Walter Raleigh | Page 5

and leap'd with him;'
and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around him an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it had the brains. Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb of London. The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash; the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the front window - the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariable citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes - a person, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses for the theatre of romance? Set a realist to walk down one of these streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion. Yet Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brick bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginative possibilities of the place. Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he says:

'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four million private lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly.'
It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside. So also, in, THE RAJAH'S DIAMOND, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief. A monotony of bad building is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the agonies of the mind of man.
To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every work of human hands became vocal with possible associations. Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 'vera weel preserved,' gave him the cardinal incident of KIDNAPPED. How should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.
His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was one prolonged passion of praise and joy. There is none of his books that reads like the meditations of an invalid. He has the readiest sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer. Of one of his earlier books he says: 'From the negative point of view I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.' And this was an omission that he never remedied in his later works. Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived in the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that it seems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been dowered with better health.
'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes the town, Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book, And wrap me in a gown,'
says George