The Eye-Witness, 28 September 1911, pp. 471–2
[Ransome used the 1911, sixth edition (here reviewed) of Balfour’s 1901 biography of his cousin Stevenson while writing his book; this is confirmed by his page-references. The article shows in places clear evidence of Ransome’s typical preoccupations and sentence-rhythms; others in the Eye-Witness office may however also have had a hand in it. The pseudonyms ‘K.’ and ‘K. Q.’ used by Ransome date from 1904 and may have associations with chess. Punctuation is that of the original article.]
R. L. S.
It is well that a cheap edition of Mr. Graham Balfour’s “Life of Robert Louis Stevenson”* should be published just now, when the glories of the wonderful sunset of that life are beginning to fade. There is no danger that men will forget Stevenson’s work so long as they can appreciate good English (or rather, good Scottish) and good story-telling. But there may be some danger that the personality which lay behind that work may be too easily forgotten; and that would be regrettable for, apart from its intrinsic fascination, without an understanding of it men will fail to understand Stevenson’s relation to his age, and consequently the enthusiasm he evoked and the fame he achieved.
If we want to understand Stevenson we must try to recapture the atmosphere of the time in which he lived. He was born in 1850. He was not quite of age when the grave closed on the most glorious of English story-tellers. The period that followed the death of Charles Dickens was one during which many brilliant talents were displayed, but almost all these talents seemed to be devoted to the task of discouraging mankind. Those who prided themselves especially on being “artists,” whether with words or brush, threw themselves into this task with singular enthusiasm. It was in those days that we were told that it was the function of the poet “to count the falling leaves”; it was in those days that a painter set himself to reproduce lovingly the rainbow hues of a dying corpse.
Against all this Neo-Satanism Stevenson set himself with a refreshing manliness and gaiety. He was not, indeed, the man to offer to the world a constructive philosophy to oppose the nightmares of negation. But he could do something that was, perhaps, at the moment more effective. He was himself exquisitely deft in the use of words. No man belonged more to his age in careful perfection of the technique of writing. He was the very man to have moved its admiration by writing about White Nights or the Flowers of Evil. He wrote instead a boy’s adventure story; and in writing it, he showed that as much artistic beauty could be got out of a boy’s adventure story as all the decadents ever got out of their decaying corpses. “Treasure Island” is an extraordinarily good adventure story, and all boys love it as such, and get more delight out of it than they get out of the poor stuff usually served out to them, simply because it is better done. It is also a very perfect work of art, in which one can find scarcely a flaw, in which scarcely a word could be altered without depreciation. Superficially it reads as if the author were hurried along from adventure to adventure, rejoicing only in the thought of rum and blood and gunpowder like a boy of fourteen. Yet Mallarmé in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
The unconquerable elfish gaiety of Stevenson was what was really valuable to him to his age and to ours. I must confess that to me he seems not only most delightful but most inspiring when he takes himself least seriously. That he could take himself and life lightly were his two best qualities not only artistically but morally, for the former touched his vanity with humour and humility, while the latter showed a rare and admirable courage, for it is not easy to take lightly a life of almost continual sickness and suffering. When he begins to take himself seriously he often jars. There is a touch of priggishness in some of his more solemn essays. He talked incredible nonsense about politics; nor is the vague sort of “undenominational” religion which he seems to have taken to so strongly in later life likely to be the final comfort of humanity. In some of his moralisings one does catch a note that goes some way to justify Henley’s taunt about “the Shorter Catechist,” and reminds one not altogether pleasantly of what he himself called his “Covenanting childhood.”
His Calvinistic origins did Stevenson harm as a moralist, but I think he owed no small debt to them as an artist. Their medieval folk-lore was rich in wonders, yet even then touched with something that was eerie and sometimes cruel. The Reformation swept away their saints and banned the fairies. It left them with a cold abstract God utterly aloof from men – and with the Devil. They turned eagerly to the latter, and into their conception of the Devil they poured all the magnificent poetry of their natures. On the wonderful devil-stories of Scott and Stevenson was fed from his childhood, and anyone who has read “Thrawn Janet” or the glorious episode of Tod Lapraik embedded in “Catriona” can see how powerfully they moved him. But it is not only in his direst imitations of the wild tales that Scottish peasants whisper, when they think that their terrible God is sleeping, that the influence of Scottish Diabolism can be felt. It flames in the blind eyes of Pew in “Treasure Island”; it hangs like a black cloud over “The Master of Ballantrae”; it is the energy of “The Ebb Tide,” that wonderful product of his mature genius; and it touches here and there, as a pearly cloud is touched with fire, the irresponsible gaiety of “The New Arabian Nights.”
There is among the old Scottish ballads one that is, perhaps. The noblest of them all, called “Tamlane”. Those who know it will remember the very Scottish myth that it speaks of – of the “Tiend to Hell.” The fairies are represented as happy, irresponsible, unmoral creatures rejoicing in their utter ignorance of good and evil. But once in seven years they must “pay the Tiend (or Tithe) to Hell,” that is, send one of their number to Hell as a sort of tribute to an Infernal Suzerain. Stevenson was at his best an elf. His most exquisite stories are the most elfish – “The New Arabian Nights” and “The Dynamiter” and, above all, that incomparable monument of human absurdity, “The Wrong Box.” But, elf as he was, he never quite forgot “the tiend to Hell”; and in his most light-hearted fantasies, in his most boyish tales of adventures, one catches now and again a glimpse of that red and thirsty abyss over which his Covenanting ancestors saw the whole human race suspended like flies. K.
* The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. By Graham Balfour. Methuen, 1s.