Walter Raleigh | Page 4

death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a- tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.'
But we on this side are the poorer - by how much we can never know. What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure and occasions so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.
All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make game of life. But to make game of life was to each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see herself; to 'be a candle-holder and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder, would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse- building and iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,' contributed to a magazine years ago, he compares the artist in paint or in words to the keeper of a booth at the world's fair, dependent for his bread on his success in amusing others. In his volume of poems he almost apologises for his excellence in literature:

'Say not of me, that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child; But rather say: IN THE AFTERNOON OF TIME A STRENUOUS FAMILY DUSTED FROM ITS HANDS THE SAND OF GRANITE, AND BEHOLDING FAR ALONG THE SOUNDING COASTS ITS PYRAMIDS AND TALL MEMORIALS CATCH THE DYING SUN, SMILED WELL-CONTENT, AND TO THIS CHILDISH TASK AROUND THE FIRE ADDRESSED ITS EVENING HOURS.'
Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In THE WRONG BOX, for instance, there is something very like the card- game commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance. It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the breath of reality, full of fantastic character; the strange funeral procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally melts into space.
But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals. The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half-human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel picture.
Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden. His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of training that would emaciate a poorer stock. From the first, his delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his zest in life
'put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laugh'd