Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 4

have enjoyed coming to his own funeral. Of course, even
this generalisation is too much of a simplification. He was not, as we
shall later have occasion to note, unacquainted with sombre nor, alas,
with sordid surroundings. Oscar Wilde said with some truth that
Stevenson might have produced yet richer and more purple romances if
he had always lived in Gower Street; and he was certainly one of the
very few who have managed to feel fierce and adventurous at
Bournemouth. But broadly speaking, it is true that the outline of his life
was romantic; and was therefore perhaps too easily turned into a
romance. He himself deliberately turned it into a romance; but not all
those romancing were such good romancers as he. So the romance
tended to turn into mere repetition and gossip; and the romantic figure
faded into journalism as the figure of Robin Hood faded into endless
penny dreadfuls or schoolboy serials; as the figure of Micawber was
multiplied and cheapened into Ally Sloper. Then came the reaction; a
reaction which I should call rather excusable than justifiable. But that
reaction is the problem in any Popular treatment of him to-day.
Now if I were to follow here the natural course of such a volume as this,
I should have to begin by telling slowly and systematically the tale that
I have just told rapidly and briefly. I should have to give a chapter to
his childhood, to his favourite aunt and his yet more beloved nurse, and
to all the things much more clearly recorded in A Child's Garden of
Verses. I should have to give a chapter to his youth, his differences
with his father, his struggles with his malady, his greater struggles
about his marriage; working up slowly through the whole length of the
book to the familiar picture of so many magazines and memoirs; the
slender semi-tropical Tusitala with his long brown hair and long olive
face and long strange slits of eyes, sitting clad in white or crowned with

garlands and telling tales to all the tribes of men. Now the misfortune
of all this would be that it would amount to saying, through a slow
series of chapters, that there is nothing more to be said about Stevenson
except what has been said a thousand times. It would be to suggest that
Stevenson's serious fame does still really depend on this string of
picturesque accidents; and that there is really nothing to be told of him,
except that he wore long hair in the Savile Club or light clothes in the
Samoan mountains. His life really was romantic; but to repeat that
romance is like reprinting the Scarlet Pimpernel or offering the world
an entirely new portrait of Rudolph Valentino. It is against this
repetition that the reaction has set in; perhaps wrongly but certainly
strongly. And to spin it out through the whole of this book would be to
give the impression (which I should mildly resent) that this book is
only the thousandth unnecessary volume of Stevensoniana. However I
told his story in detail, though it were with all the sympathy I feel, I
could not avoid that suggestion of a sort of jaded journalism.
Stevenson's picturesque attitude and career are rather in his way at this
moment; not for me, because I like the picturesque, but for this new
pose which may be called the pose of the prosaic. To these unfortunate
realists, to say that there were all these romantic things about him is
only another way of saying that there was nothing in him. And there
was a very great deal in him. I am driven to adopt some other method
of bringing it out.
When I come to describing it, I find it is perhaps even more difficult to
describe it than to do it. But something of this sort is what I propose to
do. Loudon Dodd, in whom there is much of Louis Stevenson, says
very truly in The Wrecker, that for the artist the external result is
always a fizzle: his eyes are turned inward: "he lives for a state of
mind." I mean to attempt the conjectural description of certain states of
mind, with the books that were the "external expression" of them. If for
the artist his art is a fizzle, his life is often far more of a fizzle: it is even
far more of a fiction. It is the one of his works in which he tells least of
the truth. Stevenson's was more real than most, because more romantic
than most. But I prefer the romances, which were still more real. I
mean that I think the wanderings of Balfour more Stevensonian than
the wanderings of Stevenson: that the duel of Jekyll and Hyde is more

illuminating than