Walter Raleigh | Page 5

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 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