matter that he offers no new gospel like Tolstoi, no half-hearted questioning of old conventions like Robert Elsmerr? What matter that he lays bare
no such deplorable abysses as Zola or George
Meredith ? or that he compounds no scientific pill
with his gilt gingerbread as does Jules Verne ? We
enjoy our leisure moments more because of him.
That is all — and it is sufficient.
Stevenson's writings are in the most rigid sense of the words pure literature. They exhibit no in- tention of informing or of reforming. The unwary reader for enjoyment's sake has no need to skip pages of didactics, for no moral lurks in his tales. When he has told his story he is done. And in an age when so much that is written smacks of the platform and the pulpit; when men write with shaky reasoning and slipshod rhetoric, in half vain appeal to the gallery ; when every story is rounded off" by concession to popular conventions. It is well to have in some few writers the courage to write as they see and feel, and to leave the lessons to take care of themselves. For those who are called to such high exercise, moral teaching is at once entirely appropriate and efficacious ; but when a work of the imagination is in question it is well to have it neat. Stevenson has in fuller measure than perliaps any writer of his time the gift of quaint and vigorous expression, and of that intellectual dexterity which makes possible artistic treatment of the commonplace. In large grasp of psychological, moral, or social problems he is entirely wanting. This is not by way of blame but by way of praise, for the devotee of belles lettres has little dealing with psycliology, or morals, or soci- ology. He dips into these and takes his data from them ; but his method is, of necessity, too liglit for their serious treatment. He has not interest enough in them to pursue them to the bitter end, the end of a hopeless pyrrhonism. He looks at their humorous side, compels you to laugh at them with him, and quickly gives them the go-by. Life, he says, is a jovial business, why should we depress ourselves with its tragedies ? We need not hunt for them. They thrust themselves upon us. We need not look for them in books. There, even death must be invested with a certain grim humour. Wlio would go to a concert to hear a funeral march ? The strain of Stevenson's writing is life, sensuous life, full to the brim of all the enjoyment it brings. Our cynic writer knows all the while it is a leaky chalice. Never mind, ' Fate 's a fiddler, life's a dance.' The daylight brings sorrow, to be sure, but that is only a rest in the measure. Of this epicureanism, whole- some or not as the reader's palate may discover, there is much in Stevenson. He is a kind of modern Omar Khayyam without Omar's intrusive inquisitive- ness. The humour of the moment, the boisterous jollity of dancing peasants at a village Jlte, the stars glancing through the trees over a night bivouac, the forest pines with their spires marking off a little sky map, the eerie sensation of intimate contact with nature, these are described so vividly that one enters entirely into their spirit. And in the power to compel this lies art. It is the power of literature pure and simple. It is art for art's sake. To others it may appear very thin, destitute of high ideals and all that. For these one must go elsewhere than to Stevenson. He is not a clown, but he is there to amuse, and to do that alone. Let those who are called to it preach penance, and to practise it — to each other. We, writer and reader, are comfortable bourgeois. We have a leisure hour in the evening after our shops are shut, or after we have laid down our pen, and after we have sent off our workers, poor tilings, to their hovels, which some day perliaps we may have a look at. Dismissing even this maudlin and inept benevolence, we sit by our cosy fire with nothing in the world to plague us, curtained round and crowded about with aids to om- aesthetic perception, let us have Steven- son to our humour, and Fate is a fiddler, life a dance. But without this elimination of the disagree- able, and without Stevenson and his kind, the cultivators of the belles lettres, this would not be so. Life would hardly be what it is without this leisure and this luxury. For those then who have imagina- tion enough to dispense with aesthetic aids, for those who have the aids without the imagination, and for the rare and precious species who have them both, the belles lettres are designed. For those who have neither leisure nor luxury, and for those who cannot afford to do without them, the belles lettres are as sounding brass. Stevenson confesses all this with perfectly cynical frankness. He at any rate is under no delusions about his public. He scorns it with the scorn that it likes and pays for. With the self-abnegation of a man who is careless of immortality, he is willing to disregard the fate of his own writings, and to give a slap in the face to his readers. There is a bright little passage in one of his recent essays,^ on the impossibility of gratitude and cliarity, and the futility of expecting that the ' deserving poor ' will take alms from the undeserving rich, in order to relieve them from the embarrassment of sticking in the needle's eye. ' Oh let him ' (' the belly-god Burgess ') ' stick, by aU means ; and let his polity tumble in the dust ; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form
Beggars,' Scribner's Magazine, March 1888.
