Heath, and books of the Wild West and so on. This effervescent enthusiasm for a new kind of work lit up the actual writing of what was then called ‘The Sea Cook’. But the stream suddenly dried, and the serial publication of the book began before the last fourteen chapters were written. Stevenson however, where he caught the note again, wrote them as easily as the earlier batch. No book of his ever cost him so little labour.

But it is worth observing, lest indolent youth should believe that easy writing is a test of merit, that their speed in composition was only made possible by the years of slow, meticulous labour that had preceded it. Stevenson had already written essays, his little travel-books, his New Arabian Nights, most of the best of his short stories, all these with an almost passionate taking of pains: he had already wrestled with the planning of Prince Otto, which though finished after Treasure Island was really his first long story. He had been continually disciplining himself; and when he started ‘The Sea Cook’ as an amusement only, of the most light hearted kind, he could not but write with skill and certainty, in the same way as the accomplished billiard player will frame with style even on a bagatelle board.

And it is the most seductive of books, hard to discuss because it will be read. I open it to remind myself of some detail of technique, and, from that page, I read willy-nilly to the end. And this happens not once but many times. My edition is dated 1894, and is one of the fifty-second thousand. In the last twenty years I must have read it at least twenty times; and now I cannot write of it as of a literary achievement. No: I speculate upon the fortunes of Long John when he foregathered with his old negress in the port he would not name for fear of causing jealousy. I wonder what became of the three maroons who were left on the island as a punishment for their wicked mutiny. I hear Long John cursing at the flies on his large, red face, or see him smoking silently with Captain Smollett, as in the picture at the log-house door. And then there are delicious, perilous moments, up the mast, with Hands climbing from below, and jerking his dagger murderously through the air to pin me – or was it Jim Hawkins? – to the mast.¹⁵⁹ And then the characters, Livesey and the Squire, and Gunn in the end of the book keeping a gate¹⁶⁰ – oak and walnut characters like those of the eighteenth century novels.

As for origins, Stevenson, in a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin, was most explicit. ‘T. I. came out of Kingsley’s At Last, where I got the Dead Man’s Chest – and that was the seed – and out of the great Captain Johnson’s History of Notorious Pirates. The scenery is Californian in part, and in part chic.’¹⁶¹ There is one other borrowing, at least so it seems to me, and one particularly interesting as an illustration of the dependence of such events on the personalities that perceive them. And that is the burial of Flint’s treasure, and the deaths of the men who helped him. At the end of ‘The Gold-Bug’¹⁶² Poe chooses to touch a tragic note:

‘That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself. There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them – and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply. It is clear that Kidd – if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not – it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labour. But, this labour concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen – who shall tell?’

No other of Stevenson’s books cost him such trouble in the execution as Prince Otto. In 1880 it was already vivid in his mind: it was then called ‘The Forest State – a Romance’, and he wrote of it to Henley, who was always urging him towards the theatre:

A brave story, I swear; and a brave play too, if we can find the trick to make the end. The play, I fear, will have to end darkly, and that spoils the quality as I now see it of a kind of crockery, eighteenth century, high-life-below-stairs life, breaking up like ice in spring before the nature and the certain modicum of manhood of my poor, clever, feather-headed Prince, whom I love already.¹⁶³

In March 1884, it was still unfinished. ‘Two chapters of Otto do remain: one to rewrite, one to create; and I am not yet able to tackle them.’¹⁶⁴ He took it extremely seriously:

There is a good deal of stuff in it, both dramatic and, I think, poetic; and the story is not like these purposeless fables of today, but is, at least, intended to stand firm upon a base of philosophy – or morals … as you please …¹⁶⁵

and not only was its matter¹⁶⁶ thus earnestly conceived. His first attempt at a novel, intended as the precursor of others, it involved a new and exciting combination of technical processes he had mastered in essays and short stories:

For me it is my chief o’ works; hence probably not so for others, since it only means that I have here attacked the greatest difficulties. But some chapters towards the end: three in particular – I do think come off. I find them stirring, dramatic, and not unpoetical. We shall see, however; as like as not, the effort will be more obvious than the success. For, of course, I strung myself hard to carry it out. The next will come easier, and possibly be more popular. I believe in the covering of much paper, each time with a definite and not too difficult artistic purpose; and then, from time to time, drawing oneself up and trying, in a superior effort, to combine the facilities thus acquired or improved. Thus one progresses. But, mind, it is very likely that the big effort, instead of being the masterpiece, may be the blotted copy, the gymnastic exercise. This no man can tell; only the brutal and licentious public, snouting in Mudie’s wash-trough, can return a dubious answer.¹⁶⁷

He set himself to maintain through a book, and in a continuous story,¹⁶⁸ a definite, artificial note: ‘It is all pitched pretty high and stilted; almost like the Arabs, at that; but of course there is love-making in Otto’ (which he had hitherto pretty carefully avoided), ‘and indeed a good deal of it. I sometimes feel very weary; but the thing travels – and I like it when I am at it.’¹⁶⁹ It is not perfectly successful, but it is an excellent summary of Stevenson’s first period. The attempt in the beginning to set the key of fantasy with the tracing of Otto’s pedigree to the royal race of the sea-bound Bohemia of Shakespeare’s discovery,¹⁷⁰ the placing of Perdita at least by suggestion among his maternal ancestry, and the hinted continuation of that airy sweet character of romance with the practical rigour of realistic Saxon Grunewalds,¹⁷¹ promises something that is not, and but by a miracle could not be, consistently fulfilled. Some of the characters become too real, too vigorous of pulse for the Dresden china masquerade in which they were to appear; and, curiously, it is for those that we remember that Otto disappears beside the Countess von Rosen, with whom all but the most rigid have fallen in love. The princess is called upon to execute too sudden a volte-face, so that the lyrical scenes at the end of the book are acted by a princess of fairy tale who has scarcely a cousinly relationship to the painted minx of the beginning; and the minor characters, Sir John Cotterill, Greisengesang the Councillor, Colonel Gordon, and Gotthold the librarian are more consistent, and lead us to suspect that they owe their consistency to the little use their inventor was compelled to make of them. Gondremark is a pleasant invention: but the most delightful touch in his pretentions is an essayist’s, not a novelist’s, when in the epilogue it is mentioned that Swinburne has dedicated ‘a rousing lyric and some vigorous sonnets’ to his memory.

I seem to be carping unnecessarily: it is not so: I am but noticing in Prince Otto the signs of a transition, and in so doing perhaps forgetting the wayward grace of the book, and that quality in it which makes it like the Countess von Rosen, curtseying to the Prince in the Castle of Felsenburg, ‘“You are as adroit, dear Prince, as I am – charming.” And as she said the word with a great curtsey, she justified it.’ But I can not help feeling that the charm of the book deserves also the description that the Countess fitted to herself: ‘Blank cartridge, O mon Prince!’

Stevenson complained that much as he enjoyed his own works, he never read The Black Arrow, and the Critic-on-the-Hearth to whom he dedicated it was also unable to get to the end of it. It was, as he put it, ‘tushery’,¹⁷² a sort of masquerade of old times, with the easy unreality of a pantomime, marred a little by the too great precision of some of the characters for their parts in such stage play. It was, he confessed, written in direct imitation of a school of writers of boys’ books. It was the second product of the factory of juvenile literature of which Stevenson had such cheerful hopes, and, strange as it may seem, it was designed, and successfully designed, to catch the favour of those who had gone so far in their disapproval of Treasure Island, when it appeared in Young Folks, as to write querulous letters to the editor of that magazine. For all that, I liked it as a boy, and like it still, and can turn back without distaste to the picture of Dick and Joanna in the passage with the lamp before them, or to hear the merry Alicia’s comforting ‘Keep your heart up, lion-driver’, or her unfortunate reply to Richard Crookback ‘My lord duke, so as the man is straight –’. There are sturdy enough descriptions of fighting, a portrait of Crookback which pleased Stevenson, and some lesser things on a much higher level, like the scene where Dick asks pardon from the old seaman. The old seaman was worthy of a better book, and perhaps it was just the feeling that there were two books, superimposed, destroying each other, written in different keys,¹⁷³ that made The Black Arrow a disquieting memory for its author. Still it is a pleasant work, and one of those two books that it contains, is full of Stevenson.

Those who are interested in the study of technique will not find many better illustrations of the genesis of a narrative than Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.¹⁷⁴ Stevenson conceived in a dream a man who by chemical powders was enabled to loose the baser part of his nature in another form than his own, for the unpunished satisfaction of his vicious desires. The character of the man was bad throughout, and he took pleasure in the deeds thus committed in a physical disguise. In this form Stevenson wrote it down before the sharp impression of his dream had evaporated. At that time he was not allowed by his doctor to read aloud, and his wife read the draft, and submitted her criticism in writing. She pointed out (I am leaning here on Mr Graham Balfour’s account of the matter)¹⁷⁵ that whereas the tale was really an allegory Stevenson had treated it simply as a narrative. ‘After a while his bell rang; on her return she found him sitting up in bed (the clinical thermometer in his mouth), pointing with a long denouncing finger to a pile of ashes. He had burned the entire draft … not out of pique, but from a fear that he might be tempted to make too much use of it, and not rewrite the whole from a new standpoint.’ Now the interest of this anecdote lies not so much in Stevenson’s readiness to accept criticism, or in his whole-hearted earnestness as a craftsman, as in the reason given by the critic, and the subsequent action of the criticised.¹⁷⁶

Mrs Stevenson’s dissatisfaction was not based on anything outside the draft itself. It was not that she preferred allegory to plain narrative; but that she perceived a discrepancy between matter and manner, the matter demanding a different manner, the manner suggesting a different matter. Her criticism was a suggestion that Stevenson had not gone far enough in knowledge of what he was trying to write, that as it then stood Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was imperfectly known; and Stevenson burned the draft least that imperfect knowledge, stereotyped as it was at a particular degree of imperfection, should be an opaque barrier to further investigation. The original suggestion, from dream or accident, is thus the starting point of a piece of research; the rest is not invention but gradually deepening and spreading perception, and the part played by Mrs Stevenson with regard to the writing of this short story is precisely that of the watchful critical faculty at every stage in the evolution of a work of art.

Some of Stevenson’s fantastic tales have been compared to Poe’s: but there is always more in them of Hawthorne than of Poe.¹⁷⁷ ‘The Body-Snatcher’,¹⁷⁸ perhaps, depends like too many of Poe’s stories on merely physical horror: the details of blood in, for example, ‘Markheim’¹⁷⁹ seem to me to have a wholly different origin. The stricken dealer ‘struggling like a hen’, the account of the body, ‘like a suit half-stuffed with bran’, the jolting about of the unstiffened limbs, these things belong to the same category as the visual horror of the murdered man in ‘A Lodging for the Night’¹⁸⁰ with his ‘bald head and garland of red curls’; or, in another story not in the least horrible in intention, the fight between Hands and Jim Hawkins in the Hispaniola, when as the boat heeling over, pursuer and pursued tumbled together into the scuppers, ‘the dead red-cap, with his arms still spread out, tumbling stiffly after us.’¹⁸¹ Stevenson is not experimenting in physical thrills, but exulting in the vividness and realism of his vision; his ugly corpses offering him the pleasures of a patch of sunlight and shadow miraculously got into words, and at the same time a delight which in a man of his tenderness, is comparable to the delight in action shown by a man so sedentary by habit and compulsion. He described blood, from his sick-bed, in much the same spirit as the Sidney who died at Zutphen described his shepherdesses.¹⁸²

But though The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde resembles in some things Poe’s ‘William Wilson’,¹⁸³ its scent, its mainspring, was one known to Hawthorne but scarcely realised by Poe except in the crudest manner. To those who have read the book as a simple fantasy, a couple of sentences in a letter from Stevenson to his friend Low must bring with them a shock of surprise and of wonder. ‘The gnome,’ says Stevenson of this story, ‘is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears. It is not always the time to rejoice.’¹⁸⁴ Why, this is as serious as the preachers who made its popularity by advertising the tale from their pulpits! How is it to be reconciled with the fact that the idea of the tale came to him in a vivid dream, and that when he first wrote it down he wrote it as if it were a plain story, not an allegory? Hawthorne is perhaps the only other writer who if in possession of all the facts would have been in no way surprised, unless at the surprise of other people. Hawthorne was himself no fanatic, but he saw that a story may be given coherence and frame by a moral as well as by a physical background, and set his figures at their work, black tortured shadows before the white glow of the morality of his New England forefathers. That is precisely what Stevenson did when in the second revision of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he strengthened the allegorical presentation; he took, as narrator, the moral attitude of his stern, Scottish ancestry, and in doing so, found that one of his own personalities for which that attitude was most real, recovered from the past a Stevenson tortured between good and evil, and in sustaining the mental pose of this unhappy Stevenson found again something of his unhappiness, and translated an artistic device into a vivid, momentary but not for that the less painful reality.

In 1896, a collection of short fables and apologues was added to a new edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.¹⁸⁵ Most of them had been written before 1888, and Stevenson had talked of making a book of them; he added a few during his stay in the South Seas, but they were unpublished at his death. This little collection is a sort of nursery garden, in which we can see less elaborate specimens of the half-romantic, half-moral tales, of which Markheim, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the better known examples. But they are not all on this pattern. Some, not the best, are on an austere Aesopic model; others, like the conversation between Smollett and Silver, in an open place not far from the story of Treasure Island are a gentle, balanced, playing with the facts of life; others again like the sentences exchanged between the eager tadpole and the elderly frog,¹⁸⁶ are mainly whimsical illustrations of human attitudes. The best are very short fairy stories, different in handling, and effect, but identical in intention with Wilde’s ‘Poems in Prose’. Of such are The House of Eld, The Touchstone, The Poor Thing and The Song of the Morrow. They are such tales as Blake’s poem of the boy and the old woman:¹⁸⁷ the last is indeed identical with that. The king’s daughter, speaking to the old crone at the beach, and ending as an old crone, to whom speaks a king’s daughter. There is something in the prose of the antique manner of Morris:¹⁸⁸ and a suggestion too of the prose that was to be written years afterwards by J. M. Synge,¹⁸⁹ compound of the fine gesture of old romance and the intimate grammar of the peasantry: for example:

And the King’s daughter of Duntrine got her to that part of the beach where strange things had been done in the ancient ages; and there she sat her down. The sea foam ran to her feet, and the dead leaves swarmed about her back, and the veil blew about her face in the blowing of the wind. And when she lifted up her eyes, there was the daughter of a King come walking on the beach. Her hair was like the spun gold, and her eyes like pools in a river, and she had no thought for the morrow and no power upon the hour, after the manner of simple men.¹⁹⁰

These fables contain some of Stevenson’s most notable images; the man listening to his ancestors, who spoke together with bee-like voices, and stooping his hand among their bones, when ‘the dead laid hold upon it many and faint like ants’;¹⁹¹ the elder brother whose soul was as small as a pea, and whose heart was ‘a bag of little fears like scorpions’;¹⁹² the woman who ‘smiled as a clock ticks, and knew not wherefore’;¹⁹³ and the appearance gobbling like a turkey in the story of ‘The House of Eld’,¹⁹⁴ which is in its way Stevenson’s wistful expression of the relations he feared between himself and his parents. And this compound of vivid imagery, of felt rather than of merely seen pictures, with a contemplation of life separated a little from two particular manifestations, is the main part of many of his longer stories. The Aesopic fables do not succeed;¹⁹⁵ they are wilfully imitation antiques, involving an unnecessary sacrifice of power in exchange for a virtue not now to be obtained. They were to be as hard as nuts, without ornaments, and so they are, but whereas in Aesop the fruit is all of a piece, green¹⁹⁶ throughout, in these the kernel rattles dry in the husk, and can be separated from it with advantage. The idea: no child believes that his father was ever young: is more immediate and striking than its gratuitous translation into tadpole and frog. Indeed, in Fables, the careful reader will find not only the simplest examples of Stevenson’s virtues, but also at least a suggestion of the cause of his occasional blindness to failure, the shorter catechist¹⁹⁷ setting the romancer to polish the chapel door-handle, instead of lifting the roof of the chapel off its walls as he rose with the clouds of romance about his shoulders and the romantic vision in his eyes.

As Happy as Kings¹⁹⁸

About this time thirty years ago, a Mr Stevenson, severely stricken in wind and limb, sorely troubled with the ridiculous details of drains and smells in a house he had taken in the hope of being well in it, was busied in composition of a kind almost entirely new to him. He had written three or four pretty little books of prose, The New Arabian Nights, and a story for boys called Treasure Island which had earned much disapprobation when published in a boy’s magazine.¹⁹⁹ His friends were mostly poets, and it was with an agitated diffidence that he announced to them the work in which he was engaged: Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers, afterwards A Child’s Garden of Verses. Just about the same time it happened that I was born.²⁰⁰ It further happened that the book had just had time to percolate the provinces, and induce in provincial parents a readiness to read it aloud instead of Bunyan,²⁰¹ when I, in the course of nature, was ready to listen to it. There are accordingly when I read it now, two distinct persons looking at the print, a baldheaded person²⁰² who has read too many books, and a small boy who has read Robinson Crusoe, Little Arthur’s History of England²⁰³ (a noble work) and As Pretty as Seven²⁰⁴ (the best book of German fairy stories with the most charming woodcuts in the world). I differ from that small boy, alas; on most things. Our tastes are widely divergent. But on the ‘penny whistles’²⁰⁵ of that Mr Stevenson we still preserve a very happy unanimity.

A Child’s Garden of Verses is one of those smiling accidents that befall serious, laborious men. When Morris, intent on a thousand other things, delighted his fellow undergraduates with the poems that were afterwards printed in his first volume,²⁰⁶ and remarked that, if this was poetry, then it was very easy, he expressed very much what Stevenson must have felt when, after long years of technical diligence in other directions, he found himself writing these things, and with his unerring criticism of himself saw with surprise that they were very good. ‘These are rhymes, jingles; I don’t go for eternity and the three unities,’²⁰⁷ and he gaily answered criticism on occasional imperfect rhymes, which, he said, were good enough for him. He did not find them easy: ‘I can usually do whistles only by giving my whole mind to it: to produce even such limping verse demanding the whole forces of my untuneful soul.’²⁰⁸

He did not believe them to be poetry of any very high order. ‘Poetry,’ he said, ‘is not the strong point of the text, and I shrink from any title that might seem to claim that quality.’ He thought of calling them ‘Penny Whistles’, and publishing them with a sketch of ‘a party playing on a P. W. to a little ring of dancing children,’²⁰⁹ as a frontispiece. When the book was out, he announced to Mr Gosse: ‘I have now published on 101 small pages ‘The Complete Proof of Mr R. L. Stevenson’s Incapacity To Write Verse’ in a series of graduated examples with table of contents.’²¹⁰ Yet with one or two exceptions he never wrote better verse, and, perhaps, he never elsewhere achieved a completer and more personal success. And in spite of his diffidence in writing to his friends, poets, he loved these verses well. ‘They look ghastly,’ he said, ‘in the cold light of print; but there is something nice in the little ragged regiment for all; the blackguards seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child’s voice.’²¹¹

A child’s voice in literature had never been achieved before, except for a moment and by a child, the wonderful Marjorie Fleming²¹² whose immortal lines on a nurse (I think):

are treasured by all who have ever heard them. ‘Marjorie Fleming I have known, as you surmise, for long’, Stevenson wrote to Mr William Archer. ‘She was possibly – no, I take back possibly – she was one of the greatest works of God. Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist.’²¹³

Some of the Songs of Innocence²¹⁴ are in the mouths of children, but Blake’s children are angels and their clear voices are ecstatic with the hope and the memory of paradise. Stevenson’s child is concentrated, humanely, on the present. The sun in the morning, the lamplighter at night, the rustle of an aunt’s skirts, play more serious than life, are the simplest and least questionable version of a philosophy ridiculous in the mouth of Dr Pangloss,²¹⁵ but respectable, gallant, and holding for older persons who listen to it, something of the pattern of a forlorn hope:

The world is [so] full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.²¹⁶

These things are the real furniture of childish psychology, and give us back our babyhood.

I suppose each reader of the book, each reviewer of that little ragged smiling regiment, must himself have been the child who sang these to a plain but cheerful recitative, like the a. b. ab,²¹⁷ we hear when, dusty with age and travel, we pass by a village schoolroom. The only piece of false psychology in the book is the last poem, ‘To any reader’:

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.

That is not so. Stevenson saw himself, but every child who hears the verses, identifies the land of counterpane with his own bed, and every grown person sees not the little Scottish boy in the old Manse at Colinton, but lives again his own infancy.²¹⁸

I count myself fortunate that I was born late enough to be among the children whose mothers have read aloud them The Child’s Garden of Verses. For me now they have something of the lovable quality that I suppose everybody attributes to his own childhood. They were translated into my life, and episodes in it seem to have been known to Stevenson though not always quite accurately chronicled by him. Now in writing of them I think I may wisely defer to a childish critic of long ago who was more certain of his favourites than ever I can be. When I was on the fringe of babyhood, before I went to school, older then three but without the hoary dignity of nine or ten; these were the verses I liked best: ‘Bed in Summer’; ‘Foreign Lands’, principally for the open feeling of the fourth line ‘And looked abroad on foreign lands’; the insistent question of ‘Windy Nights’, ‘Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about?’ best of all, perhaps. ‘The Land of Counterpane’ with its real transfiguration of dip and hill in counterpane geography; with contempt of superior science and at the same time a delight in the fantasy, the address to ‘My Shadow’; doubtfully with a distaste for the realism of the comb and the mention of girl’s names as warriors, the ‘Marching Song’. Then I liked the first stanza of ‘The Cow’, the first and last stanzas of ‘Good and Bad Children’ partly for the rhyme’s sake:

Children, you are very little,
And your bones are very brittle;
If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately …

Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces –

this last with a backhand deduction as to the childhood of my aunts,²¹⁹ which Stevenson certainly never intended. ‘The Lamplighter’ was another favourite, though the trees whose leaves were suddenly silenced by the lamp in the autumn evenings made it impossible for Leerie to nod to any little child, listening for his footsteps and watching from the house for the illumination. This Stevenson should have foreseen.²²⁰ ‘From a Railway Carriage’ was always lovingly associated with journeys to the north country hills, although he²²¹ wished to edit it, and still thinks that Stevenson would not have disapproved the emendation. In a moving railway carriage one thing always impresses itself on the childish mind, and that is the dip and rise of the telegraph lines as they cut the square of the window. And that Stevenson has omitted. Now it was by that that I knew I was in a train. I liked the sentiment but resented the doll in ‘My Ship and I’, and always waited in the readings for the thrill of the last line: ‘And fire the penny cannon in the bow.’ And full of knowledge that the very room in which my parents read possessed a similar occult geography, I had a proprietary pleasure in ‘The Land of Story-Books’. Not one of the poems in the section called ‘Garden Days’ earned my suffrage, except for a few single lines and pictures, and I am now in cordial agreement with my youth. The Envoys were for grown-up people only, and I was no friend to little Louis Sanchez.²²²

I think the childish critic had found the pick of the collection, and I have little to add to his choice by way of commentary. Stevenson was not altogether right when he refused his verses the name of poetry. Much of it is charming prose matter that has gained the lasting, memorable quality of good nonsense-rhymes. He preserves with extraordinary skill the delightful freedom from ulterior motive, which is the chief glory of the childish imagination. He is generous of quite inimitable touches of childish diction:

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might
To eat with apple-tart.²²³

There is self-consciousness here and there of a kind bad for children and detested by them, as: ‘Who should climb but little me?’ But as a rule the psychology is just, and sometimes brilliant in its accuracy, as in the pirate-story, when the geography is made up as the play goes, and only in the last line, when they are sorely needed when the cattle ‘are charging with a roar’, decides, breathlessly, that ‘the wicket is the harbour and the garden is the shore.’ Then too there are epithets with the rightness, and the surprising-ness of true poetry.

It would be hard to overpraise the perception and the courage that supplied and left the word ‘Egyptian’, so true, and so inexplicable.²²⁴ And we have only to write in prose the matter of a story: ‘In the winter I get up at night and dress by the yellow light of a candle, whereas in summer, on the contrary, I have to go to bed by day’ – and compare it with the verse:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day –

to perceive that there is more in this than rhymed prose, and that the matter is indeed stamped with the personal and untranslatable form of poetry.²²⁵

Stevenson was not deceived by the fact of writing verse into thinking–like so many romancers turned poetasters²²⁶ – that in writing prose he had missed his vocation as a poet. He knew that was a difference not only in result but in intuition between his verse and that of those of his contemporaries whom he held to be poets. He asks John Addington Symonds:

I wonder if you saw my book of verses? It went into a second edition, because of my name, I suppose, and its prose merits. I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings. But I believe the very fact that it was only speech served the book with the public. Horace is much a speaker, and see how popular! most of Martial is only speech, and I cannot conceive a person who does not love his Martial; most of Burns, also, such as ‘The Louse’, ‘The Toothache’, ‘The Haggis’, and lots more of his best. Excuse this little apology for my house; but I don’t like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.²²⁷

At the same time he had no very low opinion of the muse in her more gossiping moments; he could instance Herrick²²⁸ and Martial²²⁹ and many others whose verses seemed to be mere talk when compared with the solemn music or the intenser song of poets whom he admitted to be greater. But he did not clearly perceive that verse may be talkative and yet poetry, while he cheerfully announced, sometimes mistakenly, that his verse was talkative and not poetry at all. He says of his own verse: ‘… I have begun to learn some of the rudiments of the trade, and have written three or four pretty enough pieces of octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling. A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse, and you behold the Bard.’²³⁰ To William Sharp, he writes:

I have never called my verses poetry: they are verse, the verse of a speaker not a singer; but that is a fair business like another. I am of your mind in preferring much the Scotch verses, and in thinking ‘Requiem’ the nearest thing to poetry that I have ever ‘clerked.’²³¹

And again, in sending a sonnet to Sharp who edited an anthology, he wrote: ‘The form of my so-called sonnets will cause you as much agony as it causes me little.’²³² He was, I think, very uncertain as to the precise nature of the difference, though he willingly admitted its existence.

When I suffer in my mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and I consider one who writes them a sort of doctor of the mind. And frankly, Meiklejohn, it is not Shakespeare we take to, when we are in a hot corner; nor, certainly, George Eliot – no, nor even Balzac. It is Charles Reade, or old Dumas, or the Arabian Nights, or the best of Walter Scott; it is stories we want, not the high poetic function which represents the world; we are then like the Asiatic with his improvisatore or the middle-aged with his trouvère We want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy. When we are well again, and have an easy mind, we shall pursue your important work; but what we want now is a drug. So I, when I am ready to go beside myself, stick my head into a storybook, as the ostrich with her bush; but fate and fortune meantime belabour my posteriors at their will.²³³

And when we are tempted to compare the airy emptiness of Stevenson’s novels with the rich humanity, the filled views, of, for example, Dostoevsky,²³⁴ or Turgenev²³⁵ or Korolenko,²³⁶ we must remember that such a comparison was never invited by Stevenson. I have chosen these Russian examples on purpose, instead of the Balzac²³⁷ or the George Eliot²³⁸ that to Stevenson represented the exciting but strange antipodes of his storytelling world, because in them the thing that Stevenson lacked is intensified, while his peculiar gifts are almost absent, whereas Balzac or that stern-faced woman both took considerable pleasure in storytelling for its own sake. Those Russians are concerned with life itself: they want to know, to understand, to make life conscious; they sacrifice all else to that end. Stevenson asked for stories, to make life bearable, to make it pleasant, and when he wrote tales, he wrote such tales as he would have wished to find at hand in such a mood as that in which he wrote the paragraph I have just copied out. His is not the tradition of Richardson,²³⁹ Bronte,²⁴⁰ Hardy²⁴¹ and Meredith, though just as Meredith in the beginning of his life wrote The Shaving of Shagpat so Stevenson, at the end of his, wrote Weir of Hermiston which, more than any other of his books, belongs to the other side of the gulf between the poet and the troubadours.²⁴²

A course of Balzac which, as Wilde said, ‘reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades’ turns Stevenson’s creations into the most transparent veils, and a course of Dostoevsky makes them altogether non-existent. But only the crudest criticism would undervalue them on that account, just as only the dullest critics measure a work by comparison with another, and only he who has no right to be a critic at all measures it by comparison with another work in an altogether different kind.²⁴³

Adventure was what Stevenson cared for in life; adventure was what brought him to his twentieth reading of Vicomte de Bragelonne; adventure is what delighted him in his own books; and it is after a course of Dumas that the Scotch novels²⁴⁴ of Stevenson appear in their true colours, something new, something different, accomplished, graceful sacrifices on the altar of a tradition that will last as long as men are young enough to have the hearts of boys. Treasure Island opened the run; The Black Arrow perhaps momentarily destroyed his belief in it; but with Kidnapped he opened the series of his Scotch novels, and Kidnapped was professedly a boy’s book: ‘This,’ says Stevenson, apologising in the preface for the freedoms he had taken with chronology, ‘is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was a grim old fire-eater in his day has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.’²⁴⁵

Engaging images indeed: Alan Breck with his ‘Eh mon, am I no a bonny fighter?’, and his love of fine clothes, and that intolerable David, who excuses himself only by his adventures, and, after all is with the less compunction turned out to make room for ourselves: the old uncle, the pretty girl at the inn, and many more. But David is the problem: as Mr Rankeillor remarked he had shown ‘a singular aptitude for getting into false positions; and, yes, upon the whole, for behaving well in them’: but it is David who chronicles Mr Rankeillor’s remark, like so many others, to his own advantage. Now if Alan Breck had written the book, he would have kept up a fine, flaunting, boasting, braggadocio vein, which would have amused rather than repelled. There is something repugnant in the smug David, and yet – Stevenson knew what he was about, and yet again; it is no use, no fervour of casuistry will ever make me like David. I read the book with pleasure, with profit, with continual amusement, and an increasing dislike for its narrator. It is one of Stevenson’s triumphs that he should have made him live enough to be disliked. And, David apart, the book contains examples of that thrill, that faint stir of the flesh over the cheek bones, that is given by romance, achieved less obviously, less easily than by gold moidores, doubloons, and reminiscence of Captain Kidd.²⁴⁶ Things like the Red Fox being a hot man wiping his face at the moment of his death, Alan’s appearance with the fishing rod, the race through the heather and his drawing the soldiers after him from the murderer, even the Udolpho²⁴⁷ touch in the lightning about the tower when David climbed, so narrowly to escape his death.²⁴⁸

In December 1887, he fell ‘head over heels into a new tale’, The Master of Ballantrae, that was to be ‘sound human tragedy’, no boy’s book now, but serious character study and yet with wild enough adventure thrown in.

The Master is all I know of the devil. I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards; he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. ‘Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry.²⁴⁹

This is serious enough, but the commentary on it is in an essay in The Art of Writing (an essay which carries off in a gentlemanly way its cousin-ship to Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Composition’)²⁵⁰ which describes the invention and inception of the tale – the starting point being the final resuscitation of the Master, and the novel itself being at first merely the steps to that high culmination. Thus from the very beginning there was conflict, for the novel became more and more real, lively, humane, and the legerdemain of the finish, which however he would not throw over, retained its need of a conspiring showman and quivering green limelight. And by the time the book was two thirds written, Stevenson was well aware of the danger he was in. In a letter to Henry James written in March 1888, he describes the plot, and his difficulty, and wrote what must be the last verdict upon the book:

Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the last one or two, I regret to say, not so soundly designed; I almost hesitate to write them; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. I wish I knew; that was how the tale came to me however. I got the situation; it was an old taste of mine: The older brother goes out in the ’45, the younger stays; the younger, of course, gets title and estate and marries the bride designate of the elder – a family match, but he (the younger) had always loved her, and she had really loved the elder. Do you see the situation? Then the devil and Saranac suggested this dénounement, and I joined the two ends in a day or two of constant feverish thought, and began to write. And now – I wonder if I have not gone too far with the fantastic? The elder brother is an INCUBUS: supposed to be killed at Culloden, he turns up again and bleeds the family of money; on that stopping he comes and lives with them, whence flows the real tragedy, the nocturnal duel of the brothers (very naturally, and indeed, I think, inevitably arising), and second supposed death of the elder. Husband and wife now really make up, and then the cloven hoof appears. For the third supposed death and the manner of the third reappearance is steep; steep, sir. It is even very steep, and I fear it shames the honest stuff so far; but then it is highly pictorial, and it leads up to the death of the elder brother at the hands of the younger in a perfectly cold-blooded murder, of which I wish (and mean) the reader to approve. You see how daring is the design. There are really but six characters, and one of these episodic, and yet it covers eighteen years, and will be, I imagine, the longest of my works.²⁵¹

I have quoted this long passage because I cannot help thinking that Stevenson pointed with great accuracy to the fundamental flaw in the book, and because it illustrates extremely clearly how in a long composition the original inspiration may wake an older inspiration still, and come in the end to be a mere incubus upon its back, as this ancient inspiration stirs in its sleep, and rises, and at last carries all else sturdily before it. It was more than a year after this letter was written, before the book was finished in Honolulu. But in that time the novel had but grown stronger, the Poesque dénouement more bigoted in retaining its fantastic atmosphere, the fundamental contradiction more noticeable and painful. It is strange to reflect on the persistence of ideas, on that fantastic goblin refusing to be unseated from the shoulder of a tale which as it grew to maturity became only less and less fit to carry it.²⁵²

A number of passages in Stevenson’s Letters, in which he discusses the personages of his fictions, as well as his noticeable manner towards them, suggest and indeed demand a discussion of the nature of such imaginary characters.²⁵³ The problems they offer are by no means as simple as less conscious artists than Stevenson, and long tradition, make them appear. They are excellent examples of those problems which long familiarity has led us to believe non-existent. We are in the habit of talking about the characters of fiction precisely as if they were men and women, indeed as if they were men and women whom we know a little better than we know most of our acquaintances. Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Tom Jones, Willoughby:²⁵⁴ we can even come so far as to regard these imaginary creatures as standards or types to which we refer our friends in default of closer definition. Such a one, we say, is a Don Quixote: there is more than a touch of Tom Jones in such another … And yet Don Quixote and Tom Jones are not people, but are vividly present in our minds as we remember sentences of Cervantes and Fielding. There should not be any essential difference between a novel and a poem, as far as our definition of art in general will carry us, and, unless that is incorrect, a novel, like any other work of art, is an act of becoming conscious, performed by its author. But an illusion is produced that the author has left his own life aside, and is merely chronicling the lives of others. We are faced with the difficulty of reconciling this apparent contradiction.²⁵⁵

The first contribution to this reconciliation we may take from a passage in Stevenson’s letters, written without any such intention. Indeed the problem does not seem to have troubled him at all. It is a little story of Meredith and The Egoist.

A young friend of Mr Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. ‘This is too bad of you,’ he cried. ‘Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my dear fellow,’ said the author; ‘he is all of us.’²⁵⁶

That is to say that at least there was enough of him in Meredith to allow his author to learn the rest by separating the promise of him that was in himself from those other qualities which fortunately contradicted and smothered his existence.²⁵⁷ This development of an imaginary character out of oneself by the elimination of the elements in one’s nature which suppress its actual growth is at least analogous to the separation of a moment of life from the unconscious crowded flux of living. It is a choice of a mental attitude from among the many that would be possible in ordinary life, and the voluntary retention of that attitude – in a manner exactly analogous to the careful tuning of a work of art to the note sounded by the particular mood that dictates it. So far, we are on safe ground, and a character within a fiction is a work within a work, itself subject to the same limitations, and produced by the same methods as the larger work, in which it shares in a harmony to which it contributes, by which it is ruled. We can thus imagine that it may sometimes happen that the inner work, the character, may be better realised than the larger piece of consciousness in which it is a part. There are novels in which we feel that the part is greater than the whole,²⁵⁸ pictures in which a portrait seems to have swelled out of proportion, forced its way through the canvas and destroyed the perspective of the whole. And, indeed, one purpose of the foregoing paragraph of analysis is to enable us to state to ourselves how it is that in Catriona for example, David Balfour seems to be so very much more actual than the story in which he takes a part. More than once in Stevenson’s books a character seems to stand before us like a reveller the morning after a masquerade, an unimpeachable reality, with remnants of the story hanging about him, the rags and tatters of a fancy dress, pale in the morning light.

It will be worth our while to glance for a moment at the gradual development of character in the personages of narrative. In the beginning they had, properly speaking, no individuality at all.²⁵⁹ They took part in events, and were credited only with the simplest emotions, common to all men. They had a father’s love, a lover’s ardour and such courage as their author liked to believe was his own. A remarkable innovation was the first picture of a coward, but not so remarkable as the first picture of a coward which did not make him hateful. The events were at first everything, and the heroes and heroines who took part in them were merely what the listeners would like to think of themselves. The consciousness of life given by this primitive art was a projection of oneself into imaginary action and a general realisation of oneself in delightful, in admirable poses.²⁶⁰ The good knight is wholly virtuous, the bad simply his opposite, scarcely realised at all except as a thing to be cloven to the chine without remorse. The greater the force conquered, the greater the glory; and so the monster of Beowulf grows large, and Jack kills a giant instead of another Jack.²⁶¹ Neither the monster nor the giant are realised except as things horrid and very difficult and dangerous to kill.

Then, in the drama, the persons opposed are visible upon the stage; their actions need more explanation; they begin to speak and move like human beings. The mind wakes slowly to the existence of other minds, unlike itself, but no less vividly peculiar and alive, and these separate dramatic realisations are given their subordinate place in a larger, a circumspicuous realisation. Then, I think of Richardson,²⁶² with whom actions and personnages became invisible, and we are entirely concerned with thoughts and motives. With the romantics the eye comes into its own again, and throughout the nineteenth century, men play with first one mode and then another, and two or three at once, so that we forget that things have not always been so, and lose sight of the fact that to understand what they are doing we must separate these modes of consciousness, and remember that in a modern story the author may be intensifying his consciousness of life by visual realisation of its pictorial appearance, by the excitement of imagined events, and by the impersonation of characters, and that he may be doing all these three at once, and that the mastery of his work is shown by their complete coincidence, by the perfection with which he disguises from us the separateness of the planes on which he is working.²⁶³

I think it possible²⁶⁴ that Stevenson’s continual self-transplantation had a little to do with the lack of body in the more ambitious works of the middle period of his life. It is not easy to give deep roots in life to work produced at a time when one’s attention is continually arrested by the novel details of one’s personal circumstances, when the mind is in a subdued excitability and effervescence, conscious always of the impossibility of tranmitting a true impression of its novel surroundings to the friends in collaboration with whom it exists, in so far as it depends upon its past. The mind strikes deeper, and in whatsoever it is buried, when outer things need no transmission, but are common to its present and past life and to those of its intellectual associates.

Hazlitt, I think, said that he would be glad to spend his life in travel if he could have another life to live at home; for that those years that are spent in foreign parts do not coalesce with the rest of a man’s life; and abroad it is as if he had never lived at home; and at home his foreign adventures are a sort of mirage even to himself, and do not make a part of that rising mound of experience from which each man surveys his world. I may be misrepresenting Hazlitt, for I am writing in a little Russian town where there are no English books, and so I can not check my memory.²⁶⁵ But I am certainly not misrepresenting a thought that may have occurred to Stevenson, and must be present in the mind of any close student of his books.

It would be strange if this phenomenon of travel was without its effect on the writings of a man for whom his art was so identified with his life. Translators, and compilers, men of science, may be laborious when they will, and we shall not detect the influences of their travels in the changing texture of their impersonal styles. Collectors of the husks of travel may write in tents on the Andes or in blown out skins of oxen floating down the rivers of the East,²⁶⁶ and be as dull or as interesting, as if they wrote at home. But if a book is given a personal vitality, if it is the result of an intimate labour, if it depends upon its author as well as on the facts which it records, it is subject at once to these subtler influences. Borrow did not write Lavengro or The Romany Rye upon the road, or from notes, and the superiority of these books as literature over The Bible in Spain (written from notes and contemporary letters) or Wild Wales the direct result of a journey undertaken on purpose, is due to the fact that he had had time to re-collect himself, to refresh his personality until it could indeed translate those old adventures into the general rhythm of his experience.

When Stevenson was twenty three, and ‘ordered south’, he wrote in a letter from Avignon, where he stayed on the way:

I cannot write while I am travelling; c’est mon défaut; but so it is. I must have a certain feeling of being at home, and my head must have time to settle. The new images oppress me, and I have a fever of restlessness on me.’²⁶⁷

It was not until the novelty of the South Seas had worn away into habitude; not until Stevenson’s active existence had closely bound itself up with the place where he lived; not until observation had had time to slacken the intensity, the continuity of its business, that his work took deeper roots, and, always graceful, added strength to grace.²⁶⁸

Let us first consider Catriona and St Ives²⁶⁹ There is a curious lack of meat upon these shapely skeletons. David Balfour is always doing, always in exciting surroundings, but his escapes, his difficulties do not concern us as humane adventures, but rather as a series of coincidences, of circumstances which, ultimately, do not matter. When I put down Catriona I feel as if I have been listening to a light overture, sketching the motives of the ensuing drama, and that the curtain has been rung down before the beginning of the play.

St Ives is on the way to being a novel on the ancient plan of Le Sage,²⁷⁰ or of the engaging beggar stories of Spain, like Lazarillo de Tormes.²⁷¹ The character of St Ives is charming, but unchanged by his experiences. He is the same at beginning and end of the book; and the plot, the ingenious contrivance of the incredible cousin, pursuing, is merely a device for shifting scenery, for permitting an apparent logic to a succession of independent adventures, all of which are described with equal gusto and detail, no expansion in one place or contraction in another to give the book as a whole a notable shape or internal harmony. The book is a ribbon of adventure,²⁷² like the North Road; most of the adventures are unnecessary: all are delightful. The point is that all are separate. The episode of the duel among the French prisoners, the escape from the castle, the journey with the Scotch drovers, the adventure with the English smuggler of French prisoners, the claret coloured coach, the interrupted elopement to Gretna Green, the adventures of the drunken Swots of the University of Cramond, the balloon escape, the adventure of the Lady Nepean with its special story of Captain Colenso:²⁷³ these things are a succession of short stories, like the chapters in Gil Blas,²⁷⁴ told with something of the insistence in personal charm that makes the success of A Sentimental Journey.²⁷⁵ And Rowley²⁷⁶ is an admirable companion picture to Le Fevre;²⁷⁷ and St Ives has several sayings that make him no despicable fellow traveller with Sterne. When he remarks that ’some fire, I think, is needful’,²⁷⁸ to learn French, we rub our hands with pleasure. The book is full of perfect asides: nothing could be better than Rowley’s shy induction of his flageolet.²⁷⁹ The book would be entirely satisfactory, if only we could feel that Stevenson had not thought of it as a more serious affair. He seems to be hitting the bull’s eye at five hundred yards, but we have an uncomfortable conviction that he has set his sights for a thousand yards, and believes all the time he is firing on the longer range.²⁸⁰

And there are wasted touches: of St Ives’ French Revolution childhood, due probably to dictation, love of music, etc. Stevenson would probably have seen what he was missing, and would not have let such things go by in the taking of breath.²⁸¹ St Ives ‘is merely a story of adventure, rambling along; … but there, all novels are a heavy burthen while they are doing, and a sensible disappointment when they are done.’²⁸²

And then, after The Master of Ballantrae, seven years after Kidnapped, to which it was a sequel, came Catriona taking up David Balfour where he had been left, in the offices of the British Linen Company, and bringing him out with a bag of money, to prosecute a series of adventures, further to illustrate his character (which I cannot abide) and to fall in love with then marry the mother of the children for whom, as we learn with surprise in the last chapter, he is writing the story. Of this book, Stevenson wrote: ‘I shall never do a better book than Catriona, that is my high-water mark, and the trouble of production increases on me at a great rate – and mighty anxious about how I am to leave my family.’²⁸³ It occurs to me as I transcribe that sentence that Mr Pepys had a ghostly finger in the cooking of Stevenson’s epistolary style. But that is not our present subject.²⁸⁴

Let me try to discover on what Stevenson based the artwork of Catriona, and in how far his opinion is just. It is of course, not his high water mark, but then he could not foresee that with the increasing trouble of production, was to come that firm, jasper manner of the Ebb Tide and Weir, and with that manner a less limited demand from art. Catriona satisfied the Stevenson who believed that ‘the one excuse and breath of art’ was charm. It is full of charm, and the more charming because of the few grim passages, with Simon Fraser, for example, the few sordid pictures, such as James More’s, which show up ‘gray eyes’²⁸⁵ and Prestongrange’s daughters like flowers on gray velvet.²⁸⁶ It is subject to the same criticism as Kidnapped; things happen for the sake of the story; it is to be assessed like this beside the works of the great novelists; but as The Master of Ballantrae does not, it sustains its note; it all holds together, and leaves at the end a lasting memory of charm. And that was what Stevenson had asked from it.²⁸⁷

The writing of Weir of Hermiston followed hard upon St Ives, but is so much greater and so different an achievement as to demand a separate chapter.²⁸⁸ Between the two came the tale of St Ives, left unfinished for Hermiston’s sake, but best discussed in this place.

Nearer to life than any of his novels, his Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin is among the three or four best books he wrote. Considered only as a work of imagination, how admirable is its careful discontinuity of texture, the general setting of the family, with its set character sketches of Jenkins and Jacksons, then in a larger pattern the account of Jenkin himself, and finally, the small web again, in the account of the last days not only of Jenkin but the picturesque members of the previous generation, survived from the first chapter. Stevenson never wrote anything better than his picture of the Captain after the death of his wife. Yet the thing is not fiction; it is composed of far less malleable material. And I know of no biography which, without flatulent adulation, leaves so heroic an impression of its subject.

And for an understanding of Stevenson, a clear realisation of the nature of his loss of this older, uncouth, childish, heroic, enthusiastic, good man is essential. After reading it, passage after passage of Stevenson’s moral essays seem to have the shadow of Jenkin behind them, the cheerful, honest, optimist who was with difficulty persuaded that there was one bad man, and searched his experience in vain for an instance of malice. More than Henley, or R. A. M. Stevenson, or Symonds, or Mr Gosse, this Edinburgh professor carved of virgin rock, smiling like a child and just as serious, influenced Stevenson, and it is pleasant to think that this book, so vigorous, so clear, so heartening, remains to transmit that influence to others.

I think few books have been so curiously underestimated in comparison with the other works of their writer than Stevenson’s In the South Seas.²⁸⁹ Sir Sidney Colvin in his edition of the Letters tells us that ‘there is a certain many-voyaged master-mariner as well as master-writer – no less a person than Mr Joseph Conrad – who … prefers In the South Seas to Treasure Island’, but Mr Conrad²⁹⁰ must be almost alone.²⁹¹ Yet there are few books of travel so vivid, so sympathetic with the people visited, so rich in a sense of the strange, so precise in its expression of that strangeness. I believe that if it had been written by any other writer than Stevenson it would have earned him an honourable remembrance: I believe the reason of its neglect and the disparagement of silence it has suffered is that it bears Stevenson’s name on the title-page, and that persons reading that name, conversant with Stevenson’s other works, expect a different book. Their palates are offended, as when one drinks tea, expecting coffee; and they do not forgive the offence.²⁹²

The task that Stevenson attempted was sufficiently difficult to make admirable even a partial success. He wished to describe the life and setting of the inhabitants of several groups of small islands in the Pacific Ocean some two thousand miles from the coasts of New Zealand. The editor of a local paper, The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, had suggested that the folklore of the Pacific Islands lacked ‘a link of homogeneous interest to connect them with the mentation and sympathy of the civilised reader.’ ‘That,’ said Stevenson,

was almost my first discovery after I began to write of the South Seas, and to my chagrin I found my matter would not work up even into readable travels (from the public’s point of view). It seems to me that you have put the difficulty of into a line – everything in the Pacific must be first translated into terms of civilization before being written.²⁹³

Now all descriptive writing is a translation for the reader of what is unknown to him into terms of what is known, and the greater the discrepancy between known and unknown the greater is the writer’s difficulty. The great travel books are written by Europeans, and enable other Europeans to follow the adventures of people not unlike themselves in strange surroundings. Stevenson’s object was far less easy to attain. He eliminated, or almost eliminated, the common ground of race, and tried to make Europeans follow with interest the fortunes of strange people in strange surroundings. And apart from the fact that the mere realisation was difficult, with so small a leaven of the known in the mass of the unknown, he has also to contend with the fact that man is a self-centred animal and that his interest in the fortunes of others may be mapped in a series of circles concentric with himself. In the outer circles his free interest to be had for the asking is very small, and at last, in the outermost disappears altogether. Most of those who know of In the South Seas, ask themselves some such question as ‘Am I the keeper of my fifteen cousins twenty times removed,’ and buy Treasure Island instead.

Moreover, the book was made still more difficult by the very circumstances that made possible its success. Stevenson was so near what he described, it made so powerful an impression upon him, that he was in danger of forgetting how far from it were his readers, and how averse they were likely to be from a repetition of that impression on themselves. While he wrote, the axes of his black boys were clearing the foundations of the house in which he was to live among them. And he had had scarcely time for learning ‘to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea.’²⁹⁴

In November 1890, he was busied in clearing ground in the forest about his house, and wrote this to Sir Sidney Colvin:

My long, silent contests in the forest have had a strange effect on me. The unconcealed vitality of these vegetables, their exuberant number and strength, the attempts – I can use no other word – of lianas to enwrap and capture the intruder, the awful silence, the knowledge that all my efforts are only like the performance of an actor, the thing of a moment, and the wood will silently and swiftly heal them up with fresh effervescence; the cunning sense of the tuitui, suffering itself to be touched with wind-swayed grasses and not minding – but let the grass be moved by a man, and it shuts up; the whole silent battle, murder, and slow death of the contending forest; weigh upon the imagination. My poem ‘The Woodman’ stands; but I have taken refuge in a new story, which just shot through me like a bullet in one of my moments of awe, alone in that tragic jungle.²⁹⁵

In such circumstances, under such emotions, was conceived ‘The Beach of Falesá’, which afterwards formed the main part of Island Nights’ Entertainments:²⁹⁶ Out of the forest itself came that strange violent tale of Uma and the trader, and the conjuror’s magic of the sinister Case.²⁹⁷ He began the story, left it, took it up months later: ‘Oh it’s so good, ‘The High Woods’’ (the story was first called ‘The High Woods of Ulufanua’) ‘but the story is craziness, that’s the trouble’, and again, on reading through the chapter and a bit that had been written, he found it ‘so wilful, so steep, so silly – it’s a hallucination I have outlived, and yet I never did a better piece of work, horrid, and pleasing, and extraordinarily true; it’s sixteen pages of the South Seas; their essence.’²⁹⁸ Three days later ‘the yarn is cured.’ He had got rid of some supernatural trick which had originally been part of it, and was surprised at not having done so before. So do stories develop. Three weeks after that it had been written and re-written and he felt as if he never wanted to write ‘any more again for ever’. He wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin: ‘You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.’²⁹⁹

Speaking of these stories, he said: ‘They all have a queer realism, even the most extravagant, even the ‘Isle of Voices’; the manners are exact.’³⁰⁰ The stories were not meant, however, to go into a volume together. ‘The Bottle Imp’ was to have been ‘the centre-piece of a volume of Märchen which I was slowly to elaborate.’³⁰¹

Of the Island Nights’ Entertainments, only two pretend to have been written for an island audience: ‘The Brother Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’. They are a kind of artificial folklore. The Fables we have already discussed, showed Stevenson’s power of coloured allegories. These are not allegories, nor even very moral. They are comparable only with folktales, which rest on elementary principles of psychology – what all men wish, in houses and wives and clothes and musical instruments, and the danger of dealing with the supernatural – they are set in the precious key of island lore.

They should be compared with folklore noted in the South Seas. The humane element has been, perhaps, a little elaborated; but not offensively, and the touches of the eastern civilisation in the missionary and the mate in ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the admirable picture of the drunken boatmen who, free from fear and scruples, rolls off on the way to hell with the bottle imp under his arm, and a bottle of rum bubbling at his mouth, are conceived from the Island point of view.³⁰² ‘The Bottle Imp’ curiously is one of Stevenson’s most popular tales: I have even met it translated into Russian. It was the first tale to be translated into Samoan.

Of the novels written in collaboration with Mr Lloyd Osbourne the first, The Wrong Box, is nothing but ‘a little judicious levity’ as Michael Finsbury said, by authors of whom one was ‘old enough to be ashamed of himself and the other young enough to learn better.’³⁰³ The tale was written first on the typewriter of Mr Osbourne, and, to Stevenson’s surprise, when he remembered his own serious and moralising youth, was highly entertaining. Stevenson suggested, removed, and burnished. As he noticed in criticism of his stepson, it would not have been written except for the inspiration of the New Arabian Nights, and it is indeed an excellent example of the many half fantastic, half romantic, earnest, farcical tales which followed in the wake of that gay-coloured caravan across the sandy desert of contemporary popular fiction.

The other two, The Wrecker and The Ebb-tide, more intimately involved Stevenson’s interest and attention, as well as his kindness as a toucher up of youthful masterpieces.³⁰⁴ His interest in each case was technical, in The Wrecker a question of plot, in The Ebb-tide an experiment in style.

The idea of The Wrecker was given to its author by a conversation on ship-board, while cruising in the South Seas in The Equator; a conversation about wrecks, and the piling up of unseaworthy ships with a view to making money out of underwriters.

Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put together. But the question of treatment was as usual more obscure. We had long been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed the cause might lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale were gradually approached, some of the characters introduced (as it were) beforehand, and the book started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life … After we had invented at some expense of time this method of approaching and fortifying our police novel, it occurred to us it had been invented previously by someone else, and was in fact – however painfully different the results may seem – the method of Charles Dickens in his later work.³⁰⁵

It is this that makes The Wrecker seem less like one book, whether novel of manners or plain police tale, than a compendium of the scenarios of several, the adventures of Loudon Dodd in Paris, of Dodd and Pinkerton in New York, of The Currency Lass, as of Norris Carthew, all striking different notes, all promising more than they quite fulfil, all interesting and pleasant, sufficiently so to make the actual mystery almost an annoying encroachment upon our entertainment. It is as if we are asked to solve a chess problem in the progress of the various courses of an eccentrically designed but excellent meal.

In The Ebb Tide³⁰⁶ Stevenson deliberately adopted another manner than the easy, continuous narrative of The Wrecker, or the first-personal impressions of David Balfour or Treasure Island. It is a dry, economical book. Scenes carefully chosen are worked out in full detail, and burnished, and set side by side. The purpose of the book is never lost sight of: it is the portrait of Attwater with his strange combination of cruelty, Cambridge, and religion on an uncharted island in the Southern Seas.³⁰⁷ And though, for credibility, precisely half the book is spent on preparing the three adventurers for their subsequent actions when brought into contact with that extraordinary figure, when we look back it is as if we were observing the calm, unhurried preparation of three ocean waves for their final inevitable shattering upon an immovable rock. So perfect is the design of the book in its ultimate form that it is hard to believe that at first in Stevenson’s mind the two parts of it stood out as separate stories, the one (Attwater) a ‘kind of Monte Cristo’, the other ‘The Beachcombers’, ‘more sentimental’.³⁰⁸ It is possible to trace the whole history of the tale, from the combination of these two imagined tales into ‘a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters,’ and then when a quarter written, ‘a great and grisly tale’.³⁰⁹ Then a clearer vision of what was to be is set down in a letter to Charles Baxter, telling him to sell the serial rights of ‘The Schooner Farallone’, and continuing:

I should say this is the butt end of what was once ‘The Pearl Fisher’. There is a peculiarity about this tale in its new form: it ends with the conversion! We have been tempted rather to call it The Schooner Farallone: a tract by RLS and LO. It would make a boss tract; the three main characters – and there are only four – are barats, insurance frauds, thieves and would be murderers, so the company’s good. Devil a woman is there, by good luck; so it’s ‘pure’. ’Tis a most – what’s the expression? – unconventional work.³¹⁰

Another letter, of about the same date, in which we get another glimpse of the Ebb Tide‘s evolution: ‘During the last week the amanuensis was otherwise engaged, whereupon I took up, pitched into, and about one half demolished another tale, once intended to be called ‘The Pearl Fisher’, but now razeed and called ‘The Schooner Farralone.’³¹¹ It was then (February 1893) promising to be finished in a month, but on the 25th April he wrote to Sidney Colvin:

We call it The Ebb Tide: A Trio and Quartette; but that secondary name you may strike out if it seems dull to you. The book, however, falls in two halves, when the fourth character appears. I am on p. 82 if you want to know, and expect to finish on I suppose 110 or so; but it goes slowly, as you may judge from the fact that this three weeks past, I have only struggled from p. 58 to p. 82: twenty-four pages, et encore sure to be rewritten, in twenty-one days …³¹²

… I can’t think what to say about the tale, but it seems to me to go off with a considerable bang; in fact, to be an extraordinary work: but whether popular! Attwater is a no end of a courageous attempt, I think you will admit; how far successful is another affair. If my island ain’t a thing of beauty, I’ll be damned. Please observe Wiseman and Wishart; for incidental grimness, they strike me as in it. Also, kindly observe the Captain and Adar; I think that knocks spots. In short, as you see, I’m a trifle vainglorious. But O, it has been such a grind! The devil himself would allow a man to brag a little after such a crucifixion! And indeed I’m only bragging for a change before I return to the darned thing lying waiting for me on p. 88, where I last broke down. I break down at every paragraph, I may observe; and lie here and sweat, till I can get one sentence wrung out after another. Strange doom; after having worked so easily for so long!³¹³

I have made 11 pages in nine livelong days. Well! up a high hill he heaved a huge round stone. But this Flaubert business must be resisted in the premises.³¹⁴

And here I am back again on p. 85! the last chapter demanding an entire revision, which accordingly it is to get. And where my mail is to come in, God knows! This forced, violent, alembicated style is most abhorrent to me; it can’t be helped; the note was struck years ago on the Janet Nicoll, and has to be maintained somehow; and I can only hope the intrinsic horror and pathos, and a kind of fierce glow of colour there is to it, and the surely remarkable wealth of striking incident, may guide our little shallop into port.³¹⁵

I am discontented with The Ebb Tide, naturally; there seems such a veil of words over it; and I like more and more naked writing; and yet sometimes one has a longing for full colour and there comes the veil again.³¹⁶

Still grinding at Chap. XI. I began many days ago on p. 93, and am still on p. 93, which is exhilarating, but the thing takes shape all the same and should make a pretty lively chapter for an end of it. For XII is only a footnote ad explicandum.³¹⁷

Back on p. 93. I was on 100 yesterday, but read it over and condemned it … 10am. I have worked up again to 97, but how … This is Flaubert outdone.³¹⁸

What kills me is the frame of mind of one of the characters; I cannot get it through. Of course that does not interfere with my total inability to write; so that yesterday I was a living half-hour upon a single clause and have a gallery of variants that would surprise you.

Well, it’s done. Those tragic 16 pp. are at last finished, and I have put away thirty-two pages of chips, and have spent thirteen days about as nearly in Hell as a man could expect to live through. It’s done, and of course it ain’t worth while, and who cares? There it is, and about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as hateful.³¹⁹

And even after that, he said: ‘I ought to rewrite the end of this bluidy Ebb Tide: well, I can’t. C’est plus fort que moi; it has to go the way it is, and be jowned to it.’³²⁰ He could not forgive it, heaped epithets of abuse on it and called it ‘the excruciating Ebb Tide’, the ‘ever-to-be-execrated Ebb Tide’, or ‘Stevenson’s Blooming Error.³²¹

I wonder how many of Stevenson’s readers have detected the source of all this trouble – which Stevenson himself sets his finger upon:

The difficulty of according the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in the third person) is extreme. That is one reason out of half a dozen why I so often prefer the first. It is much in my mind just now, because of my last work, just off the stocks three days ago, The Ebb Tide: a dreadful, grimy business in the third person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a narrative style pitched about (in phrase) ‘four notes higher’ than it should have been, has sown my head with grey hairs; or I believe so – if my head escaped, my heart has them.³²²

I retired with The Ebb Tide and read it all before I slept. I did not dream it was near as good; I am afraid I think it excellent. A little indecision about Attwater, not much. It gives me great hope, as I see I can work in that constipated, mosaic manner, which is what I have to do just now with Weir of Hermiston.³²³

If we compare Stevenson’s attitude with Flaubert’s, allowing for the distinctive ‘charm’ which each writer possessed, we find that the ‘constipated mosaic’ of Weir is an affirmation of Flaubert’s method; while The Ebb Tide, in the same category of accomplishment, is quite different.³²⁴

Weir … [and Ransome’s trailing dots suggest that there is more to come. But this is the only word on the page. Then the manuscript lets the reader down, for there are no passages on Weir of Hermiston at all within the parcel of quarto sheets; and it is only from Ransome’s hints along the way that we know he considered Weir above all to be Stevenson’s masterpiece. It is clear that he had planned to write a substantial account of this compelling unfinished novel, and it is ironical that the missing section of draft should be about an incomplete book: Stevenson had died with his pen poised over a sentence about two-thirds of his way through. There is no doubt that Ransome knew what he wanted to say about what might have been Stevenson’s masterpiece, and it is likely that he did set his opinion down, perhaps during that journey to Russia and his time there which began the day after this manuscript was dated, or perhaps in the autumn of 1914, while he was in the north, waiting to return to Russia. Perhaps the Great Russian Bear swallowed the pages down; perhaps they were lost in the fire that destroyed many of his personal papers a few years later in Riga. Their fate is an unsolved mystery.

Ransome’s conclusion is also incomplete. It would evidently have contained a summary account of the personality of Stevenson as a writer, as distinct from the man. We could have expected an account of the part played in his development as a writer by Mrs Stevenson as ‘the Stormy Petrel’,

Ever perilous
And precious, like an ember from the fire
Or gem from a volcano …,³²⁵

and by her children, and perhaps an assessment of how Stevenson came to achieve his iconic status and world-wide readership: at the time of his death he was perhaps the most popular writer in the English-speaking world.

The surviving fragments of the conclusion nevertheless relate to matters that interested Ransome greatly (he had already pursued them in relation to Wilde): Stevenson’s conversation, his writing viewed as ‘executant musicianship’, his delight in being the ‘amateur’, his versatility, his meticulous attention to style, his artificiality and his realism, and finally, his morality. On these matters, then, Ransome now gives us his last word.]

Conclusion

Stevenson’s conversation had in it more of the argumentative than, for example, Wilde’s. Instead of the aesthetic movement as a nursery it had the Edinburgh Speculative Society. With his cousin or Sir Walter Simpson,³²⁶ he talked for three months at Fontainebleau, and the subject on which they conversed was limited to theology and love. The existence or non-existence of a personal God, the continuance of life after death or sudden extinction, the casuistry of right behaviour in love, illustrated no doubt with distant examples and immediate experience; the character of the conversation they suggest is a combination between post-Darwinian argument between Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and speeches in a court of love between such counsel as Rabelais and Abélard,³²⁷ Most of Stevenson’s friends were good talkers as well as good listeners, and there was probably a wholesome public feeling against unbridled monologue. There was:³²⁸

one whom I shall call Spring-Heel’d Jack. I say so, because I never knew anyone who mingled so largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not what is more remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell – ‘As fast as a musician scatters sounds / Out of an instrument’ – the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination.

A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly’s manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol’d, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel’d Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, both are loud, copious intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of contradiction.

Mr Gosse after insisting on the gravity of Stevenson particularly remarks: ‘I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did.’³²⁹ This kind of humour is more a laughable manner of expression than any series of separate jests.

Stevenson³³⁰ was not a constructive thinker: he perceived, he felt, but was better at illustration than at argument. And so, instead of a treatise on technique, he left only the record of a few imperfectly understood observations beside a mass of brilliant technical feats. Except in a very few of his works, Stevenson is nearer being an executant musician than a composer. He does not so much invent as re-create and endow with his own charming and marked personality the harmonies and discords created by others. He has left us Stevenson’s rendering of Sterne, Stevenson’s Ballantyne, a Stevenson Hazlitt, a Stevenson Hawthorne, and even a Stevenson Scott; but as we listen to him in all these moods we think less of Sterne, Ballan-tyne, Hazlitt, Hawthorne or Scott, than of ‘the flashing eye, the floating hair’,³³¹ the delicate fingers, the persuasive, graceful gesture of the performer immediately before us.

Stevenson was one of the most versatile of miscellaneous writers but he never suffered from that melancholy humour of the versatile, in which they wonder what they should be doing, and, frightened at their own inconsistencies, look feverishly for a particular vocation. Plans for a life of Wellington in no way interrupted the joyous progress of the storyteller, and the author of the Child’s Garden of Verses dreamed, with no infidelity to any of his softer loves, of the eventual publication of a ‘small arid book on the Art of Literature’.³³² Oh happy man who could live for days in a story ‘and only come out of it to play patience’ and could play the sober critic without wishing to throw the storyteller’s cloak into the lumber room and to forget he ever wore other clothes than the pedagogic drab. He never complained that a man cannot do two things at once. He had seldom fewer than half a dozen on the stocks at once.³³³

There was just this much of the amateur in Stevenson: in spite of his industry, his craftsmanship, he was often preoccupied with the little distinction, the small glamour that is attributed to authorship by those who do not write. He was pleased to be called Tusitala,³³⁴ pleased to put his friends into his books (which an author’s acquaintances almost invariably imagine and perhaps hope is the object of his intercourse with them), hugged himself over confessions of his early work, and discussions of method not between himself and other artists, but between himself and men and women who admired him and his books. This is not in the least like the philosophy of literature to be found in Flaubert’s correspondence. Charmingly, gracefully written, it has now and again a memory of the egotistic parson describing in a parish magazine the genesis of his final sermon. His method of work may be remembered here: ’Some days,’ writes Mrs Strong,

we have worked from eight o’clock till four, and that is not counting the hours Louis writes and makes notes in the early morning by lamplight. He dictates with great correctness, and when particularly interested unconsciously acts the part of his characters. When he came to the description of the supper Anne has with Flora and Ronald, he bowed as he dictated the hero’s speeches and twirled his moustache. When he describes the interview between the old lady and the driver, he spoke in a high voice for the one, and a deep growl for the other, and all in broad Scotch even to ‘cuma’ (comma).³³⁵

Mrs Strong also tells how Stevenson once looked in a looking glass to describe a particular expression of ‘The Master’s’ and was astonished to find only his own reflection instead of that of his hero. ‘Stevenson,’ Wilde wrote in a letter, ‘merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging.’³³⁶

Yet Stevenson considered himself a realist.³³⁷ He wrote to Low after receiving his drawings for Keats:

The sight of your pictures has once more awakened me to my right mind; something may come of it; yet one more bold push to get free of this prisonyard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries. I do not know, I have a feeling in my bones, a sentiment which may take on the forms of imagination, or may not. If it does, I shall owe it to you; and the thing will thus descend from Keats even if on the wrong side of the blanket. If it can be done in prose – that is the puzzle.³³⁸

Long afterwards Low reminded him of this. He replied: ‘Well, as you see, nothing came of it. The Master of Ballantrae is not precisely inspired by Keats … No, it is not in me, I can do the grim, I can do the Jekyll and Hyde sort of thing, but the trouble with me is that I am at bottom a realist,’ and replying to a very sound of objection of Mr Low’s, he settled it: ‘All that is true enough, but it is the local conditions, the things of the moment and hour that strike the hardest. If it was not for Zola and his gang, who have spoiled the game, I should be a rank realist.’³³⁹ In a letter, 1892, to Sir Sidney Colvin not included in the four red volumes,³⁴⁰ he says ‘I have in nearly all my works been trying one racket: to get out the facts of life as clean and naked and sharp as I could manage it,’ and in the same letter he says that in a love story ‘you can’t tell any of the facts, and the only chance is to paint an atmosphere.’³⁴¹

Stevenson asks: what is realism? He has spoken of the monk who listened to the song of a bird, and found that fifty years had passed in a bar or two of music. ‘All life that is not merely mechanical,’ says Stevenson, ‘is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.’ Wherefore he realises it is to him a puzzling, a seemingly irrelevant business. In the pages of the realist, ‘to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.’³⁴² And later he says: ‘The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.’³⁴³

Stevenson’s own standard of style³⁴³ was of so exacting a nature, so much more in consonance with Gallic requirements, than with those ordinarily enforced in our own tongue, that he never seriously contemplated writing in French. Often enough, however, he would use French terms, or note their exactness of definition approvingly, especially in the rich vocabulary pertaining to art or literature, and in like manner, more than once, when discussing some of his many projects for stories or essays – of which he had an inexhaustible fund – he would break off with ‘quite impossible in English. I wish that I could write it in French.’³⁴⁴

Marcel Schwob, the subtle author of Mimes, and Le Croisade des Enfants, the biographer of Villon, who died with his great work unwritten,³⁴⁵ exchanged a few letters with Stevenson. He surprised Stevenson very much by wishing to translate The Black Arrow and by admiring Stevenson’s women. The astonished author replied ‘Vous ne détestez pas alors mes bonnes femmes? Moi, je les déteste,’³⁴⁶ and perhaps this reply is the source from which so many have drawn their statement that Stevenson could do nothing with female characters. But that is not the question here. We are here concerned with Schwob’s short, luminous essay, reprinted in Spicilège,³⁴⁷ and his by no means negligible contribution to an understanding of Stevenson’s method. He was perhaps the first to point out how much Stevenson accomplished by wise silences. ‘Nous ne savons pas exactement …’³⁴⁸ ‘We do not know exactly what Billy Bones had done. Two or three of Silver’s touches³⁴⁹ suffice to inspire us with the burning regret that we are for ever ignorant of the life of Captain Flint and his companions of fortune …’ ‘Ce qu’il ne nous dit pas de la vie d’Allan Breck, de Secundra Dass, d’Ollala, d’Attwater, nous attire plus que ce qu’il nous en dit.’³⁵⁰

He compared Stevenson’s method of realising the unreal with that of Defoe. He points out that Stevenson’s realism is quite unreal, and gives many examples to show that ‘Stevenson n’a jamais regardé les choses qu’avec les yeux de son imagination’,³⁵¹ and finds in these examples not errors, but images stronger than real images, indeed ‘la quintessence de la réalité.’³⁵² Finally he insists that Stevenson’s stories began, for Stevenson, with pictures, a door, a closed house, a young man with cream tarts, which, by the way, are never explained. He points out that in some of Stevenson’s stories the tale is not as good as the picture, but remains a kind of commentary, though, ‘dans les romans, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Master of Ballantrae, etc., le récit est incontestablement très supérieur à l’image, qui cependant a été son point de départ.’³⁵³

Stevenson won his general recognition in his lifetime in two ways, as the writer of a boy’s book, and as the author of a moral allegory which reverberated in a thousand pulpits.³⁵⁴ His stories all, except a very few, have a showman interested keenly in morality, and his moralisings are the more acceptable from the mouth of such a professed adventurer and romantic as himself. It would have been tedious to comment in every chapter on the morality behind the books discussed, because it did not noticeably vary as he grew older. But to neglect it altogether would be to neglect one of the more or less constant and important factors in his personality. Stevenson in everything, everywhere, was concerned to an unusual extent, for a writer not vowed to a church or to reform, with morals. He was never better pleased than to give advice, and he never felt better employed than when he was giving advice to himself.

Even morals took on for him a flavour of the picturesque. He saw them, for example, in brown leather, with emblems, if I may put it so. There was something of an altogether non-moral gusto in his moralising.³⁵⁵ At twenty-four, he planned a book of ‘Essays on the Enjoyment of the World’, ‘with a motto in italics on the title page – you know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice?’³⁵⁶ It is perhaps just this mundane pleasure that prevents us from finding intolerable the spectacle of the lively, dissolute young advocate, whose exploits in the Lothian Road, and Portobello³⁵⁷ way, were fresh in the minds of his associates, setting up shop as a lay preacher. That, and an honest attitude towards the young advocate, which lay preachers do not commonly emulate. ‘One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy – if I may.’? This quotation is taken from ‘A Christmas Sermon’ written later in life; but may better show that its sentiment was Stevenson’s from the beginning.

And, now, let us consider not piecemeal but in a lump, the essentials of his preaching. It is a preaching, in the first place, of acceptance, and in the second of revolt. Stevenson in the pulpit points with a scornful finger at the man who is bored, and with a finger fiercely denunciatory at the moralist of convention. He wishes to share his pleasant exultation in the world, to silence those who make that exultation difficult. On the plainer levels he only says ‘Let all be happy together’, and points out a few of the pitfalls that may prevent us. On the higher slopes he outlines a very practicable view of the whole duty of man, which is in notable discord with the teachings, workday and Sunday put together, of the ordinary format.

Lay Morals perhaps contains the most striking examples of his ‘Anti-Grundyism’. An unfinished treatise on ethics, its main purpose was a comparison between the ideals³⁵⁸ [of Mrs Grundy, a voice of public opinion, who like many people has ‘an easy view of following at each other’s tails’ to church, and of one’s own conscience, a tough task-master.]

What Stevenson actually does is to transform the technical morality of the scrupulous artist into terms of life’s affairs. ‘What is right,’ he says, ‘is that for which a man’s central self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed design of righteousness.’³⁵⁹ The best comment on this will be a passage from Poe’s essay on Hawthorne’s short stories:

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but, having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be worked out, he then invents such incidents – he then contrives such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of the effect, he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed.³⁶⁰

‘The idea of the tale, unblemished because undisturbed.’ Every detail that offers itself, is retained or rejected, regardless of its private beauty, with a single eye to its compatibility or incompatibility with the whole.³⁶¹ It is precisely this that Stevenson applies to life. Wilde spoke of a man’s life as of a work of art, with perhaps too much thought of its significant, spectacular effects. Stevenson has the same idea, only, for him the ‘idea of the tale’ is a ‘fixed design of righteousness’, or, perhaps, and if so, how much more true, ‘the central impulse and direction of a man’s nature.’³⁶²

Lay Morals, that unfinished treatise on ethics is, so far as Stevenson took it, a comparison between the ideals of Christ and those of public opinion. Its motive is an impatience with the people who believe that they can serve God and Mammon, and yet profess themselves Christians. In an ingenious passage he points out that these people are not of Christ’s mind, but of a mind with Benjamin Franklin.³⁶³ The essay proceeds with a very noble definition of the Bohemian. ‘The man I mean lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian. And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his shilling with a friend …’ and then the opposing indictment: ‘But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his level in society, falls out of society altogether.’³⁶⁴ Here is the force of Stevenson’s argument. We are not Christian; we substitute for the inner personal virtue an outward and public conformity. We have dethroned Christ, though we continue to praise in his name the deity we have set in his place, and that deity is no other than Mrs Grundy.

It is almost unnecessary to remark on the part played by his Scottish blood and environment in determining Stevenson’s attitude as a moralist. To say that moralising was hereditary in his family is to say no more than that his family was Scottish. I do however think it worth while to take a story from his memoirs to illustrate the family fashion in this regard. The woman was pre-eminently pious, he has said, the man in comparison worldly and active. His grandmother gathered the godly about her; his grandfather followed her from an admiring distance, as one walking beneath an angel. Yet there is one sally of his recorded which is certainly indicative of Stevenson’s personal attitude. ‘One of her (the grandmother’s) confidants had once a narrow escape;’

an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an outside stair in a street of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been passing underneath with his bread upon his head. ‘I would like to know what kind of providence the baker thought it!’ cried my grandfather.’³⁶⁵

Stevenson never allowed his grandfather’s critical and circumspicuous instinct to sleep during his own sermons. He was always mindful of the feelings of the baker under the impinging heavy weight of godliness, and he never allowed his own sense of proportion to be distorted by righteousness over-much. Mrs Strong asked him of The Merry Men: ‘In these stories, do you preach a moral?’ ‘Oh, not mine,’ he said. ‘What I want to give, what I try for, is God’s moral!’³⁶⁵And much of Stevenson’s most earnest moralising is that of the indignant baker who had suffered from the fall upon him of too much godliness as he trod his profane and airy way. He moralises as a Scotchman. He moralises against ‘morality’ because he has been a Scottish child.

Mrs Stevenson in her preface to the Prayers which her husband wrote for family use at Vailima says that with him ‘prayer, the direct appeal, was a necessity. When he was happy he felt impelled to offer thanks for that undiscovered joy; when in sorrow, or pain, to call for strength to bear what must be borne.’ Those sentences, so precise in meaning, help as few other comments on Stevenson do help, in mapping his private intellectual position. I find that position extremely interesting.³⁶⁶ The existence or non-existence of God would not alter it. Stevenson needed to pray, needed to praise, for his own sake, not for any imagined pleasure given to the deity.

1 Ransome’s check-list for this section reads “Stevenson. Techniques of Literature. Technical Questions. Characters in Novel; how far dictated by the book: how far contributed as elements of the game: Schiller’s play theory fits perfectly Stevenson’s method. He Stevenson separates the imagining of the book from the writing of it. Find a psychological statement of that too Noyes. Is the first art at all: or is it merely a plan, which gains in enjoy thereon from an assumed perfection in the as yet unattempted execution of the work of art? His general ideas on art. Schiller. His own development in knowledge. Points. Realism: the laws of the game. Realism qua danger. Observation & euphony. Styles. The offset of every word into technique. Omission & suppression.”

2 An example of another plan can be found within the ‘Stevenson exercisebook’, transcribed and reproduced in appendix A.1.iii. Ransome always began with careful preliminary note-taking and detailed planning. Then he wrote up sections in whatever order seemed congenial.

3 An apt series of metaphors for Stevenson’s art. (Concurrently with this book, Ransome was planning another, on roads and walking, but only one or two separate essays were written.)

4 “Hyères. Oct[ober] 23, 1883. Letters, II, 151. To W. H. Low.” A telling metaphor for the supreme classical dramatist’s heroic art, after reference to three artists supreme in their own fields. Stevenson and Ransome would agree about the power of the relatively recently discovered Mastodon to create awe: it had done so in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), a book that later fed the imaginations of Ransome’s characters Dorothea and Titty. ‘The Mastodon’ becomes a character in his Secret Water (1939).

5 A “series of burlesque sonnets he had written at Davos” in 1881 commemorating Peter Brash, who had kept a tavern in Edinburgh when Stevenson was a student.

6 “Stevenson. His art: Aetat. 33. To W. E. Henley, Hyères, 1883, June.” [Letters, II, 124.] This sequence of quotations may imply that Ransome concurs with the traditional notion that every true artist aspires to be possessed by godlike creative power. The mention of God, and a quotation from the Eucharistic Preface ‘Lift up your hearts’ (sursum corda) occurs in a letter to a man considered by some to be ‘devilish’ and the prototype for the morally ambiguous Long John Silver; it is fascinating that Ransome enjoyed this ‘heightened pitch’ of thought and chose to quote this in full to enrich his book.

7 An eight-chapter novella, in The Merry Men and of Other Tales and Fables (1887).

8 Ransome here prefers the word ‘ordinary’ to ‘real’ which he deleted. ‘Real life’ is a key concept for the novels of his greatness, and includes the life of the imagination – a distinction which Ransome is already making clear.

9 A primitive form of candle made from steeping the pith of a rush in tallow. In Edwardian England this would already have been an archaic and seldom-met form of cottage-lighting; a deliberately romantic image of flickering weakness. Just such an amount of light does Ransome unassumingly imagine he will cast on the subject.

11 “Letters, II, 147.” The Iliad is Homer’s verse epic. Ironically, Ransome himself has not yet thoroughly ‘learnt to omit’, as his occasionally winding and florid sentences in this work demonstrate. He was soon forced to learn this art by becoming a newspaper correspondent in Russia. His skill with telegrams is most famously demonstrated in Swallows and Amazons (1930), ‘Better drowned than duffers if not duffers won’t drown’.

12 “Letters, II, 147. 1883, to R. A. M. S.” (Stevenson here quotes Shakespeare’s Macbeth and ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ by S. T. Coleridge.) “Stevenson. Technique. of Storytelling. [the quotation follows] ‘I would rise from the dead to preach.’ Refer to remarks on techniques of storytelling in letter to Archer, [Letters,] III, 42.”

14 More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Vandergrift Stevenson, ‘Epilogue of the Cigar Divan’. The composition of this page can be precisely dated from Ransome’s diary to 7 January 1914.

15 ‘Coleoptera’ is an order of sheath-winged insects, mostly beetles. As a boy Ransome had been a keen beetle-hunter, and in later life named his own sailing dinghy ‘Coch-y-bondhu’ after a Welsh beetle, also the name of a trout-fly, and named its fictional counterpart in The Picts and The Martyrs (1943) after an ancient Egyptian beetle, ‘Scarab’.

16 The Ebb Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1894), by Robert Louis Stevenson in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne (1894).

21 Stevenson’s lively account of a canoeing holiday in France (1878), in which he paddled the Arethusa, and his friend the Cigarette.

23 The ‘sentimental journey’ genre of travel writing became very popular in the eighteenth century, imitating Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick (1768). Stevenson’s Inland Voyage and Travels were very consciously part of this tradition.

25 Here he intended to consider Stevenson on “Thoreau. Turajini. Pavilion. The story of a lie – ? in the ship. Planning Prince Otto,” but his next runningheading is “Essays”. Ransome put a colon after ‘circumstances’, but did not complete his review.

26 The dedication takes the form of a letter to Sidney Colvin. The letter continues: ‘Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours, R. L. S.’

27 “Letters, II, 177.” ‘Mr Gosse’: later Sir Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), literary critic, art critic, and author of the autobiographical Father and Son (1907) and The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), a work that held resonance both for Stevenson and Ransome.

28 The rustic actor in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i., ‘Let me play the lion too. I will roar … but I will aggravate my voice so I will roar you as gently as any sucking-dove; I will roar you as ’twere any nightingale.’

29 An allusion to John Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, ‘… or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild’.

30 The playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith is recorded by Boswell as having said to Dr Johnson, ‘If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.’

31 Alphonse Daudet, Le Petit Chose (1868); the ‘little thing’ of the title refers to paternal weakness.

32 Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (1869), ‘letters from my windmill,’ a collection of short stories.

34 The story is the twelfth, ‘Les Vieux’ (the old folk). Ransome’s recollection of the story is not accurate in detail.

35 ‘Quite like a grown-up man’ is not an exact quotation, but Ransome’s paraphrase of Daudet is true to the final emotion: the old man’s ‘petit air malin’, his rascally youthful bravado in suggesting he might be out late, walking arm-in-arm ‘like a man’ with the narrator, and his wife’s final rueful ‘My poor husband! At least he’s still walking’, as she gazes after him.

36 Militants in the Cévennes and Southern France who resisted the persecution of Protestantism by Louis XIV (1638–1715).

37 Stevenson and his friend had fled from ‘the champion canoeist of Europe’.

39 Fireworks. In a later note, Ransome approved Stevenson’s ability to “smile at his own mannerisms [he crossed out the word ‘artifice’] of style. When Mrs Strong said to him ‘At least you have no mannerisms,’ he took the book out of my hand and read ‘It was a wonderful clear night of stars.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘how many many times I have written “a wonderful clear night of stars.”’ Memories of Vailima, p. 10.”

42 “Edinburgh 1878”. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879) was first published in the artistic periodical The Portfolio. The book was used by Ransome’s mother, sisters and brother as a handbook to Edinburgh when they settled there while his brother Geoffrey began to learn the printing business. Arthur gave his mother’s address on his daughter’s birth certificate (May 1910), and he, Ivy and their baby spent six weeks there after the birth.

44 Essays of Travel (1905), the quotation slightly rearranged from chapter 14, ‘On the enjoyment of unpleasant places’: ‘For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after a rye plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably.’

45 This sentence is editorially put together from a working page headed “Prose examples of Stevenson’s style;” but the example quoted (from chapter 6 of Across the Plains) is the only one listed.

47 “Roads. 1873” Stevenson’s actual words were ‘a great deal of meeting …’ (Essays of Travel, chapter 13.)

48 George Henry Borrow (1803–81), novelist, travel writer, linguist, author of Wild Wales, Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain; subject of a biography (1912) by Ransome’s friend the poet and essayist Edward Thomas.

53 Hazlitt’s energetic genius was widely recognized, but, as Coleridge said, ‘he delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a forceps’.

54 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768). A ‘calèche’ or in English usually ‘calash’ was a light two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle with a folding hood.

55 Ransome seems to have written these pages soon after finishing his book on Oscar Wilde (1912). Wilde gives the propositions ‘that she [nature] imitates art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny’, and ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions, The Critic as Artist (1891).

57 ‘What a failure the setting sun is this evening!’ Alfred de Musset (1810–57), poet and playwright; Fantasio (1834).

58 The Silverado Squatters (1883) is a memoir of his honeymoon trip in the Napa Valley, California. The paragraph is editorially pieced together.

60 “Illustrate romantic attitude by comparison of book Inland Voyage with letter p. 103 Balfour.” The quotation from Balfour is inserted editorially; it continues: ‘for an easy book might be written and sold, with mighty little brains about it, where the journey is of a certain seriousness and can be named. I mean, a book about a journey from York to London must be clever; a book about the Caucasus may be what you will.’

61 We do not know who this friend was. The section is headed “Early Criticism”, followed by a check-list.

63 cf. ‘Woe is me that I may not give some specimens – some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young.’ (Across the Plains, chapter 7).

64 David Balfour is the hero of Kidnapped (1886); Mr Utterson the investigating lawyer in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885).

67 Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), historian of the history of ideas and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; father of Virginia Woolf.

68 From ‘Aspects of Robert Burns’, included in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.

69 ‘Samuel Pepys’, a chapter in Familiar Studies. Elsewhere Ransome quotes Stevenson on Pepys: “Though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight. Familiar Studies, 218.”

71 Of this essay, Ransome elsewhere notes “his bringing in the rondel, and ballade writing of Fontainebleau, admiration for Banville [Théodore de Banville (1823–91), French Parnassian poet], again as in Burns knack of portraiture, a little thin, a little too sure of its own comprehensiveness, ‘my good copy in pen and ink of an illumination in a fine copy of the Poems given by Henry VII to Elizabeth of York’, his word for ‘some of our quaintly vicious contemporaries’.”

74 Charles Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), influential literary critic, associated with Victor Hugo.

75 A subject which Ransome had been passionately debating with Lascelles Abercrombie. He was currently planning a book to be called ‘The Nature of Technique’. These passages are perhaps intended as a preamble to it.

76 Familiar Studies, chapter 1, ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’: ‘And it is in this way that art is the pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner.’

78 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), Victorian romantic poet and critic with a reputation for decadence.

81 John Knox (1510–72), theologian, leader of the Protestant reformation in Scotland.

83 Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), influential and wide-ranging Russian critic, symbolist poet and novelist exiled from St Petersburg to Paris (1905–7) and again after 1918, author of critical works on Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and Lermontov and of a trilogy of historical novels that were European best-sellers in their day. In exile he wrote an attack on Bolshevism, The Kingdom of Antichrist (1922). Ransome might have met him in Paris; they once discussed a possible Russian translation of Oscar Wilde. His thought, promoted through the ‘Religious-Philosophical Society’ he founded in 1903, has affinities with Yeats and Stevenson’s work, and perhaps influenced Ransome’s The Elixir of Life (1915).

84 “Let me take this opportunity of directing attention to an English writer with somewhat similar aims, who has written one excellent fantasy of ideas and another on a less strenuous level but also extremely interesting: J. A. Revermort, author of Cuthbert Learmont and …” ‘J. A. Revermort’ was the pseudonym of John Adam Cramb (1862–1913). Cuthbert Learmont was published in 1910. The second book in Ransome’s mind (the title of which he could not remember) may have been Revermort’s Lucius Scarfield: A Philosophical Romance of the Twentieth Century (1908).

85 ‘A Lodging For The Night: A Story of François Villon’, in New Arabian Nights.

86 Ransome additionally notes of this essay: “a portrait of a man in actions; a study of the professional Don Juan, showing a considerable knowledge of wayside love, and a keen understanding of its psychology as exemplified by Burns, due partly to impatience with the inadequate, blind sketch by Principal Shairp …” (i.e. John Campbell Shairp’s 1879 biography of Burns).

87 “Stevenson. Critic. To W. E. Henley. Letters, II, 123.” Stevenson was referring to Henley’s brother Edward’s efforts as an actor, rather than writer.

90 Henry Fielding (1707–54), English novelist and dramatist, author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).

92 (1882), in Memories and Portraits (1887), chapter 15, ‘A gossip On Romance’.

93 Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer (1815), an historical novel by Sir Walter Scott; chapter 41.

95 ‘Art comes forth more beautifully from a rebellious mould’: a slightly inaccurate quotation of Théophile Gautier, Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos), ‘L’Art’.

98 “F[amiliar] S[tudies], 19,” and “cf. his reply to Henley on T[reasure] I[sland],” i.e. ‘I make these paper people to please myself, and Skelt, …’ Letters, II, 152. The italics here are Ransome’s, intensified by a double wavy underlining. He is already on a journey of artistic self-discovery, his own realism perhaps only completely secure by the time of Winter Holiday (1933). He habitually called his own fatherly mentor, W. G. Collingwood, ‘the Skald’ (‘poet’ in Norse); here he had wrongly placed ‘Skelt’ before ‘myself’ in his transcription. Stevenson tells us in Memories and Portraits (chapter 13) that he was ‘a true child of Skelt’ in having been absorbed as a boy in Martin Skelt’s toy theatres and their world of drama and romance.

103 Completed by ‘Q’ (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) and published posthumously (1897).

107 A perception which we might wish Ransome had supported with argument. ‘Not a novel’ because no love interest? Not a novel because ‘a boy’s book’?

110 A lighter breed of saddle-horse used for everyday riding or ceremony, as opposed to the work-horse or war-horse. The archaic term is apt, since the image is from the medieval legend of St George and the Dragon, where St George’s horse must be a war-horse.

111 ‘Mechlin’: a type of Flemish lace, here made into a garment; named after the city of manufacture, Mechelen.

113 A genre of dramatic comedy, dominant in English Restoration comedy, and Molière; and to some extent in the eighteenth-century comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan; exemplified too in the plays of Oscar Wilde, about which Ransome had recently been writing.

115 Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la Nuit (published posthumously 1842): Bertrand was one of the inspirers of the Surrealist movement.

116 Ransome’s use of ‘humane’ in preference to ‘human’ on several occasions in this book is highly idiosyncratic. It has the sense of a sophisticated perception of human nature, and with a classical context of humanistic values, a connotation of being fully aware of human potentiality.

117 “R. L. S. by Francis Watt, p. 183.” The book is R. L. Stephenson [sic] (1913).

119 Can Ransome here be guilty of the kind of familiarity with his audience that he had earlier disapproved of in Stevenson’s essays?

120 An echo of Stevenson’s words at the end of chapter 3 of ‘Providence and the Guitar’: ‘And taking the guitar in one hand and the case in the other, he led the way with something too precipitate to be merely called precipitation from the scene of this absurd adventure.’

124 Ransome is alluding to lines from John Keats’ sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

These lines were later to colour the perception of the Walker children who gazed from a peak they had named ‘Darien’ in chapter 1, ‘The Peak in Darien’, of Ransome’s first great novel Swallows and Amazons (1930).

125 In ‘The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs’, the third and final part of ‘The Suicide Club’ (1878), within New Arabian Nights (1882).

126 No doubt he would include his own work, especially Bohemia in London (1907). The paragraph gratefully acknowledges Stevenson as his master.

127 The Arabian Nights, or, A Thousand and One Nights is a collection of ancient tales from India, Persia, Yemen, Arabia and Egypt, of which the best known is ‘Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,’ a rhyming version by Ransome was published in a limited edition in 1919; later (1928) he dramatised the story as a school play.

128 The Shaving of Shagpat: An Oriental Romance (1856), the first published novel by George Meredith (1828–1909), uses a stories-within-story structure in imitation of The Arabian Nights.

130 ‘The Adventure of Prince Florizel and the Detective’, in New Arabian Nights. Compare Ransome’s style here with Stevenson’s in the ending of the story:

I am happy to say that a recent revolution hurled him from the throne of Bohemia, in consequence of his continued absence and edifying neglect of public business; and that his Highness now keeps a cigar store in Rupert Street, much frequented by other foreign refugees. I go there from time to time to smoke and have a chat, and find him as great a creature as in the days of his prosperity; he has an Olympian air behind the counter; and although a sedentary life is beginning to tell upon his waistcoat, he is probably, take him for all in all, the handsomest tobacconist in London.

Ransome’s tone has become almost exactly that of the author he is writing about.

131 The character Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s Intentions: The Critic as Artist, not wanting to discuss anything solemnly, says to Ernest:

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

132 ‘Thrawn Janet’ in The Merry Men and other Tales and Fables (1887); ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’ is chapter XV, ‘Black Andie’s Tale of Tod Lapraik’, within Stevenson’s novel Catriona; see Stevenson, Vailima Letters (1895), April 1893: ‘Tod Lapraik is a piece of living Scots; if I had never writ anything but that and Thrawn Janet, still I’d have been a writer.’

133 Ransome has Englished Stevenson’s spelling a little here, which diminishes the Scots effect: Stevenson wrote ‘but there was grandfaither’s siller tester in the puddock’s heart of him.’

136 Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a short novel; ‘Ethan Brand’ (1850) and ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ (1836) are short stories.

139 The order of publication was: Treasure Island (1883), The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1883), and Prince Otto (1885). The introductory sentence is here reconstructed from “Stevenson. Prince Otto. Treasure Island. Black Arrow. Stevenson. T. A.” (i. e. Tales of Adventure.)

141 As, of course, they had stirred Ransome’s; his first story, written at the age of seven, has buccaneers and pirates in it; see Introduction, and appendix B.1.

142 By James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), American novelist of adventure and romance (1826).

143 ‘White Ice’ cannot be identified for certain. It is most likely to be Ballantyne’s The World of Ice: or, Adventures in the Polar Regions (1860); or possibly his Fast In The Ice (1863) or even Rivers of Ice (1875). Ransome does not usually get titles wrong. ‘White Ice’ may also suggest also Jules Verne’s Hivernage dans les glaces (A Winter amid the Ice) (1874); or perhaps his Le désert de glace (Ice Desert), part two of Les voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866; the first part is Les anglais au pôle nord.) Verne’s novels, like Ballantyne’s, were made by Ransome part of the Swallows’ and Amazons’ mental landscapes. Such fantastical adventures in frozen landscapes were to be triumphantly outshone by the much later realism of Ransome’s frozen Lakeland landscape in his Winter Holiday (1933).

144 In this, the most famous novel (1858) of R. M. Ballantyne, Jack, Ralph Rover and Peterkin are shipwrecked on a desert island. This was to be a formative tale for Ransome’s novels; the scene of Titty and Roger’s diving for pearls in Swallows and Amazons is inspired by it.

145 The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720) by Daniel Defoe, an inspiration also for Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Stevenson had asked his friend Sidney Colvin to send him a copy of Singleton after Treasure Island was published (Letters, July 1884).

146 ‘A Ballad of John Silver’ by John Masefield (1878–1967), poet-laureate, and dedicatee of Ransome’s Portraits and Speculations (1913).

147 ‘Grand Guignol’: a style of naturalistic horror drama named after the theatre in Paris where it originated in the 1890s.

148 Ransome too, like Stevenson and Stevenson’s father, never lost his boyish imagination – his, tempered by an idiosyncratic gentle irony.

149 Just such a map as Steven Spurrier was later to draw for Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

They made a molten image,
And set it up on high,
And there it stands unto this day
To witness if I lie.

At the bottom of the famous Treasure Island map is the testimony: ‘Facsimile of Chart latitude and longitude struck out by J. Hawkins’. Jim Hawkins is a fairly trustworthy narrator as witness to the main events of the story. In chapter 28, facing Long John Silver, he offers to bear witness: ‘Kill me, if you please, or spare me. But one thing I’ll say, and no more; if you spare me, bygones are bygones, and when you fellows are in court for piracy, I’ll save you all I can. It is for you to choose. Kill another and do yourselves no good, or spare me and keep a witness to save you from the gallows.’

151 i.e. his father and his step-son. Swallows and Amazons was dedicated ‘to the six for whom it was written, in exchange for a pair of slippers’; they were members of the Altounyan family with whom he had sailed dinghies on the lake that he disguised for the purposes of his fiction.

153 “Fam. 41.” Records of a Family of Engineers (1912): ‘He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or whisky, often in his full rig of sou’- wester, oilskins, and long boots; and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a blunt and seamanlike demeanour. My father and uncles, with the devilish penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father, indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken. He had crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins. The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian.’

154 Young Folks; A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature (1871–1900); the first episode of ‘Treasure Island; or, The Mutiny of the Hispaniola’ was in vol. 19, no. 565, 1 October, 1881.

156 ‘And there I was, pinned by the shoulder to the mast’, at the end of chapter 26, ‘Israel Hands’.

157 Not the heroic Horatius, ‘Captain of the Gate’ in Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’, but Jim’s meeting with Ben Gunn and the bathos of Ben’s final years:

‘As for Ben Gunn, he got a thousand pounds, which he spent or lost in three weeks, or to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back begging on the twentieth. Then he was given a lodge to keep, exactly as he had feared upon the island …’ (Chapter 34, ‘And Last’).

159 The French title of this story, ‘Le scarabée d’or’, will have resonance for readers of Ransome’s The Picts and the Martyrs (1942). Ransome had read the whole of Poe for his critical study (1910); the last part of that book is ‘The French view of Poe’.

163 Classical (and English) rhetoric traditionally makes a contrast between the ‘matter’ (i.e. content) and ‘manner’ (i.e. style) of a composition.

164 “To Colvin, 1884, March 9. Letters, II, 169 & 170.” Mudie’s Lending Library was established in 1842 by Charles Mudie, bookseller.

165 Ransome probably draws on a quotation he notes: “Prince Otto. In April 1883, to Mrs Sitwell: Hyères: ‘I have been, and am, so busy, drafting ‘a long story’ (for me I mean) about a hundred Cornhill pages, or say about as long as the Donkey book.’ Letters, II, 109.”

166 “To Henley same date Letters, II, 108.” (He had quoted this phrase twice before; the repetition may be an aspect of the first-draft composition.)

167 Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1623) (in which Perdita is the heroine) sets scenes on ‘the sea-coast of Bohemia’, a land-locked country.

169 “Letters, II, 116. To W. E. Henley, May 1883: ‘I turned me to – what thinkest ’ou? … to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The Black Arrow: a Tale of Tunstall Forest is his name: tush! a poor thing!’”

170 Ransome seems to draw on a letter he noted from Stevenson to C. W. Stoddard about Otto:

“It is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy-mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air-bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too great realism of some chapters and passages – some of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot – which disprepares the imagination for the cast of the remainder.

173 An extraordinary parallel can be drawn between this observation and what we know to have been the effect of Ransome’s second wife’s criticism upon his later narratives. In the case of The Picts and the Martyrs (1942), her strictures delayed its publication by a year. Amusingly, Ransome notes (but does not incorporate) the following: “‘Jekyll and Hyde, wrote Miss Jeanette L. Gilder (a literary lady who contributed to The Critic) ‘of course, interested me immensely, but it is hardly a book to enjoy.’”

174 Hawthorne, romantic writer of historical ‘tales’ and ‘romances’ with allegorical content, set in colonial New England; Poe, writer of macabre tales of mystery, inventor of detective fiction, contemptuous of allegory and didacticism, translated into French by Beaudelaire, himself appreciated Hawthorne’s ‘pure’ style and ‘wild, plaintive, thoughtful’ tone.

175 Written in 1881 as a ‘crawler’ but ‘laid aside in a justifiable disgust, the tale being horrid’ (as Stevenson wrote to Colvin that July) it was published in December 1884 as a Pall Mall ‘Christmas Extra’.

176 First published in Unwin’s Christmas Annual 1885, and included in The Merry Men.

177 ‘A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Francis Villon’, in New Arabian Nights.

179 A wonderful reverse-analogy. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), English pastoral poet, courtier, and soldier, famous for his Astrophil and Stella sonnets, died from a wound received in battle against the Spaniards at Zutphen.

180 The story tells of a boy and his Doppelgänger who acts as voice of conscience to the debauched hero.

182 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with other Fables (1896). ‘Apologues’: brief moral fables.

‘Be ashamed of yourself,’ said the frog.
‘When I was a tadpole, I had no tail.’
‘That’s just what I thought!’ said the tadpole.
‘You never were a tadpole.’

184 ‘The Mental Traveller’ by the English romantic poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827) has a similar circular structure; it includes these verses:

And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,
And pierces both his hands and feet,
And cuts his heart out of his side
To make it feel both cold & heat.

Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries –
And she grows young as he grows old,

Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And pins her down for his delight …

185 William Morris (1834–96), English socialist writer and artist, a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and of the Kelmscott Press.

186 John Millington Synge (1871–1909), Irish playwright, poet and folklorist, author of The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea and other wellreceived plays.

192 At Coniston in the autumn of 1910, Ransome experimented without great success in writing fables.

193 i.e. fresh and wholesome; but perhaps also an allusion to the quality of thought, from a poem by Andrew Marvell (1621–78), ‘The Garden’: ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’, which had become a recognised image for philosophical truth.

194 As a proper Scottish child Stevenson would have been proficient in ‘the Shorter Catechism’, a set of questions and answers grounding children in the doctrines of the Church of Scotland.

195 The only section with a title in the manuscript, a quotation from a poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses: ‘Happy Thought’. The first pages of this section (also headed “Stevenson. Poetry.”) comprise the only part of the MS to have been published during Ransome’s lifetime; they were written on 26 January 1914 (as his diary shows) and appear under the same title with little alteration in The New Witness, 5 February 1914 (see appendix A.3).

198 John Bunyan (1628–88), author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), inspiration for many children’s books, especially Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women.

199 Writing in early 1914, Ransome was not yet the bald-headed person he was to become, but cultivated a sage and elderly persona, at one point growing a beard to help. By the time he drew Captain Flint (in Swallowdale, 1932, a selfportrait) he was indeed bald. The idea of the adult reader of children’s books being ‘two people’ is addressed in recent post-modernist critical theory, where notions of intertextuality and of duality of address in both writer and reader have been discussed in relation to children’s literature. For Ransome, as for Stevenson, childhood was never something to be left behind.

200 (1835), a much-republished children’s history by Maria, Lady Callcott (1785–1842). Ransome’s mother Edith had published as recently as 1903 her own history-book for children, A First History of England.

201 As Pretty as Seven, and Other Popular German Tales [by the Brothers Grimm] by Ludwig Bechstein (1801–60), with illustrations by A. L. Richter (1872).

202 So much in tune was Ransome with Stevenson as a ‘penny whistler’ that he used that term in a eulogistic paragraph, intended perhaps as a conclusion or envoi to this study (see note to end of Part I, above, and appendix A.1.i).

203 The Defence of Guenevere, and other poems (1858). J. W. Mackail’s Life of William Morris had seduced Ransome away from the study of chemistry at Yorkshire College and made him determined to become a man of letters.

209 Marjorie Fleming (1803–11), a Scottish child poet who died of measles. A fine example is ‘Isa’s Bed’, is to her beloved sister Isabel.

I love in Isa’s bed to lie
Oh such a joy and luxury
The bottom of the bed I sleep,
And with great care within I creep
Oft I embrace her feet of lillys,
But she has goton all the pillies.
Her neck I never can embrace,
But I do hug her feet in place.

212 Dr Pangloss: absurdly optimistic moral philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who believes that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

215 The adult ‘any reader’ will always be ‘far far away’ in time; but Ransome is right in finding this poem the odd-man-out in terms of sentimentality of tone.

216 Ransome had no hated aunt; the ‘Great Aunt’ who interrupted the holiday lives of her nieces in Swallowdale and The Picts and the Martyrs is probably a purely literary construct. Of Ransome’s aunts, Katy was an excellent croquet-player, and in old age had great fun careering down-hill in her bathchair; his Great-Aunt Susan with her bows and arrows was a weekly refuge from his prep-school at Windermere; his very remarkable missionary aunts, Jessie and Edith, he later visited in China.

217 Each child reader affirms the experience presented in these poems, to be brought up short here and there by recognition of impossibility; thus literature enlarges a child’s world.

219 ‘To My Name-Child’ (‘little Louis Sanchez’, who played ‘on the beach of Monterey’) is the second last poem in the book.

221 This is where the section published in The New Witness (see appendix A.3) ends.

222 The scarcely legible handwriting of this preceding section betrays the speed at which Ransome composed his account of this much-loved book.

224 “To J. A. Symonds. Saranac. Nov[ember] 21, 1887. [Letters,] III, 25.” John Addington Symonds (1840–93), English poet and essayist, like Stevenson had lived in Davos to recover his health.

226 Martial, Roman epigrammatist whose poems formed part of traditional schoolboy education.

228 “William Sharp (Fiona McLeod) A Memoir, Elizabeth Sharp. Heinemann, p. 139.”

230 John M. D. Meiklejohn (1830–1902), Scottish author of textbooks of history, geography and English language. “San Francisco, Feb[ruary] 1, 1880. Letters, I, 278.”

231 Feodor M. Dostoevsky (1821–81), Russian novelist, admired for his psychological realism; author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, among others.

232 Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) Russian novelist and playwright, friend of Flaubert; author of the novel Fathers and Sons (an important theme for both Stevenson and Ransome).

233 Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921), Ukrainian short-story-writer (The Blind Musician is one of his collections), opponent of Tsarist policies, exiled to Siberia, published too late to have been an influence on Stevenson. Ransome so admired him as to substitute his name here for that of Tolstoy (crossed out).

234 Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), whose series of novels La comédie humaine was a landmark in realism.

235 George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans (1819–80), English novelist acclaimed for psychological realism.

236 This plethora of names is due to first-draft speed. Ransome’s pen races across the page. Here he gives a chronological ‘great tradition’ of English novelists. Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), novelist, author of Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, and Sir Charles Grandison, another epistolary novel, which was a favourite of Jane Austen’s.

237 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818–48) is the archetype for novels of romance where the Yorkshire landscapes and qualities of character are interdependent.

238 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), poet and novelist, whose powerful sense of place is tied to the passions of his characters in novels such as Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd.

239 This ‘Arabian entertainment’, an allegorical fantasy, was Meredith’s earliest published prose narrative (1856). Ransome may have already been planning his version of Aladdin, and it is likely that he did admire Shagpat. Noting that just as Shagpat is odd-man-out among Meredith’s novels, so is Weir amongst Stevenson’s, he implies that just as Shagpat is trivial in comparison with The Egoist, so are all of Stevenson’s narratives in comparison with Weir – most readers would agree.

240 Ransome’s ambition to be taken seriously as a critic is evident here. He disarmingly uses a trope which displays the discarded criticism as part of his criticism, before embarking on a quest to define the kind of genius that belonged to Stevenson.

242 Prefatory letter of dedication to Charles Baxter, university friend and lawyer who acted for Stevenson in some business matters.

243 William Kidd (1645–1701), a Scot hanged on counts of piracy and murder. His reputation for piracy may have been ill deserved.

244 Of thrilling horror, as in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), a highly popular Gothic romance by the English novelist Ann Radcliffe.

245 Ransome elsewhere notes this further observation, from Will Low: “Low noticed the strong impression of the country through which David Balfour and Alan Breck escape in Kidnapped. Stevenson made him look through the books, to see that there was actually ‘not a live description of landscape in it.’ Low, p. 426.”

247 An essay by Poe in which he describes the composition of his poem ‘The Raven’.

249 Ransome’s judgement is informed by his recently published and wellreceived critical study of Poe (1910).

251 The self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, hero in his own fantasy of chivalry, and his earthy companion Sancho Panza, are protagonists of the comic romance by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote (1605). Tom Jones is the hero of Fielding’s novel of that name; is the foolish adventurer in marriage Sir Willoughby Patterne, ‘the egoist’ after whom Meredith named his novel (1879).

252 Ransome here foreshadows questions that become important in late twentieth-century critical debate.

253 Stevenson, The Art of Writing, chapter 3. He continues: ‘I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote – I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.’ Under the heading ‘Trust’, Ransome notes “He very early knew Meredith, and would get M[eredith] to tell his best. Gosse, 76, intro by Colvin.”

254 Ransome is outdoing himself with engaging but mischievous convolutions of sentence-structure.

255 Ransome’s soon-to-be-written The Elixir of Life (1915) is one such: its best moment is a splendid horse-race with the Devil.

256 Ransome glances back to his recent work in his A History of Storytelling, Studies in the Development of Narrative (1909).

257 Ransome is not afraid of grappling with the toughest problems of art, life, and human consciousness; in this he is part of the avant-garde in his time. Here he has just crossed out ‘art’ and ‘life’ in favour of ‘consciousness’, and is about to insert the qualifiers ‘imaginary’ and ‘general’, intent on getting his thought clear and right.

258 Beowulf, hero of the Old English epic, kills the monster Grendel; Jack, the young hero of the English folk-tale ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’.

260 When writing this account Ransome had already published collections of short-stories (they caused no stir); during the period he had Stevenson ‘on the stocks’, while in Russia, he was inspired to write his first novel, a strange mixture of philosophy and the macabre, in a genre of fantasy inspired by Poe and Stevenson: The Elixir of Life (1915). This knotty analysis shows the apprentice wrestling with the novelist’s art.

261 This very personal paragraph is headed “Stevenson. Novels (Weir perhaps).” Alas, no Weir.

262 This passage may have been written in June 1913, when Ransome had settled down to work on Stevenson at ‘Datcha Gellibrand, Terijoki, Finland’, the address from which he wrote to his mother, and inscribed on the fly-leaf of his ‘Stevenson Exercise-book’ (see Introduction, and appendix A.1).

263 A rich genre of travel writing with wonderfully enticing titles was known to Ransome, including Charles Darwin, who had camped in the Andes, and Ransome’s friend and former literary agent Stefana Stevens, whose My Sudan Year he reviewed anonymously in 1912. He may have known Across Asia on a Bicycle: The Journey of Two American Students from Constantinople to Peking (1894) – a work with a Stevensonian spirit of adventure.

265 Again Ransome prefigures his own personal situation. Only returned from exile to the Lake District and comfortably married to Evgenia, could he write his new kind of narrative, in novels deeply rooted in countryside he had known and loved from childhood.

267 Alain-René Le Sage (1668–1741), author of Gil Blas de Santillane and other picaresque prose romances.

268 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and of his Fortunes and Adversities (1550), an anonymous Spanish novella first translated into English in 1576, and thought to be the first picaresque work of prose fiction.

269 An echo of Alfred Noyes (1880–1958), ‘The Highwayman’, a fine narrative poem of tragic romance: ‘The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor’ and ‘The road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor …’

270 Only the first thirty chapters of St Ives were completed by Stevenson before his death; the balloon episode, and the Lady Nepean and Colenso, were part of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s completion of the story. Ransome is napping here. He is disparaging about the book, and the palpable speed of his pen skating across the paper betrays his superficial attention to it.

274 The story of Le Fevre is one of the minor masterpieces within A Sentimental Journey.

275 St Ives, chapter III, ‘Major Chevenix comes into the story, and Goguelat Goes Out’.

276 The flageolet is introduced in chapter XXII, ‘Character and Aquirements of Mr Rowley’:

He consoled himself by playing for awhile on a cheap flageolet, which was one of his diversions, and to which I owed many intervals of peace. When he first produced it, in the joints, from his pocket, he had the duplicity to ask me if I played upon it. I answered, no; and he put the instrument away with a sigh and the remark that he had thought I might. For some while he resisted the unspeakable temptation, his fingers visibly itching and twittering about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in sporadic anecdote entirely lost. Presently the pipe was in his hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in dumb show for some time.

‘Mr Ramornie, if you please, would it disturb you, sir, if I was to play a chune?’ he pleaded.

277 His nonchalance in composition is suggested in another quotation noted by Ransome (see appendix A.2.iv.)

278 (This sentence is written in an almost illegible scrawl.) St Ives was dictated by Stevenson at intervals during the year before his death, while distracted by illness, by his passion for music, and by work on other books, notably Weir of Hermiston.

279 “[Letters], IV, 147. See also a remark on Ives. Same page.” The full context is: ‘merely a story of adventure, rambling along; but that is perhaps the guard that ‘sets my genius best,’ as Alan might have said. I wish I could feel as easy about the other! But there, all novels are a heavy burthen while they are doing, and a sensible disappointment when they are done.’ That ‘other’, he died in the act of writing: Weir of Hermiston.

282 Catriona herself; her ‘gray eyes’ are much in the mind of the young hero.

284 Ransome damns with very faint praise indeed. Though dismissive, he still values the ‘charm’ the book holds for his generation. Taste has subsequently seen an uneasy mixture of authorial self-deception and failure of voice in the novel.

285 A section not present, perhaps never written; Ransome leaves us only hints and fragments of his admiration for Weir, which he saw to have come from an extreme act of imagination new in Stevenson’s work.

286 In The South Seas, ed. S. Colvin (1896). This section is headed “Travel In the South Seas”.

287 Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is usually considered one of the earliest modernist English novelists; his first novel, Almayer’s Folly was published in 1895, the year after Stevenson’s death. His greatest novels (Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness) were all known before Ransome wrote this.

288 Sidney Colvin, Letters, III, 262, introducing a letter of 29 April 1891 to himself from Stevenson, explains its context: Stevenson had received a letter from Colvin ‘expressing the disappointment felt by [his] friends at home at the impersonal and even at times tedious character of some portion of the South Sea Letters that had reached us. As a corrective of that opinion, may I perhaps mention here that there is a certain many-voyaged master-mariner – no less a person than Mr Joseph Conrad – who does not at all share it, and prefers In the South Seas to Treasure Island.’ Ransome shares Conrad’s high opinion of the book.

289 Ransome himself was later persuaded to abandon ‘The River Comes First’, a fragment since published in Coots In The North And Other Stories (1988), on the grounds that it was not what his public had come to want.

298 Märchen: fairy-tales. Vailima Letters, chapter 25, January 1893: ‘What annoyed me about the use of “The Bottle Imp” was that I had always meant it for the centre-piece of a volume of Märchen which I was slowly to elaborate.’ Colvin had unilaterally published it along with ‘The Beach of Falesá’, completely different in style and intention.

299 Ransome had a sharp eye for point of view, and was ahead of his time in his theoretical understanding of its effects.

300 The brief Preface to The Wrong Box (1889), signed by R. L. S. and L. O., is this:

‘Nothing like a little judicious levity,’ says Michael Finsbury in the text: nor can any better excuse be found for the volume in the reader’s hand. The authors can but add that one of them is old enough to be ashamed of himself, and the other young enough to learn better.

301 The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1892); The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and a Quartette, by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, 1894. Ransome’s irony is evident in crossing out ‘sketches’ in favour of ‘masterpieces’.

303 “Lloyd Osbourne helped in the planning and wrote the original draft up to chapter v. After which nothing but taking over. There was thought of deleting his name.”

304 Ransome’s later Peter Duck (1932) and Missee Lee (1941), although having themes in common with Stevenson’s tale, are quite uninfluenced by it. The character of Attwater, washed up on a Pacific shore, is no source for Miss Lee or any of her pirate acquaintance.

305 To Colvin, 30 September 1889, Letters, III, 137; ‘Attwater’ is ‘The Pearl Fisher’.

306 To Marcel Schwob, 19 August 1890, Letters, III, 177; ‘great and grisly’ not found; however see letter to Baxter from Vailima, Feb[ruary] 1893, ‘a most grim and gloomy tale’, and to Gosse, 10 June 1893 ‘a dreadful grimy business in the 3rd person.’

319 “[Ibid.,] 179.” These many quotations about the effort required for a longer work reflect Ransome’s own struggle with this extraordinarily difficult reconciliation.

320 “To Sidney Colvin. Feb[ruary] 1894, Letters, IV, 247.” This quotation, headed “Stevenson. Ebb-Tide & Weir”, suggests that Ransome had intended to treat both works together as sharing the same prime position among Stevenson’s works; a view held by most contemporary and subsequent critics of Stevenson.

321 Reconstructed from a scarcely decipherable note: “Compare Stevenson’s attitude with Flaubert’s. Charm. [vertical line] ‘Constipated mosaic’ of Weir affirmation F: but n. b. that “The Ebb Tide” is in the same – & different.” Flaubert’s intense workmanship and exacting habits of work were much admired by Ransome, so this missing chapter was set fair to place Weir on a high pinnacle of achievement.

322 “Memories of Vailima, p. 54.” When the poem was quoted by Nellie van de Grift Sanchez in her Life of Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson (1924) she added: ‘He called her the “stormy petrel” in reference to her birth in the wild month of March, and because she was such a fiery little person.’

323 A friend since Edinburgh University. Together they travelled on the Continent, and were companions in the canoe voyage described in Stevenson’s first book An Inland Voyage, in which, named after their craft, Simpson becomes ‘Cigarette’ and Stevenson, ‘Arethusa’.

324 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Romantic poet and literary critic, and Charles Lamb (1775–1834), essayist and critic, were for seven years (1782–89) schoolmates at Christ’s Hospital in London. ‘Post-Darwinian’ refers not to the debates following Charles Darwin’s publication of his Origin of Species (1859) but to those following his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s revolutionary ideas of common descent (1796). François Rabelais (1494–1553) is the French Renaissance satirist famous for Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–52); Pierre Abélard (1079–1142) is the French philosopher, theologian, musician and poet, whose autobiographical romance Abelard and Heloïse, is a classic of love-literature. These examples define the passionate and brilliant quality of these young men’s conversation.

325 “Continue with miniatures from “Talk & Talkers”” says Ransome here – so we do. These two ‘talkers’, from Stevenson’s brilliant essay, copied out by Ransome for use, are ‘Spring-heel’d Jack’ – that is, Bob, Stevenson’s cousin R. A. M. Stevenson; and ‘Burly’: his friend W. E. Henley. This sort of conversation Ransome considered best of all.

326 “‘Personal Memories of Robert Louis Stevenson’, Edmund Gosse, in The Century Magazine, July 1895.”

329 To W. H. Low, 13 March, 1885: ‘I shall see if I can afford to send you the April Contemporary – but I dare say you see it anyway – as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most effective tongue. It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear.’

330 Ransome crosses out his original phrase, ‘quadruplicity of personality’, in favour of a metaphor favoured by Stevenson, ‘on the stocks’. On 8 October 1883 Stevenson wrote to Colvin that he had ‘a great variety of small ships launched or still upon the stocks’, Letters, II, 155. Ransome himself could never easily move between genres, and was currently frustrated at being stuck in the mode of criticism and essays.

333 (Robert Ross had allowed Ransome to read Wilde’s letters to him – they were not yet in the public domain.) Faint praise; and artificiality was, in the end, what Ransome abjured.

337 The four red volumes of Stevenson’s Letters (1911) were constantly on Ransome’s desk during the months that he was working on this book at Manor Farm, Hatch, Wiltshire in 1913 and 1914.

338 “‘Stevensoniana,’ By Sir Sidney Colvin. Article in Scribner’s Mag., Nov[ember], 1912.” The sentence has been editorially reconstructed.

340 “151 [sic], Across the P[lains].” Chapter 6, ‘Random Memories Continued’.

343 M. A. Marcel Schwob (1867–1905), dedicatee of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu Roi (1896) and of Oscar Wilde’s The Sphynx (1894) ‘in friendship’, corresponded with Stevenson, translated some of his works, and attempted a voyage to meet him.

344 19 August 1890 (an opinion shared by his wife ‘who hates and loathes and slates my women’: Letters, II, 120).

345 Spicilège (1896) brought together Schwob’s articles on François Villon, R. L. Stevenson, and George Meredith, along with his prefaces on Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Renard.

346 ‘Nous ne savons exactement ce qu’avait fait BB. Deux ou trois touches de Silver suffisent pour nous inspirer le regret ardent d’ignorer à jamais la vie de Captain Flint et de ses compagnons de fortune.’ Ransome interleaves the French with his translation.

348 ‘What he doesn’t tell us about the life of Alan Breck, of Secundra Das, of Ollala, of Attwater, fascinates us more than what he does tell us about them.’

349 ‘Stevenson never looked at things but through the eyes of his imagination’.

351 ‘In the novels Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Master of Ballantrae, etc., the story is incontestably very superior to the picture, which however has been his starting-point.’

352 This section is headed “Moralist”, and was largely written (as his diary shows) on 17, 18 and 19 February 1914. The ‘moral allegory’ is, of course, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

353 In a different formulation of this Ransome says: ‘In his maturer years, with all his seriousness, he preserved something of this altogether non-moral gusto in moralising.’

354 To Sidney Colvin, summer of 1874. The book was never written. In 1874 Stevenson published Essays of Travel, of which chapter 24 is ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’.

357 Here, with a dash and multiple dots, Ransome tails off. His notes: ‘Morals. Anti-Grundyism. Moral hereditary background combined with sense, instance grandmother and grandfather and the baker. Religion. Prayers. Sect: cf Damien letter. The artist’s morality applied to life.’ Completion of this paragraph would have been a matter of routine for him. In his essay ‘Lay Morals’, Stevenson evokes Mrs Grundy:

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.

Christ was in general a great enemy to such a way of teaching … For morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man fights for his own hand … you find Christ giving various counsels to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.

358 “Lay Morals”. Other quotations written out by Ransome for use in this section, but never incorporated, are: ‘What a man spends upon himself he shall have earned by services to the race.’; ‘To be, not to possess,’ for Wilde’s ‘Oh, not to do’; ‘I do not want to be decent at all, but to be good.’

359 “cf. H[istory] of Storytelling, p. 245.” Ransome’s own recent book A History of Story-Telling: Studies in the Development of Narrative (1909), ‘Poe and the New Technique’. He reminds himself to insert here the quotation from Poe used there; it is editorially inserted.

360 This axiom is one that Ransome himself had rigorously adopted by the time he wrote Pigeon Post (1936).

361 Ransome follows this with a large question-mark. The passage from chapter III of Lay Morals is: ‘All that we know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts which commend themselves to that.’

362 (1706–90), Founding Father of the United States, author, scientist, philosopher, politician.

363 Lay Morals and Other Essays, chapter IV. Ransome, author of Bohemia in London (1907) which he had recently revised (1912) is bound to think this definition noble, and indeed seems to have emulated Stevenson in his own Bohemian life. He scrawled a large question-mark after this paragraph. He notes: “Bohemianism. The true Bohemian the upright man – L[ay] M[orals] near to end. Criticism of accepted ideas. Christianity and respectability”, and elsewhere “Moral hereditary background combined with sense, instance grandmother and grandfather and the baker. Religion – Prayers. Sect: cf. Damien letter. The artist’s morality applied to life.” Reading Stevenson’s letters in Colvin’s ‘four red volumes’ (1911) Ransome would not have had the benefit of a letter omitted from that collection. Writing to Miss Adelaide Boodle in January 1890 about the validity of religious life outside the Church of England, Stevenson had said: ‘Who are those whom we respect, who do a fair day’s work in life, and keep their blood pure by exercise? The most that I have known do not sit in our friend’s church; many of the best Christians sit in none. … I am pained that a friend of mine should conceive life so smally as to think she leaves the hand of her God because she leaves a certain clique of clergymen and a certain scattered handful of stone buildings, some of them with pointed windows, most with belfries, and a few with an illumination of the Ten Commandments on the wall. I have forgotten Milton’s exact words but they are something to the purpose: ‘Do not take the living God for a buzzard.’

366 Ransome seems to affirm Stevenson’s ‘free’ position. Here is a new scrap of biographical information about Ransome, and a unique instance of his writing about personal matters of belief.

PART II

Writings

As Happy as Kings¹⁹⁸

Conclusion

PART II

Writings

As Happy as Kings198

Conclusion

As Happy as Kings¹⁹⁸