Walter Raleigh | Page 9

of them,
shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his
models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of
English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in
one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.'
And he quotes a passage from Harrington's OCEANA:
'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man,
but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own
hand, is herself King People.'
It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson
learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be
particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles
Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable LIVES OF PIRATES
AND HIGHWAYMEN. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very
few modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style.
However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion
borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of
stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the
slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of
words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty
even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble
literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk,
remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its
own stamp. This was what Stevenson did, and the very conversations
that pass between his characters have an air of distinction that is all his
own. His books are full of brilliant talk - talk real and convincing
enough in its purport and setting, but purged of the languors and
fatuities of actual commonplace conversation. It is an enjoyment like
that to be obtained from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and

dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss
Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the
Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those
wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in A
LODGING FOR THE NIGHT and THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S
DOOR. But people do not talk like this in actual life- ' 'tis true, 'tis pity;
and pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not; in actual life conversation is
generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and
dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into
meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into
mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exact
reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken
by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy
as by a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous
habit of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular
remark is as much as to describe each particular twiddle. Or in its more
intellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our
thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of
the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and
black - like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed
for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them.
There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one and
the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. Even when he
is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for
another man's. All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres
from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares
and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.
If he ever fell into one of these - which may perhaps be doubted - it was
through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter
to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his
only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not
inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is
no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and
am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the
defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support
the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by
Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father

Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance
of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in