Walter Raleigh | Page 7

them in the boat, and they were left
on a desert island to a certain death. 'They were soldiers, they said, and
knew well enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades
pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried,
"God bless the King!" Now, one or two of those who were in the boat
escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing
for us' - even when life is extorted it may be given nobly, with
ceremony and courtesy. So strong was Stevenson's admiration for
heroic graces like these that in the requiem that appears in his poems he
speaks of an ordinary death as of a hearty exploit, and draws his figures
from lives of adventure and toil:
'Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I
live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse
you grave for me: HERE HE LIES WHERE HE LONGED TO BE,
HOME IS THE SAILOR, HOME FROM THE SEA, AND THE
HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL.'
This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour
and music of a soldier's funeral.

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular
combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accident
has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous
followers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted to
the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared
little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony
style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing
to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and
tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with
languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and
then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson,
who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set himself
laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty of style.
I. STYLE. - Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature,'
unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it
first. A poet is born, not made, - so is every man, - but he is born raw.
Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the
art of writing,
'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Thassay so hard, so sharp
the conquering.'
Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education,
are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature - they
are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind. All writing is a kind of
word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the
diverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select them
judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all
speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our
writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a
feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed
from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up
from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces
of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare
suddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in their
context! 'The cry is still, "They come!" ' - 'More honoured in the breach
than the observance,' - the sight of these phrases in the splendour of
their dramatic context in MACBETH and HAMLET casts shame upon
their daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither

the time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words,
so he borrows his sentences ready- made, and applies them in rough
haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably
repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of
thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by others.
It is a matter of natural taste, developed and strengthened by continual
practice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases.
The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of fine
phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but
cultivates his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the raw
fibres in novel and bewitching patterns. To this end he must have two
things: a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, meaning, and
associations of individual