R. L. STEVENSON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23687, 20 December 1938, Page 4

R. L. STEVENSON

TRIBUTES IN EDINBURGH MEAT MESSAGE TO SCOTLAND (FitoM Our Own Correspondent) (By Air Mail) LONDON, Nov. 17. At the annual dinner of the Robert Louis Stevenson Club, Edinburgh, an appeal was made by the chairman, Mr F. A. Hardy, that Edinburgh Corporation should endow Stevenson's birthplace in Howard Place, in view of its interest and importance to the city. The house, he said, attracted -a great many people from overseas, and it should not be left to a private club to keep the house open and in repair. There were displayed at the dinner a picture of Stevenson dictating the last few lines that he wrote of "Weir of Hermiston," a play bill, sent to the club by Miss Rosaline Masson, showing the name of R. L. Stevenson in the part of " a messenger" in the play "Deianira," and as Sir Charles ' Pomander in "Art of Nature," the plays being given on May 21, 22, and 23, 1877, at 3 Great Stuart street. Lord Tweedsmuir, honorary vicepresident of the club, had asked the chairman to convey his greetings, and to say how glad he was to find Stevenson still had so many admirers in Edinburgh. Mr Lewis Spence spoke of Steven-son's-charm. Stevenson was the first lowland Scot to accept the gospel of graciousness as a thing natural and understood, to approach it in a European sense. From the time of the reign of James 111 the first of the Kings who tried to Europeanise Scotland, she had been waiting for such a man. . ~ People up to 50. the speaker noticed, took to Stevenson as thirsty horses do to water; the younger generation accepted him as a natural product of the a/fe; the old folks regarded him as one of these old genii with whom it was not meet for serious people to have ado. '"And thousands read him merely because he belonged to Edinburgh, and seemingly for no other reason. Stevenson was a man in whom an enormous accumulation of juvenile dreaming and wishing issued, and eventuated in one of the most amazing bodies of romantic fiction the world has ever witnessed—amazing chiefly for one thing, for the utter and absolute success with which it brought tbgether the probable and the fantastically imaginative. Indeed, no other writer has so famously succeeded in a task which, until the end of fiction, will always remain its prime and sovereign perplexity. MATERIAL AND SIDEREAL WORLDS "Stevenson," continued Mr Spence, "was a man of two worlds of this, the material, and of the other, that sidereal world of which we know so little, guess so much, and so wistfully await trustworthy information. The bruit and desire of it runs through all his work; you get the impression of spirit as clearly, as boldly, as you do of matter* Frequently, when reading him, and as in the case of Poe, or the ballads, you ex§erience that sensation as when hearing great and thrilling music, as of standing with a foot in either plane, a sensation never experi-enced-unless in literature the terrestrial body of which is suffused or overlaid by; the spiritual sense. He was exceedingly sure of his position, and not even Henley, out of the majesty of true corpulence, could bully him put of that assurance. He knew from the first. By a very long way he is the . chief artist in letters ever produced by Scotland. , . THE LITERARY ST. COLUMBA "So far as his prose goes, Stevenson was the forerunner of effect in modern British fiction. Stevenson's sense of propriety in verbal technique was measured by an ear attuned to nuances so sharp, so delicate; so refined past the ordinary as to be in many passages almost rapturously keen and divine. Stevenson's great message to Scotland was one of artistic civilisation. He was the literary St. Columba of modern Scotland—of us, and yet not of us. TWo men before him had played this role, in part and imperfectly, because of that fatal and savage circumstance, that something barbaric in us which has always so heavily weighted the dice against art in our grudging norland—King James HI and Gawain Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, son of Archibald Bell-the-Cat. ... "As for Stevenson. Scotland had never produced an artist so conscious, so vivid, so.supremely and successfully skilful. Only his broadest effects were comprehended even by the most perspicacious in his own day. Indeed, he is only to be assessed; by a mind of first-rate critical capacity, and innate fraternal sympathy, let us say by a Villiers de l'lsle Adam or a Swinburne, or a.Francis Thompson, certainly not by people with heather between their toes/for there is something Latin suave in his utterance, something disciplined to music, which must charm all cosmopolites. '•'..'' •HUMANITY COMPELLING . AFFECTION "Had Stevenson been the greatest 4 of dunces instead of the most polished of wits, one quality, alone would have brpught him distinction—that immense and sometimes unrelieved quality of charm, a charm so expressive and occasionally oppressive that it illumines every lane down which he chooses to stroll, oft an with a blinding superfluitv of light. This quality, especially in its degree -of qualntness, has had effects little short of marvellous in .one particular quered and made captive for a quarter oi a century the entire literature of the < United States of America, a nation peculiarly susceptible to charm. It is something only partly contributory, I think, to his gift of enchantment proper, a smooth personal intimacy and familiarity, a bland and caressing humanity which compels affection. Not a novel, not a film of note pro: duced in the America of 1897 to, say, 1920 but reflects it. or bravely essays its reflection. To place an entire nation under such obligation and tribute is surely an immense achievement. "The great tragedy of Stevenson's brief life is, to me at least, the unfinished chronicle in fiction of Edinburgh., We may perhaps be justified in believing that he meditated a series of tales dealing with Edinburgh. We know that the enchantment of his native city was strong upon him in his last years. If ever a man was born to sing the saga of a city in that species of legend which mimics truth and which we call romance, it was this man. To dissociate Stevenson from Edinburgh is as impossible as to dissociate Balzac from Paris. " The Scottish artist in letters reveres and worships Scott, he loves and is amazed by Burns, but he recognises Stevenson as his natural master, because he is both an inspired and a practical mentor. He has bequeathed an imperishable lesson and secret—the secret of displaying the runes of profound human intention in seemingly unv-'-nished story, of making human thought and action a part of that enchantment which is an. No matter how profoundly he has stirred and amazed you. of this be abundantly sure —that he has not stirred and amazed you according to or past his worthiness. No writer, living or dead, stands before us to-day so vivid with the hues and colours of life and achievement, accomplished and still to be accomplished., as does Robert Louis Stevenson." SO FOND OF BIRTHDAYS Miss Mansoh. replying to the toast of "The Guests," said that during the speeches she had seen those dark, slanting, far-apart, eyes, full of love and light, looking down upon them, perhaps with a little pleased vanity in them. Was it not possible that the spirit of Louis Stevenson had been present among them? If that wandering spirit were set .free, where on earth would it find itself but in this Edinburgh of ours, which he loved so passionately, and on what day would he come but on his birthday, he who was so fond of birthdays?