Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 9

all, the white frost gives to the candles a sort of cold purification as of
Candlemas. But the point is, at the moment, that when we say this deed
was done at night, we do not mean that it was done in the dark. There is
a sense of exactitude and emphatic detail that belongs entirely to the
day. Here indeed the two authors so strangely compared might almost
have conspired in advance against the critic who compared them: as
when Poe's ideal detective prefers to think in the dark, and therefore
puts up the shutters even during the day. Dupin brings the outer
darkness into the parlour, while Durie carries the candle-light into the
forest.
These images are not fancies or accidents: their spirit runs through the
whole scene. The same incident, for instance, shows all the author's
love of sharp edges and cutting or piercing action. It is supremely
typical that he made Mrs. Durie thrust the sword up to the hilt into the
frozen ground. It is true that afterwards (perhaps under the sad eye of
Mr. Archer and the sensitive realists) he consented to withdraw this as
"an exaggeration to stagger Hugo." But it is much more significant that
it did not originally stagger Stevenson. It was the very vital gesture of
all his works that that sharp blade should cleave that stiff clay. It was
true in many other senses, touching mortal clay and the sword of the
spirit. But I am speaking now of the gesture of the craftsman, like that
of a man cutting wood. This man had an appetite for cutting it clean.
He never committed a murder without making a clean job of it.
Whence did that spirit come; and how did the story of it begin? That is
the right and real way of beginning the story of Stevenson. If I say that
it began with cutting figures out of cardboard, it might sound like a
parody of the pedantic fancies about juvenile psychology and early

education. But perhaps it will be better even to run the horrid risk of
being mistaken for a modern educationist, rather than to repeat the too
familiar phrases by which the admirer of Stevenson has got himself
described as a sentimentalist. Too much has been talked in this
connection about the Soul of the Child or the Peter Pan of Samoa; not
because it is untrue, but because it is a mistake to tell a truth too often,
so that it loses its freshness; especially when it is the truth about how to
remain fresh. Many are perhaps rather tired of hearing about it; though
they would never be tired of having it. I have therefore deliberately
approached the matter by another road; and even by a road running
backwards. Instead of talking first about Cummy and the nursery
anecdotes of Master Louis (at the risk of making a really graceful
figure grow ridiculous by mere repetition, in the eyes of multitudes of
greatly inferior people) I have tried to take the stock and normal of his
work first, and then note that it really does date in a special sense from
his childhood; and that it is not sentimental and not senseless and not
irrelevant to say so.
If therefore we ask, "Where does the story of Stevenson really start;
where does his special style or spirit begin and where do they come
from; how did he get, or begin to get, the thing that made him different
from the man next-door?" I have no doubt about the answer. He got
them from the mysterious Mr. Skelt of the Juvenile Drama, otherwise
the toy theatre, which of all toys has most of the effect of magic on the
mind. Or rather, of course, he got it from the way in which his own
individual temper and talent grasped the nature of the game. He has
written it all in an excellent essay and at least in one very real sentence
of autobiography. "What is the world, what is man and life but what my
Skelt has made them?" The psychological interest is rather more special
than is conveyed by the common generalisation about the imagination
of infancy. It is not merely a question of children's toys; it is a question
of a particular kind of toy, as of a particular kind of talent. It was not
quite the same thing, for instance, to buy toy theatres in Edinburgh as it
would have been to go to real theatres in London. In that little
pasteboard play there might be something of the pantomime; but there
was nothing of the dissolving view. The positive outline of everything,
so well sketched in his own essay, the hard favour of the heroine, the

clumps of vegetation, the clouds rolled