The effect of it all none the less was such that his Correspondence has only seemed to administer delightfully5 a further push to a door already half open and through which we enter with an extraordinary failure of any sense of intrusion. We feel indeed that we are living with him, but what is that but what we were doing before? Through his Correspondence certainly the ego does, magnificently, shine—which is much the best thing that in any correspondence it can ever do. But even the “Vailima Letters,” published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in 1895, had already both established that and allayed8 our diffidence. “It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some kind of book out of it without much trouble. So, for God’s sake, don’t lose them.”
Being on these terms with our author, and feeling as if we had always been, we profit by freedoms that seem but the consecration9 of intimacy10. Not only have we no sense of intrusion, but we are so prepared to penetrate11 further that when we come to limits we quite feel as if the story were mutilated and the copy not complete. There it is precisely12 that we seize the secret of our tie. Of course it was personal, for how did it operate in any connection whatever but to make us live with him? We had lived with him in “Treasure Island,” in “Kidnapped” and in “Catriona,” just as we do, by the light of these posthumous13 volumes, in the South Seas and at Vailima; and our present confidence comes from the fact of a particularly charming continuity. It is not that his novels were “subjective,” but that his life was romantic, and in the very same degree in which his own conception, his own presentation, of that element touches and thrills. If we want to know even more it is because we are always and everywhere in the story.
To this absorbing extension of the story then the two volumes of Letters[1] now published by Mr. Sidney Colvin beautifully contribute. The shelf of our library that contains our best letter-writers is considerably14 furnished, but not overcrowded, and its glory is not too great to keep Stevenson from finding there a place with the very first. He will not figure among the writers—those apt in this line to enjoy precedence—to whom only small things happen and who beguile15 us by making the most of them; he belongs to the class who have both matter and manner, substance and spirit, whom life carries swiftly before it and who signal and communicate, not to say gesticulate, as they go. He lived to the topmost pulse, and the last thing that could happen was that he should find himself on any occasion with nothing to report. Of all that he may have uttered on certain occasions we are inevitably16 not here possessed17—a fact that, as I have hinted above, affects us, perversely18, as an inexcusable gap in the story; but he never fails of the thing that we most love letters for, the full expression of the moment and the mood, the actual good or bad or middling, the thing in his head, his heart or his house. Mr. Colvin has given us an admirable “Introduction”—a characterisation of his friend so founded at once on knowledge and on judgment20 that the whole sense of the man strikes us as extracted in it. He has elucidated21 each group or period with notes that leave nothing to be desired; and nothing remains22 that I can think of to thank him for unless the intimation that we may yet look for another volume—which, however much more free it might make us of the author’s mystery, we should accept, I repeat, with the same absence of scruple23. Nothing more belongs to our day than this question of the inviolable, of the rights of privacy and the justice of our claim to aid from editors and other retailers24 in getting behind certain eminent25 or defiant26 appearances; and the general knot so presented is indeed a hard one to untie27. Yet we may take it for a matter regarding which such publications as Mr. Colvin’s have much to suggest.
There is no absolute privacy—save of course when the exposed subject may have wished or endeavoured positively28 to constitute it; and things too sacred are often only things that are not perhaps at all otherwise superlative. One may hold both that people—that artists perhaps in particular—are well advised to cover their tracks, and yet that our having gone behind, or merely stayed before, in a particular case, may be a minor30 question compared with our having picked up a value. Personal records of the type before us can at any rate obviously be but the reverse of a deterrent31 to the urged inquirer. They are too happy an instance—they positively make for the risked indiscretion. Stevenson never covered his tracks, and the tracks prove perhaps to be what most attaches us. We follow them here, from year to year and from stage to stage, with the same charmed sense with which he has made us follow some hunted hero in the heather. Life and fate and an early catastrophe32 were ever at his heels, and when he at last falls fighting, sinks down in the very act of valour, the “happy ending,” as he calls it for some of his correspondents, is, though precipitated33 and not conventional, essentially34 given us.
His descent and his origin all contribute to the picture, which it seems to me could scarce—since we speak of “endings”—have had a better beginning had he himself prearranged it. Without prearrangements indeed it was such a cluster of terms as could never be wasted on him, one of those innumerable matters of “effect,” Scotch35 and other, that helped to fill his romantic consciousness. Edinburgh, in the first place, the “romantic town,” was as much his “own” as it ever was the great precursor’s whom, in “Weir of Hermiston” as well as elsewhere, he presses so hard; and this even in spite of continual absence—in virtue36 of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession. The immediate37 background formed by the profession of his family—the charge of the public lights on northern coasts—was a setting that he could not have seen his way to better; while no less happy a condition was met by his being all lonely in his father’s house—the more that the father, admirably commemorated38 by the son and after his fashion as strongly marked, was antique and strenuous39, and that the son, a genius to be and of frail40 constitution, was (in the words of the charming anecdote41 of an Edinburgh lady retailed42 in one of these volumes), if not exactly what could be called bonny, “pale, penetrating43 and interesting.” The poet in him had from the first to be pacified—temporarily, that is, and from hand to mouth, as is the manner for poets; so that with friction44 and tension playing their part, with the filial relation quite classically troubled, with breaks of tradition and lapses46 from faith, with restless excursions and sombre returns, with the love of life at large mixed in his heart with every sort of local piety47 and passion and the unjustified artist fermenting49 on top of all in the recusant engineer, he was as well started as possible toward the character he was to keep.
All this obviously, however, was the sort of thing that the story the most generally approved would have had at heart to represent as the mere29 wild oats of a slightly uncanny cleverness—as the life handsomely reconciled in time to the common course and crowned, after a fling or two of amusement, with young wedded50 love and civic51 responsibility. The actual story, alas52, was to transcend53 the conventional one, for it happened to be a case of a hero of too long a wind and too well turned out for his part. Everything was right for the discipline of Alan Fairford but that the youth was after all a ph?nix. As soon as it became a case of justifying54 himself for straying—as in the enchanting56 “Inland Voyage” and the “Travels with a Donkey”—how was he to escape doing so with supreme57 felicity? The fascination58 in him from the first is the mixture, and the extraordinary charm of his letters is that they are always showing this. It is the proportions moreover that are so admirable—the quantity of each different thing that he fitted to each other one and to the whole. The free life would have been all his dream if so large a part of it had not been that love of letters, of expression and form, which is but another name for the life of service. Almost the last word about him, by the same law, would be that he had at any rate consummately59 written, were it not that he seems still better characterised by his having at any rate supremely60 lived.
Perpetually and exquisitely61 amusing as he was, his ambiguities62 and compatibilities yielded, for all the wear and tear of them, endless “fun” even to himself; and no one knew so well with what linked diversities he was saddled or, to put it the other way, how many horses he had to drive at once. It took his own delightful6 talk to show how more than absurd it might be, and, if convenient, how very obscurely so, that such an incurable63 rover should have been complicated both with such an incurable scribbler and such an incurable invalid64, and that a man should find himself such an anomaly as a drenched65 yachtsman haunted with “style,” a shameless Bohemian haunted with duty, and a victim at once of the personal hunger and instinct for adventure and of the critical, constructive67, sedentary view of it. He had everything all round—adventure most of all; to feel which we have only to turn from the beautiful flush of it in his text to the scarce less beautiful vision of the great hilltop in Pacific seas to which he was borne after death by islanders and chiefs. Fate, as if to distinguish him as handsomely as possible, seemed to be ever treating him to some chance for an act or a course that had almost nothing in its favour but its inordinate68 difficulty. If the difficulty was in these cases not all the beauty for him it at least never prevented his finding in it—or our finding, at any rate, as observers—so much beauty as comes from a great risk accepted either for an idea or for simple joy. The joy of risks, the more personal the better, was never far from him, any more than the excitement of ideas. The most important step in his life was a signal instance of this, as we may discern in the light of “The Amateur Emigrant” and “Across the Plains,” the report of the conditions in which he fared from England to California to be married. Here as always the great note is the heroic mixture—the thing he saw, morally as well as imaginatively; action and performance at any cost, and the cost made immense by want of health and want of money, illness and anxiety of the extremest kind, and by unsparing sensibilities and perceptions. He had been launched in the world for a fighter with the organism say of a “composer,” though also it must be added with a beautiful saving sanity69.
It is doubtless after his settlement in Samoa that his letters have most to give, but there are things they throw off from the first that strike the note above all characteristic, show his imagination always at play, for drollery70 or philosophy, with his circumstances. The difficulty in writing of him under the personal impression is to suggest enough how directly his being the genius that he was kept counting in it. In 1879 he writes from Monterey to Mr. Edmund Gosse, in reference to certain grave symptoms of illness: “I may be wrong, but . . . I believe I must go. . . . But death is no bad friend; a few aches and gasps71, and we are done; like the truant72 child, I am beginning to grow weary and timid in this big, jostling city, and could run to my nurse, even although she should have to whip me before putting me to bed.” This charming renunciation expresses itself at the very time his talent was growing finer; he was so fond of the sense of youth and the idea of play that he saw whatever happened to him in images and figures, in the terms almost of the sports of childhood. “Are you coming over again to see me some day soon? I keep returning, and now hand over fist, from the realms of Hades. I saw that gentleman between the eyes, and fear him less after each visit. Only Charon and his rough boatmanship I somewhat fear.”
The fear remained with him, sometimes greater, sometimes less, during the first years after his marriage, those spent abroad and in England in health resorts, and it marks constantly, as one may say, one end of the range of his humour—the humour always busy at the other end with the impatience73 of timidities and precautions and the vision and invention of essentially open-air situations. It was the possibility of the open-air situation that at last appealed to him as the cast worth staking all for—on which, as usual in his admirable rashnesses, he was extraordinarily74 justified48. “No man but myself knew all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think I regret my exile. . . . Remember the pallid75 brute76 that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit.”
He found after an extraordinarily adventurous77 quest the treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that enhanced his possibilities; and with this discovery was ushered78 in his completely full and rich period, the time in which—as the wondrous79 whimsicality and spontaneity of his correspondence testify—his genius and his character most overflowed81. He had done as well for himself in his appropriation83 of Samoa as if he had done it for the hero of a novel, only with the complications and braveries actual and palpable. “I have no more hope in anything”—and this in the midst of magnificent production—“than a dead frog; I go into everything with a composed despair, and don’t mind—just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures.” He could go to sea as often as he liked and not be spared such hours as one of these pages vividly84 evokes—those of the joy of fictive composition in an otherwise prostrating85 storm, amid the crash of the elements and with his grasp of his subject but too needfully sacrificed, it might have appeared, to his clutch of seat and ink-stand. “If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse—aye, to be hanged rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.”
He speaks in one of the “Vailima Letters,” Mr. Colvin’s publication of 1895, to which it is an office of these volumes promptly86 to make us return, of one of his fictions as a “long tough yarn87 with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world—not the shoddy sham66 world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man’s life.” That is distinct, and in the same letter he throws off a summary of all that in his final phase satisfied and bribed88 him which is as significant as it is racy. His correspondent, as was inevitable89 now and then for his friends at home, appears to have indulged in one of those harmless pointings of the moral—as to the distant dangers he would court—by which we all were more or less moved to relieve ourselves of the depressed90 consciousness that he could do beautifully without us and that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. There is no romantic life for which something amiable91 has not to be sweepingly92 sacrificed, and of us in our inevitable category the sweep practically was clean.
Your letter had the most wonderful “I told you so” I ever heard in the course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn’t change my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and rumours93 of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit94 peace in Middlesex. I do not quite like politics. I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don’t care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak95 to keep a crowd together—never.
His categories satisfied him; he had got hold of “the world where men still live a man’s life”—which was not, as we have just seen, that of “cities, clubs and colleges.” He was supremely suited in short at last—at the cost, it was to be said, of simplifications of view that, intellectually, he failed quite exactly (it was one of his few limitations) to measure; but in a way that ministered to his rare capacity for growth and placed in supreme relief his affinity96 with the universal romantic. It was not that anything could ever be for him plain sailing, but that he had been able at forty to turn his life into the fairytale of achieving, in a climate that he somewhere describes as “an expurgated heaven,” such a happy physical consciousness as he had never known. This enlarged in every way his career, opening the door still wider to that real puss-in-the-corner game of opposites by which we have critically the interest of seeing him perpetually agitated97. Let me repeat that these new volumes, from the date of his definite expatriation, direct us for the details of the picture constantly to the “Vailima Letters;” with as constant an effect of our thanking our fortune—to say nothing of his own—that he should have had in these years a correspondent and a confidant who so beautifully drew him out. If he possessed in Mr. Sidney Colvin his literary chargé d’affaires at home, the ideal friend and alter ego on whom he could unlimitedly98 rest, this is a proof the more—with the general rarity of such cases—of what it was in his nature to make people wish to do for him. To Mr. Colvin he is more familiar than to any one, more whimsical and natural and frequently more inimitable—of all of which a just notion can be given only by abundant citation99. And yet citation itself is embarrassed, with nothing to guide it but his perpetual spirits, perpetual acuteness and felicity, restlessness of fancy and of judgment. These things make him jump from pole to pole and fairly hum, at times, among the objects and subjects that filled his air, like a charged bee among flowers.
He is never more delightful than when he is most egotistic, most consciously charmed with something he has done.
And the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. I agree with you, the lights seem a little turned down.
When we learn that the articles alluded100 to are those collected in “Across the Plains” we quite assent101 to this impression made by them after a troubled interval102, and envy the author who, in a far Pacific isle103, could see “The Lantern Bearers,” “A Letter to a Young Gentleman” and “Pulvis et Umbra” float back to him as a guarantee of his faculty104 and between covers constituting the book that is to live. Stevenson’s masculine wisdom moreover, his remarkable105 final sanity, is always—and it was not what made least in him for happy intercourse—close to his comedy and next door to his slang.
And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and I believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word “duty,” and be done with the word “reward.” There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that and acts upon it, like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian106, the better for himself.
It would perhaps be difficult to quote a single paragraph giving more than that of the whole of him. But there is abundance of him in this too:
How do journalists fetch up their drivel? . . . It has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! . . . A respectable little five-bob volume, to bloom unread in shop windows. After that I’ll have a spank107 at fiction. And rest? I shall rest in the grave, or when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue to support me! I lost my chance not dying; there seems blooming little fear of it now. I worked close on five hours this morning; the day before, close on nine; and unless I finish myself off with this letter I’ll have another hour and a half, or aiblins twa, before dinner. Poor man, how you must envy me as you hear of these orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord! Colvin, how lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor am fit for any. Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and no more clavers!
If he talked profusely—and this is perfect talk—if he loved to talk above all of his work in hand, it was because, though perpetually frail, he was never inert108, and did a thing, if he did it at all, with passion. He was not fit, he says, for a situation, but a situation overtook him inexorably at Vailima, and doubtless at last indeed swallowed him up. His position, with differences, comparing in some respects smaller things to greater, and with fewer differences after all than likenesses, his position resembles that of Scott at Abbotsford, just as, sound, sensible and strong on each side in spite of the immense gift of dramatic and poetic109 vision, the earlier and the later man had something of a common nature. Life became bigger for each than the answering effort could meet, and in their death they were not divided. Stevenson’s late emancipation110 was a fairytale only because he himself was in his manner a magician. He liked to handle many matters and to shrink from none; nothing can exceed the impression we get of the things that in these years he dealt with from day to day and as they came up, and the things that, as well, almost without order or relief, he planned and invented, took up and talked of and dropped, took up and talked of and carried through. Had I space to treat myself to a clue for selection from the whole record there is nothing I should better like it to be than a tracking of his “literary opinions” and literary projects, the scattered111 swarm112 of his views, sympathies, antipathies113, obiter dicta, as an artist—his flurries and fancies, imaginations, evocations, quick infatuations, as a teller114 of possible tales. Here is a whole little circle of discussion, yet such a circle that to engage one’s self at all is to be too much engulfed115.
His overflow82 on such matters is meanwhile amusing enough as mere spirits and sport—interesting as it would yet be to catch as we might, at different moments, the congruity116 between the manner of his feeling a fable117 in the germ and that of his afterwards handling it. There are passages again and again that light strikingly what I should call his general conscious method in this relation, were I not more tempted118 to call it his conscious—for that is what it seems to come to—negation of method. A whole delightful letter—to Mr. Colvin, February 1, 1892—is a vivid type. (This letter, I may mention, is independently notable for the drollery of its allusion119 to a sense of scandal—of all things in the world—excited in some editorial breast by “The Beach of Falesà;” which leads him to the highly pertinent120 remark that “this is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in it at all.” Then he remembers he had “The Treasure of Franchard” refused as unfit for a family magazine and feels—as well he may—“despair weigh upon his wrists.” The despair haunts him and comes out on another occasion. “Five more chapters of David. . . . All love affair; seems pretty good to me. Will it do for the young person? I don’t know: since the Beach, I know nothing except that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of them than I was fond enough to fancy.”) Always a part of his physiognomy is the play, so particularly salient, of his moral fluctuations121, the way his spirits are upset by his melancholy122 and his grand conclusions by his rueful doubts.
He communicates to his confidant with the eagerness of a boy confabulating in holidays over a Christmas charade123; but I remember no instance of his expressing a subject, as one may say, as a subject—hinting at what novelists mainly know, one would imagine, as the determinant thing in it, the idea out of which it springs. The form, the envelope, is there with him, headforemost, as the idea; titles, names, that is, chapters, sequences, orders, while we are still asking ourselves how it was that he primarily put to his own mind what it was all to be about. He simply felt this, evidently, and it is always the one dumb sound, the stopped pipe or only unexpressed thing, in all his contagious125 candour. He finds none the less in the letter to which I refer one of the problems of the wonderful projected “Sophia Scarlet” “exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his fist—for I have already a better method—the kinetic—whereas he continually allowed himself to be led into the static.” There we have him—Stevenson, not Balzac—at his most overflowing126, and after all radiantly capable of conceiving at another moment that his “better method” would have been none at all for Balzac’s vision of a subject, least of all of the subject, the whole of life. Balzac’s method was adapted to his notion of presentation—which we may accept, it strikes me, under the protection of what he presents. Were it not, in fine, as I may repeat, to embark127 in a bigger boat than would here turn round I might note further that Stevenson has elsewhere—was disposed in general to have—too short a way with this master. There is an interesting passage in which he charges him with having never known what to leave out, a passage which has its bearing on condition of being read with due remembrance of the class of performance to which “Le Colonel Chabert,” for instance, “Le Curé de Tours,” “L’Interdiction,” “La Messe de l’Athée” (to name but a few brief masterpieces in a long list) appertain.
These, however, are comparatively small questions; the impression, for the reader of the later letters, is simply one of singular beauty—of deepening talent, of happier and richer expression, and in especial of an ironic128 desperate gallantry that burns away, with a finer and finer fire, in a strange alien air and is only the more touching129 to us from his own resolute130 consumption of the smoke. He had incurred131 great charges, he sailed a ship loaded to the brim, so that the strain under which he lived and wrought132 was immense; but the very grimness of it all is sunny, slangy, funny, familiar; there is as little of the florid in his flashes of melancholy as of the really grey under stress of his wisdom. This wisdom had sometimes on matters of art, I think, its lapses, but on matters of life it was really winged and inspired. He has a soundness as to questions of the vital connection, a soundness all liberal and easy and born of the manly133 experience, that it is a luxury to touch. There are no compunctions nor real impatiences, for he had in a singular degree got what he wanted, the life absolutely discockneyfied, the situation as romantically “swagger” as if it had been an imagination made real; but his practical anxieties necessarily spin themselves finer, and it is just this production of the thing imagined that has more and more to meet them. It all hung, the situation, by that beautiful golden thread, the swinging of which in the wind, as he spins it in alternate doubt and elation45, we watch with much of the suspense134 and pity with which we sit at the serious drama. It is serious in the extreme; yet the forcing of production, in the case of a faculty so beautiful and delicate, affects us almost as the straining of a nerve or the distortion of a feature.
I sometimes sit and yearn135 for anything in the nature of an income that would come in—mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal136 mind of man. What I want is the income that really comes in of itself, while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs. . . . I should probably amuse myself with works that would make your hair curl, if you had any left.
To read over some of his happiest things, to renew one’s sense of the extraordinarily fine temper of his imagination, is to say to one’s self “What a horse to have to ride every week to market!” We must all go to market, but the most fortunate of us surely are those who may drive thither137, and on days not too frequent, nor by a road too rough, a ruder and homelier animal. He touches in more than one place—and with notable beauty and real authority in that little mine of felicities the “Letter to a Young Gentleman”—on the conscience for “frugality138” which should be the artist’s finest point of honour: so that one of his complications here was undoubtedly139 the sense that on this score his position had inevitably become somewhat false. The literary romantic is by no means necessarily expensive, but of the many ways in which the practical, the active, has to be paid for this departure from frugality would be, it is easy to conceive, not the least. And we perceive his recognising this as he recognised everything—if not in time, then out of it; accepting inconsistency, as he always did, with the gaiety of a man of courage—not being, that is, however intelligent, priggish for logic140 and the grocer’s book any more than for anything else. Only everything made for keeping it up, and it was a great deal to keep up; though when he throws off “The Ebb-Tide” and rises to “Catriona,” and then again to “Weir of Hermiston,” as if he could rise to almost anything, we breathe anew and look longingly141 forward. The latest of these letters contain such admirable things, testify so to the reach of his intelligence and in short vibrate so with genius and charm, that we feel him at moments not only unexhausted but replenished142, and capable perhaps, for all we know to the contrary, of new experiments and deeper notes. The intelligence and attention are so fine that he misses nothing from unawareness143; not a gossamer144 thread of the “thought of the time” that, wafted145 to him on the other side of the globe, may not be caught in a branch and played with; he puts such a soul into nature and such human meanings, for comedy and tragedy, into what surrounds him, however shabby or short, that he really lives in society by living in his own perceptions and generosities146 or, as we say nowadays, his own atmosphere. In this atmosphere—which seems to have had the gift of abounding147 the more it was breathed by others—these pages somehow prompt us to see almost every object on his tropic isle bathed and refreshed.
So far at any rate from growing thin for want of London he can transmit to London or to its neighbourhood communications such as it would scarce know otherwise where to seek. A letter to his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, of September 1894, touches so on all things and, as he would himself have said, so adorns149 them, brimming over with its happy extravagance of thought, that, far again from our feeling Vailima, in the light of it, to be out of the world, it strikes us that the world has moved for the time to Vailima. There is world enough everywhere, he quite unconsciously shows, for the individual, the right one, to be what we call a man of it. He has, like every one not convenienced with the pleasant back-door of stupidity, to make his account with seeing and facing more things, seeing and facing everything, with the unrest of new impressions and ideas, the loss of the fond complacencies of youth.
But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim124 obliterated150 polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy151 and orgiastic—or m?nadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and “I could wish my days to be bound each to each” by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and whether I wish it or not. . . . I remember very well your attitude to life—this conventional surface of it. You have none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial ficelles of the business; it is simian152; but that is how the wild youth of man is captured.
The whole letter is enchanting.
But no doubt there is something great in the half success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional region Bald Conduct without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it’s dreary153! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron “gentleman” and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short.
The last letter of all, it will have been abundantly noted154, has, with one of those characteristically thrown-out references to himself that were always half a whim80, half a truth and all a picture, a remarkable premonition. It is addressed to Mr. Edmond Gosse.
It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to be done. But for my part, give me a roaring toothache! I do like to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation155. I was not born for age. . . . I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted156 youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend157 the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is a precipice158. . . . You can never write another dedication159 that can give the same pleasure to the vanished Tusitala.
Two days later he met his end in the happiest form, by the straight swift bolt of the gods. It was, as all his readers know, with an admirable unfinished thing in hand, scarce a quarter written—a composition as to which his hopes were, presumably with much justice and as they were by no means always, of the highest. Nothing is more interesting than the rich way in which, in “Weir of Hermiston” and “Catriona,” the predominant imaginative Scot reasserts himself after gaps and lapses, distractions160 and deflections superficially extreme. There are surely few backward jumps of this energy more joyous161 and à pieds joints162, or of a kind more interesting to a critic. The imaginative vision is hungry and tender just in proportion as the actual is otherwise beset163; so that we must sigh always in vain for the quality that this purified flame, as we call it, would have been able to give the metal. And how many things for the critic the case suggests—how many possible reflections cluster about it and seem to take light from it! It was “romance” indeed, “Weir of Hermiston,” we feel, as we see it only grow in assurance and ease when the reach to it over all the spaces becomes more positively artificial. The case is literary to intensity164, and, given the nature of the talent, only thereby165 the more beautiful: he embroiders166 in silk and silver—in defiance167 of climate and nature, of every near aspect, and with such another antique needle as was nowhere, least of all in those latitudes168, to be bought—in the intervals169 of wondrous international and insular170 politics and of fifty material cares and complications. His special stock of association, most personal style and most unteachable trick fly away again to him like so many strayed birds to nest, each with the flutter in its beak171 of some scrap172 of document or legend, some fragment of picture or story, to be retouched, revarnished and reframed.
These things he does with a gusto, moreover, for which it must be granted that his literary treatment of the islands and the island life had ever vainly waited. Curious enough that his years of the tropics and his fraternity with the natives never drew from him any such “rendered” view as might have been looked for in advance. For the absent and vanished Scotland he has the image—within the limits (too narrow ones we may perhaps judge) admitted by his particular poetic; but the law of these things in him was, as of many others, amusingly, conscientiously173 perverse19. The Pacific, in which he materially delighted, made him “descriptively” serious and even rather dry; with his own country, on the other hand, materially impossible, he was ready to tread an endless measure. He easily sends us back again here to our vision of his mixture. There was only one thing on earth that he loved as much as literature—which was the total absence of it; and to the present, the immediate, whatever it was, he always made the latter offering. Samoa was susceptible174 of no “style”—none of that, above all, with which he was most conscious of an affinity—save the demonstration175 of its rightness for life; and this left the field abundantly clear for the Border, the Great North Road and the eighteenth century. I have been reading over “Catriona” and “Weir” with the purest pleasure with which we can follow a man of genius—that of seeing him abound148 in his own sense. In “Weir” especially, like an improvising176 pianist, he superabounds and revels177, and his own sense, by a happy stroke, appeared likely never more fully7 and brightly to justify55 him; to have become even in some degree a new sense, with new chords and possibilities. It is the “old game,” but it is the old game that he exquisitely understands. The figure of Hermiston is creative work of the highest order, those of the two Kirsties, especially that of the elder, scarce less so; and we ache for the loss of a thing which could give out such touches as the quick joy, at finding herself in falsehood, of the enamoured girl whose brooding elder brother has told her that as soon as she has a lover she will begin to lie (“?‘Will I have gotten my jo now?’ she thought with secret rapture”); or a passage so richly charged with imagination as that in which the young lover recalls her as he has first seen and desired her, seated at grey of evening on an old tomb in the moorland and unconsciously making him think, by her scrap of song, both of his mother, who sang it and whom he has lost, and
of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their descendants, who lingered a little in their places and would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that, in all ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs178 were made ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
It is not a tribute that Stevenson would at all have appreciated, but I may not forbear noting how closely such a page recalls many another in the tenderest manner of Pierre Loti. There would not, compared, be a pin to choose between them. How, we at all events ask ourselves as we consider “Weir,” could he have kept it up?—while the reason for which he didn’t reads itself back into his text as a kind of beautiful rash divination179 in him that he mightn’t have to. Among prose fragments it stands quite alone, with the particular grace and sanctity of mutilation worn by the marble morsels180 of masterwork in another art. This and the other things of his best he left; but these things, lovely as, on rereading many of them at the suggestion of his Correspondence, they are, are not the whole, nor more than the half, of his abiding181 charm. The finest papers in “Across the Plains,” in “Memories and Portraits,” in “Virginibus Puerisque,” stout182 of substance and supremely silver of speech, have both a nobleness and a nearness that place them, for perfection and roundness, above his fictions, and that also may well remind a vulgarised generation of what, even under its nose, English prose can be. But it is bound up with his name, for our wonder and reflection, that he is something other than the author of this or that particular beautiful thing, or of all such things together. It has been his fortune (whether or no the greatest that can befall a man of letters) to have had to consent to become, by a process not purely183 mystic and not wholly untraceable—what shall we call it?—a Figure. Tracing is needless now, for the personality has acted and the incarnation is full. There he is—he has passed ineffaceably into happy legend. This case of the figure is of the rarest and the honour surely of the greatest. In all our literature we can count them, sometimes with the work and sometimes without. The work has often been great and yet the figure nil184. Johnson was one, and Goldsmith and Byron; and the two former moreover not in any degree, like Stevenson, in virtue of the element of grace. Was it this element that fixed185 the claim even for Byron? It seems doubtful; and the list at all events as we approach our own day shortens and stops. Stevenson has it at present—may we not say?—pretty well to himself, and it is not one of the scrolls186 in which he least will live.
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1
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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inconveniently
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| ad.不方便地 | |
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outright
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| adv.坦率地；彻底地；立即；adj.无疑的；彻底的 | |
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ego
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| n.自我，自己，自尊 | |
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delightfully
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| 大喜，欣然 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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allayed
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| v.减轻，缓和( allay的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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consecration
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| n.供献，奉献，献祭仪式 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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penetrate
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| v.透(渗)入；刺入，刺穿；洞察，了解 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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posthumous
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| adj.遗腹的；父亡后出生的；死后的，身后的 | |
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considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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beguile
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| vt.欺骗，消遣 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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perversely
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| adv. 倔强地 | |
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19
perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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21
elucidated
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| v.阐明，解释( elucidate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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retailers
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| 零售商，零售店( retailer的名词复数 ) | |
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eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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defiant
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| adj.无礼的，挑战的 | |
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untie
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| vt.解开，松开；解放 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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deterrent
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| n.阻碍物，制止物；adj.威慑的，遏制的 | |
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32
catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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33
precipitated
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| v.（突如其来地）使发生( precipitate的过去式和过去分词 )；促成；猛然摔下；使沉淀 | |
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34
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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35
scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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commemorated
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| v.纪念，庆祝( commemorate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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40
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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anecdote
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| n.轶事，趣闻，短故事 | |
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42
retailed
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| vt.零售（retail的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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43
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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44
friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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45
elation
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| n.兴高采烈，洋洋得意 | |
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46
lapses
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| n.失误，过失( lapse的名词复数 )；小毛病；行为失检；偏离正道v.退步( lapse的第三人称单数 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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47
piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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48
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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49
fermenting
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| v.（使）发酵( ferment的现在分词 )；（使）激动；骚动；骚扰 | |
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50
wedded
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| adj.正式结婚的；渴望…的，执著于…的v.嫁，娶，（与…）结婚( wed的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
civic
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| adj.城市的，都市的，市民的，公民的 | |
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52
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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53
transcend
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| vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围 | |
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54
justifying
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| 证明…有理( justify的现在分词 )； 为…辩护； 对…作出解释； 为…辩解（或辩护） | |
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55
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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56
enchanting
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| a.讨人喜欢的 | |
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57
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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58
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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59
consummately
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| adv.完成地，至上地 | |
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60
supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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61
exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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62
ambiguities
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| n.歧义( ambiguity的名词复数 )；意义不明确；模棱两可的意思；模棱两可的话 | |
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63
incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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invalid
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| n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的 | |
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65
drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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66
sham
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| n./adj.假冒(的)，虚伪(的) | |
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constructive
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| adj.建设的，建设性的 | |
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inordinate
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| adj.无节制的；过度的 | |
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69
sanity
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| n.心智健全，神智正常，判断正确 | |
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70
drollery
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| n.开玩笑，说笑话；滑稽可笑的图画（或故事、小戏等） | |
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71
gasps
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| v.喘气( gasp的第三人称单数 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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72
truant
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| n.懒惰鬼，旷课者；adj.偷懒的，旷课的，游荡的；v.偷懒，旷课 | |
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73
impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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pallid
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| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
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76
brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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ushered
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| v.引，领，陪同( usher的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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wondrous
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| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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80
whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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81
overflowed
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| 溢出的 | |
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82
overflow
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| v.(使)外溢，(使)溢出；溢出，流出，漫出 | |
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83
appropriation
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| n.拨款，批准支出 | |
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84
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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85
prostrating
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| v.使俯伏，使拜倒( prostrate的现在分词 )；（指疾病、天气等）使某人无能为力 | |
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86
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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87
yarn
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| n.纱，纱线，纺线；奇闻漫谈，旅行轶事 | |
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88
bribed
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| v.贿赂( bribe的过去式和过去分词 )；向（某人）行贿，贿赂 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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depressed
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| adj.沮丧的，抑郁的，不景气的，萧条的 | |
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91
amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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92
sweepingly
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| adv.扫荡地 | |
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93
rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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94
decrepit
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| adj.衰老的，破旧的 | |
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95
sneak
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| vt.潜行(隐藏,填石缝)；偷偷摸摸做；n.潜行；adj.暗中进行 | |
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affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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agitated
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| adj.被鼓动的，不安的 | |
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98
unlimitedly
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| 无限地，无例外地 | |
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99
citation
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| n.引用，引证，引用文；传票 | |
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100
alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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101
assent
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| v.批准，认可；n.批准，认可 | |
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102
interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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103
isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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104
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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105
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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106
barbarian
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| n.野蛮人；adj.野蛮(人)的；未开化的 | |
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107
spank
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| v.打，拍打(在屁股上) | |
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108
inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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109
poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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110
emancipation
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| n.（从束缚、支配下）解放 | |
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111
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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112
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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113
antipathies
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| 反感( antipathy的名词复数 )； 引起反感的事物； 憎恶的对象； （在本性、倾向等方面的）不相容 | |
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114
teller
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| n.银行出纳员；(选举)计票员 | |
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115
engulfed
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| v.吞没，包住( engulf的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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116
congruity
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| n.全等，一致 | |
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117
fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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118
tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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119
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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120
pertinent
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| adj.恰当的；贴切的；中肯的；有关的；相干的 | |
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121
fluctuations
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| 波动，涨落，起伏( fluctuation的名词复数 ) | |
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122
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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123
charade
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| n.用动作等表演文字意义的字谜游戏 | |
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124
prim
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| adj.拘泥形式的，一本正经的；n.循规蹈矩，整洁；adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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125
contagious
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| adj.传染性的，有感染力的 | |
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126
overflowing
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| n. 溢出物,溢流 adj. 充沛的，充满的 动词overflow的现在分词形式 | |
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127
embark
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| vi.乘船，着手，从事，上飞机 | |
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128
ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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129
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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130
resolute
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| adj.坚决的，果敢的 | |
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131
incurred
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| [医]招致的，遭受的； incur的过去式 | |
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132
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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133
manly
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| adj.有男子气概的；adv.男子般地，果断地 | |
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134
suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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135
yearn
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| v.想念；怀念；渴望 | |
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136
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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137
thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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138
frugality
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| n.节约，节俭 | |
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139
undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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140
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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141
longingly
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| adv. 渴望地 热望地 | |
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142
replenished
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| 补充( replenish的过去式和过去分词 )； 重新装满 | |
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143
unawareness
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| 不知觉；不察觉；不意；不留神 | |
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144
gossamer
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| n.薄纱，游丝 | |
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145
wafted
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| v.吹送，飘送，（使）浮动( waft的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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146
generosities
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| n.慷慨( generosity的名词复数 )；大方；宽容；慷慨或宽容的行为 | |
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147
abounding
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| adj.丰富的，大量的v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的现在分词 ) | |
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148
abound
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| vi.大量存在；(in，with)充满，富于 | |
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149
adorns
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| 装饰，佩带( adorn的第三人称单数 ) | |
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150
obliterated
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| v.除去( obliterate的过去式和过去分词 )；涂去；擦掉；彻底破坏或毁灭 | |
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151
bawdy
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| adj.淫猥的，下流的；n.粗话 | |
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152
simian
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| adj.似猿猴的；n.类人猿，猴 | |
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153
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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154
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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155
meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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156
blighted
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| adj.枯萎的，摧毁的 | |
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157
descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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158
precipice
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| n.悬崖，危急的处境 | |
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159
dedication
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| n.奉献，献身，致力，题献，献辞 | |
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160
distractions
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| n.使人分心的事[人]( distraction的名词复数 )；娱乐，消遣；心烦意乱；精神错乱 | |
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161
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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162
joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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163
beset
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| v.镶嵌；困扰，包围 | |
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164
intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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165
thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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166
embroiders
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| v.（在织物上）绣花( embroider的第三人称单数 )；刺绣；对…加以渲染（或修饰）；给…添枝加叶 | |
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167
defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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168
latitudes
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| 纬度 | |
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169
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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170
insular
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| adj.岛屿的，心胸狭窄的 | |
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171
beak
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| n.鸟嘴，茶壶嘴，钩形鼻 | |
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172
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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173
conscientiously
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| adv.凭良心地；认真地，负责尽职地；老老实实 | |
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174
susceptible
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| adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的 | |
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175
demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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176
improvising
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| 即兴创作（improvise的现在分词形式） | |
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177
revels
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| n.作乐( revel的名词复数 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉v.作乐( revel的第三人称单数 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉 | |
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178
pangs
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| 突然的剧痛( pang的名词复数 )； 悲痛 | |
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179
divination
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| n.占卜，预测 | |
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180
morsels
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| n.一口( morsel的名词复数 )；（尤指食物）小块，碎屑 | |
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181
abiding
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| adj.永久的，持久的，不变的 | |
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183
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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184
nil
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| n.无，全无，零 | |
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185
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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186
scrolls
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| n.（常用于录写正式文件的）纸卷( scroll的名词复数 )；卷轴；涡卷形（装饰）；卷形花纹v.（电脑屏幕上）从上到下移动（资料等），卷页( scroll的第三人称单数 )；（似卷轴般）卷起；（像展开卷轴般地）将文字显示于屏幕 | |
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