ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: AN APPRECIATION.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue VII, 16 February 1895, Page 151

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: AN APPRECIATION.

BY

EDMUND GOSSE.

The blow which we have so long been awaiting has fallen at last, and has found us unprepared. The most gracious, the most romantic, figure in the recent history of English literatuie is with the beautiful figures of the past; he is with Montaigne, with Goldsmith, with Charles Lamb. His long exile in a tropical land whence bis utterances came spasmodically, and whither reply to them was vague and uncertain. has broken the shock to us in some measure. Samoa seemed like an antechamber to the unknown region into which he at last has vanished. Yet, and to the vast public surely in particular, this picturesque and inaccessible remoteness only added to tbe sense of his greatness — only added a fortunate mystery to his unquestioned supremacy. He seemed to loom enormous from those odorous highlands under the Equator. He brought them within the circle of civilised intelligence. He departs, like Moses, buried unseen at the top of a high mountain, and tbe Pacific Islands fade again out of our interest. He is no longer Tusitala, the teller of tales to a clan of feathered chieftains ; be is brought back to English literature, to the noble and immortal generations of the vocal dead, who speak to us still in our own tongue, and among whom his clear voice will be heard so long as our English race endures. It is natural to ask, at this first moment, why it is that the writer of a few unambitious romances, of a few short essays, of some brief studies in poetry and in biography, should to-day be mourned throughout the Anglo-Saxon world as perhaps no Englishman of letters, cut off before old age. has been mourned since Dickens died ? The question seems to find its answer in the fact that consummate style is still, even in this confused and burdened age of ours, the key to universal sympathy. In the course of the ages there have been in every nation and language a few to whom the gift has been given, in extraordinary fulness, of expressing a human nature of peculiar sweetness and tenderness in language so appropriate and exact, so delicate and fresh, that all that is best in the imperfect lives of others has recognized m it an ideal and has hung upon its utterances. This, surely, is the extremity of literary charm ; and if this charm has ever been possessed by a writer, it was possessed by Stevenson. In him, more than in anyone his contemporary, style, in this truest sense, was predominant; for, in every page that he wrote at his best, bis own individuality stands revealed, pure, simple, impassioned, and tremulous with awe and pity. No character in tbe public arena of to-day could bear that scrutiny which is now so inevitable better than Stevenson. Those who have known him longest and most intimately are best aware how exquisite his personal conduct has been. Whatever leaps to light, we have to dread nothing which will lessen bis good name. He has been the very Galahad of letters. When he was struggling and unknown, as some of us remember him, he was always modest, gay and loyal, always respectful to accomplished meric, always merry under defeat, always pathetically grateful for each crumb of success. When celebrity came upon him, his modesty knew no abatement; be never * took himself seriously,’ never adopted pontifical airs, never lapsed into the fatuous egotism of tbe ordinary popular favourite. In the old happy times, when we knew him first, he was always to be discovered in any company, with hand gallantly on hip, his smiling oval face courteously bended, entertaining and drawing out the least attractive or the shyest person present. As in private obscurity, so in tbe blaze of adulation and publicity, he never seemed conscious that he was any one, but always displayed a strenuous wish to please ; and I suppose more dull and foolish persons have been charmed by him than by any genius now living. What the morals of literature have missed and now finally lose in tbe removal of Stevenson cannot easily be computed. He was so jovial and mercurial that no one could think him priggish, so playful that no one could regard him as a preacher, yet all his nature was founded on a faith in the reasonable virtues. In judgment he may often have seemed in error, but it was never tbe result of violent prejudice or of an ugly acrimony. He was interpenetrated with sympathy—he was doubtless without a rival in the wholesome fulness of this quality—and be tested men and things from tbe sympathetic point of view. Hence resulted some of the little volte faces which sometimes annoyed us, tbe tendency to be judge one moment and prisoner’s counsel the next; he judged because a tide of righteous wrath swept through him, he repented because he realised the prisoner’s standpoint. The conflict between, as the preachers say, his hatred of the sin and bis love of the sinner led sometimes to comical vagaries. The whole business of the * Father Damien ’ pamphlet was an instance which is almost public already. It is impossible at this crisis, in our estimation of him, to look steadily at the body of work which he has left behind him. By a pathetic and almost sinister accident, the first volume of a completed edition appeared but a week or two ago. It was the crowning distinction of bis life, and it is sad to know that the beautiful book in which began his academic immortality, as one may put it, cannot have been in time to reach his hands. It put forth his claims to our admiration in the most handsome terms, for it exhibited him to us in tbe dress which, in all probability, is that in which posterity will know him best. ‘ The great English novelist,’ the newspapers were calling him yesterday ; but he was scarcely that. In the true sense, of course, be never published a novel. A writer of tales for boys be used to call himself, and we must not forget that an element of the ephemeral inevitably clings to the most rousing and the most effective stories of mere adventure. Especially was this true when, as in ‘ Catriona,’ he was obliged by the exigencies of the form he adopted to speak through the mouth of another. We followed him always with delight ; but we grudged tbe imitative voice, the absence of the direct Stevensonian statement. But the first volume of the collected edition—and, as it happens, most felicitously—reveals him in his best character, as an essayist. The vain superlative is much to be deprecated ; but if Stevenson is not the most exquisite of the English essayists, we know not to whom that praise is due. He has, indeed, one rival, not of onr race or speech. By instinct the name of Montaigne flies to our lips ; and here, indeed, a richer personality seems expressed with greater suppleness, variety, and independence. A more i’yrrhonian temperament, no doubt, was precisely what Stevenson’s Puritan nature needed most. But, after Montaigne, who is there to be named who has expressed in more exquisite abandonment a nature more ingenious and more human !