Walter Raleigh | Page 3

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Robert Louis Stevenson by Walter Raleigh. 1906 edition. Scanned and
proofed by David Price, email [email protected]

WHEN a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion
with a nervous generation to ask is the question, 'Will he live?' There
was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and
unprofitable to answer. It is one of the many vanities of criticism to
promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer
with the assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes
are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with delight. But
'there is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally
considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short
memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.'
Let us make sure that our sons will care for Homer before we pledge a
more distant generation to a newer cult.
Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary
immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of Robert
Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, as lasting
fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen years ago his
essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small and
discerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell the
British public with TREASURE ISLAND and DR. JEKYLL AND MR.
HYDE he had shown himself a delicate marksman. And although large
editions are nothing, standard editions, richly furnished and complete,
are worthy of remark. Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our
literary history who have been honoured during their lifetime by the
appearance of such an edition; the best of his public, it would seem, do
not only wish to read his works, but to possess them, and all of them, at
the cost of many pounds, in library form. It would be easy to mention
more voluminous and more popular authors than Stevenson whose
publishers could not find five subscribers for an adventure like this. He

has made a brave beginning in that race against Time which all must
lose.
It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves with the
presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a world of
other business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in the
position of a great writer. Let us leave that foolish trick to the
politicians, who never claim that they are right - merely that they will
win at the next elections. Literary criticism has standards other than the
suffrage; it is possible enough to say something of the literary quality
of a work that appeared yesterday. Stevenson himself was singularly
free from the vanity of fame; 'the best artist,' he says truly, 'is not the
man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice
of his art.' He loved, if ever man did, the practice of his art; and those
who find meat and drink in the delight of watching and appreciating the
skilful practice of the literary art, will abandon themselves to the
enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing their unborn and
possibly illiterate posterity to answer solemn questions. Will a book
live? Will a cricket match live? Perhaps not, and yet both be fine
achievements.
It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death. In the
dedication of PRINCE OTTO he says, 'Well, we will not give in that
we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health again; I still
purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to launch a
masterpiece.' It would be a churlish or a very dainty critic who should
deny that he has launched masterpieces, but whether he ever launched
his masterpiece is an open question. Of the story that he was writing
just before his death he is reported to have said that 'the goodness of it
frightened him.' A goodness that frightened him will surely not be
visible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest was
perhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had
none of the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had
no Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full
tide