Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 6

critics are fond of suggesting that he was nothing
if not self-conscious; that the whole of his significance came from
self-consciousness. I believe that the one really great and important
work which he did for the world was done quite unconsciously. Many
have blamed him for posing; some have blamed him for preaching. The
matter which mainly interests me is not merely his pose, if it was a
pose, but the large landscape or background against which he was

posing; which he himself only partly realised, but which goes to make
up a rather important historical picture. And though it is true that he
sometimes preached, and preached very well, I am by no means certain
that the thing which he preached was the same as the thing which he
taught. Or, to put it another way, the thing which he could teach was
not quite so large as the thing which we can learn. Or again, many of
them declare that he was only a nine days' wonder, a passing figure that
happened to catch the eye and even affect the fashion; and that with
that fashion he will be forgotten. I believe that the lesson of his life will
only be seen after time has revealed the full meaning of all our present
tendencies; I believe it will be seen from afar off like a vast plan or
maze traced out on a hillside; perhaps traced by one who did not even
see the plan while he was making the tracks. I believe that his travels
and doublings and returns reveal an idea, and even a doctrine. Yet it
was perhaps a doctrine in which he did not believe, or at any rate did
not believe that he believed. In other words, I think his significance will
stand out more strongly in relation to larger problems which are
beginning to press once more upon the mind of man; but of which
many men are still largely unaware in our time, and were almost
entirely unaware in his. But any contribution to the solution of those
problems will be remembered; and he made a very great contribution,
probably greater than he knew. Lastly, these same critics do not hesitate,
in many cases, to accuse him flatly of being insincere. I should say that
nobody, so openly fond of play-acting as he was, could possibly be
insincere. But it is more to my purpose now to say that his relation to
the huge half-truth that he carried was in its very simplicity a mark of
truthfulness. For he had the splendid and ringing sincerity to testify, in
a voice like a trumpet, to a truth that he did not understand.
* * * *
CHAPTER II
IN THE COUNTRY OF SKELT
EVERY now and then the eye is riveted, in reading current criticism,
by some statement so astonishingly untrue, or even contrary to the fact,

that it seems as if a man walking down the street were suddenly
standing on his head. It is all the more noticeable when the critic really
has a strong head to stand on. One of the ablest of the younger critics,
whose studies in other subjects I have warmly admired, wrote in our
invaluable London Mercury a study of Stevenson; or what purported to
be a study of Stevenson. And the chief thing he said, indeed almost the
only thing he said, was that the thought of Stevenson instantly throws
us back to the greater example of Edgar Allan Poe; that both were
pallid and graceful figures "making wax flowers," as somebody said;
and of course the earlier and greater had the advantage of the later and
the less. In fact, the critic treated Stevenson as the shadow of Poe;
which may not unfairly be called the shadow of a shade. He almost
hinted that, for those who had read Poe, it was hardly worth while to
read Stevenson. And indeed I could almost suspect he had taken his
own advice; and never read a line of Stevenson in his life.
If a man were to say that Maeterlinck derives so directly from Dickens
that it is difficult to draw the line between them, I should be
momentarily at a loss to catch his meaning. If he were to say that Walt
Whitman was so close a copyist of Pope that it is hardly worth while to
read the copy, I should not at once seize the clue. But I should think
these comparisons rather more close, if anything, than the comparison
between Stevenson and Poe. Dickens did not confine himself to comic
subjects so much as Poe did to tragic ones; and an Essay on Optimism
might couple the names of Pope and Whitman. It might also include the
name of Stevenson; but it would