The Bibliotaph, and Other People Part 9

'Monsieur,' he exclaimed, 'this is not the fashion!'

'It will be the fashion when we have worn the waistcoat once,' was Gautier's reply. And he declares that he delivered the answer with a self-possession worthy of a Brummel or 'any other celebrity of dandyism.'

It is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and good-naturedly extravagant things which Gautier and his companions did, not alone the first night of _Hernani_, but at all times and in all places. They unquestionably saw to it that Victor Hugo had fair play the evening of February 25, 1830. The occasion was an historic one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion.

I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in Gautier's _Histoire du Romantisme_. The narrative is one of much sweetness and humor. It ought to be translated for the benefit of readers who know Gautier chiefly by _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ and that for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least influential.

It is pleasant to find that Renduel confirms the popular view of Gautier's character. M. Jullien says that Renduel never spoke of Gautier but in praise. 'Quel bon garcon!' he used to say. 'Quel brave coeur!' M. Jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give concerning Gautier. But there are eight or nine letters from Gautier to Renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in which the poet says to the publisher, 'Heaven preserve you from historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.'

Gautier must have been both generous and modest. No mere egoist could have been so faithful in his hero-worship or so unpretentious in his allusions to himself. One has only to read the most superficial accounts of French literature to learn how universally it is granted that Gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was born. Yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master's degree. He quotes one of Goethe's sayings,--a saying in which the great German poet declares that after the practice of many arts there was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of writing in German; in that he was almost a master. Then Gautier exclaims, 'Would that _we_, after so many years of labor, had become almost a master of the art of writing in French! But such ambitions are not for us!'

Yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic.

STEVENSON: THE VAGABOND AND THE PHILOSOPHER

A certain critic said of Stevenson that he was 'incurably literary;'

the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. There is comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. Rather than _do_ anything Stevenson preferred to loaf and to write books. And he early learned that considerable loafing is necessary if one expects to become a writer. There is a sense in which it is true that only lazy people are fit for literature. Nothing is so fruitful as a fine gift for idleness. The most prolific writers have been people who seemed to have nothing to do. Every one has read that description of George Sand in her latter years, 'an old lady who came out into the garden at mid-day in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or wandered slowly about. So she remained for hours looking about her, musing, contemplating. She was gathering impressions, absorbing the universe, steeping herself in Nature; and at night she would give all this forth as a sort of emanation.' One shudders to think what the result might have been if instead of absorbing the universe George Sand had done something practical during those hours. But the Scotchman was not like George Sand in any particular that I know of save in his perfect willingness to bask in the sunshine and steep himself in Nature. His books did not 'emanate.' The one way in which he certainly did not produce literature was by improvisation. George Sand never revised her work; it might almost be said that Robert Louis Stevenson never did anything else.

Of his method we know this much. He himself has said that when he went for a walk he usually carried two books in his pocket, one a book to read, the other a note-book in which to put down the ideas that came to him. This remark has undoubtedly been seized upon and treasured in the memory as embodying a secret of his success. Trusting young souls have begun to walk about with note-books: only to learn that the note-book was a detail, not an essential, in the process.

He who writes while he walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he chooses, write very well. He may turn over the rubbish of his vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which to bring out his meaning. This word need not be unusual; and if it is 'exquisite' then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare exactness to the idea. Stevenson wrote so well in part because he wrote so deliberately. He knew the vulgarity of haste, especially in the making of literature. He knew that finish counted for much, perhaps for half. Has he not been reported as saying that it wasn't worth a man's while to attempt to be a writer unless he was quite willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single sentence? In general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. That scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days, and few authors are willing to take a prophet's chances. But Stevenson was one of the few.

He laid the foundations of his reputation with two little volumes of travel. _An Inland Voyage_ appeared in 1878; _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_, in 1879. These books are not dry chronicles of drier facts. They bear much the same relation to conventional accounts of travel that flowers growing in a garden bear to dried plants in a herbarium. They are the most friendly and urbane things in modern English literature. They have been likened to Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_. The criticism would be better if one were able to imagine Stevenson writing the adventure of the _fille de chambre_, or could conceive of Lawrence Sterne writing the account of the meeting with the Plymouth Brother. 'And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common-house, I have a hope to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.' That was written twenty years ago and the Brother was an old man then. And now Stevenson is gone.

How impossible it is not to wonder whether they have yet met in that 'one common-house.' 'He feared to intrude, but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.'

The _Inland Voyage_ contains pa.s.sages hardly to be matched for beauty.

Let him who would be convinced read the description of the forest Mormal, that forest whose breath was perfumed with nothing less delicate than sweet brier. 'I wish our way had always lain among woods,' says Stevenson. 'Trees are the most civil society.'

Stevenson's traveling companion was a young English baronet. The two adventurers paddled in canoes through the pleasant rivers and ca.n.a.ls of Belgium and North France. They had plenty of rain and a variety of small misadventures; but they also had sunshine, fresh air, and experiences among the people of the country such as they could have got in no other way. They excited not a little wonder, and the common opinion was that they were doing the journey for a wager; there seemed to be no other reason why two respectable gentlemen, not poor, should work so hard and get so wet.

This was conceived in a more adventurous vein than appears at first sight. In an unsubdued country one contends with beasts and men who are openly hostile. But when one is a stranger in the midst of civilization and meets civilization at its back door, he is astonished to find how little removed civilization is from downright savagery.

Stevenson and his companion learned as they could not have learned otherwise how great deference the world pays to clothes. Whether your heart is all right turns out a matter of minor importance; but--_are your clothes all right_? If so, smiles, and good beds at respectable inns; if not, a lodging in a cow-shed or beneath any poor roof which suffices to keep off the rain. The voyagers had constantly to meet the accusation of being peddlers. They denied it and were suspected afresh while the denial was on their lips. The public mind was singularly alert and critical on the subject of peddlers.

At La Fere, 'of Cursed Memory,' they had a rebuff which nearly spoiled their tempers. They arrived in a rain. It was the finest kind of a night to be indoors 'and hear the rain upon the windows.' They were told of a famous inn. When they reached the carriage entry 'the rattle of many dishes fell upon their ears.' They sighted a great field of snowy table-cloth, the kitchen glowed like a forge. They made their triumphal entry, 'a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp India-rubber bag upon his arm.' Stevenson declares that he never had a sound view of that kitchen. It seemed to him a culinary paradise 'crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen, who all turned round from their sauce-pans and looked at us with surprise.' But the landlady--a flushed, angry woman full of affairs--there was no mistaking her. They asked for beds and were told to find beds in the suburbs: 'We are too busy for the like of you!' They said they would dine then, and were for putting down their luggage. The landlady made a run at them and stamped her foot: 'Out with you--out of the door,' she screeched.

I once heard a young Englishman who had been drawn into some altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his own part by saying: 'Now a French cook running amuck with a carving knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.'

There were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. Stevenson says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were out in the rain, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a disappointed mendicant.'

'It's all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil.

I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.'

Stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of Diana on fire that night if it had been handy. 'There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of human inst.i.tutions.' As for the baronet, he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again; and he registered a vow before Heaven never to be uncivil to a peddler. But before making that vow he particularized a complaint for every joint in the landlady's body.

To read _An Inland Voyage_ is to be impressed anew with the thought that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. They are instinctively for being on the move. Like the author of that book they travel 'not to go any where but to go.' If they behold a stage-coach or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard.

They are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when they are on the move. Talk to them of foreign lands and they are seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. Stevenson met an omnibus driver in a Belgian village who looked at him with thirsty eyes because he was able to travel. How that omnibus driver 'longed to be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.' 'Here I am,' said he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My G.o.d, is that life?' Stevenson opined that this man had in him the making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to Africa or to the Indies after Drake. 'But it is an evil age for the gipsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.'

In his _Travels with a Donkey_ the author had no companionship but such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. 'My lady-friend' he calls her.

Modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' She gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ign.o.ble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her s.e.x. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty.'

From time to time Modestine's load would topple off. The villagers were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. 'Judge if I was hot!' says Stevenson. 'I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jack-a.s.s, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days before this trouble came upon me.'

He had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep's wool within, and in this portable house he pa.s.sed his nights afield. Not always by choice, as witness his chapter ent.i.tled 'A Camp in the Dark.' There are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to perfection,--if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. I don't know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in which Stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking next morning to see the 'world flooded with a blue light, the mother of dawn.' He had been in search of an adventure all his life, 'a pure dispa.s.sionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,'

and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that morning found him, an inland castaway, 'as strange to his surroundings as the first man upon the earth.'

Pa.s.sages like these indicate Stevenson's quality. He was no carpet-knight; he had the true adventurer's blood in his veins. He and Drake and the Belgian omnibus-driver should have gone to the Indies together. Better still, the omnibus driver should have gone with Drake, and Stevenson should have gone with Amyas Leigh. They say that Stevenson traveled in search of health. Without doubt; but think how he _would_ have traveled if he had had good health. And one has strange mental experiences alone with the stars. That came of sleeping in the fields 'where G.o.d keeps an open house.' 'I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists.'

Much as he gloried in his solitude he 'became aware of a strange lack;' for he was human. And he gave it as his opinion that 'to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.' It may be so. Such a woman would need to be of heroic physical mould, and there is danger that she would turn out of masculine mould as well. Isopel Berners was of such sort. Isopel could handle her clenched fists like a prizefighter. She was magnificent in the forest, and never so perfectly in place as when she backed up George Borrow in his fight with the Flaming Tinman. Having been in the habit of taking her own part, she was able to give pertinent advice at a critical moment. 'It's of no use flipping at the Flaming Tinman with your left hand,' she said, 'why don't you use your right?' Isopel called Borrow's right arm 'Long Melford.' And when the Flaming Tinman got his knock-down blow from Borrow's right, Isopel exclaimed, 'Hurrah for Long Melford; there is nothing like Long Melford for shortness all the world over!'

But what an embarra.s.sing personage Miss Berners would have been transferred from the dingle to the drawing-room; nay, how impossible it is to think of that athletic young G.o.ddess as _Miss_ Berners! The distinctions and t.i.tles of conventional society refuse to cling even to her name. I wonder how Stevenson would have liked Isopel Berners.

And now his philosophy. Yet somehow 'philosophy' seems a big word for so unpretentious a theory of life as his. Stevenson didn't philosophize much; he was content to live and to enjoy. He was deliberate, and in general he would not suffer himself to be driven.

He resembled an admirable lady of my acquaintance who, when urged to get something done by a given time, usually replied that 'time was made for slaves.' Stevenson had the same feeling. He says: 'Hurry is the resource of the faithless. When a man can trust his own heart and those of his friends to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in the mean while, why, then, there he dies, and the question is solved.'

You think this a poor philosophy? But there must be all kinds of philosophy; the people in the world are not run into one mould like so much candle-grease. And because of this, his doctrine of Inaction and Postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon Stevenson. In their opinion instead of being up and doing he consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. They feel towards him as Hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge would have felt towards _him_. Hawthorne imagines that ghostly and terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite scorn, 'A writer of storybooks. What kind of employment is that for an immortal soul?'

To many people nothing is more hateful than this willingness to hold aloof and let things drift. That any human being should acquiesce with the present order of the world appears monstrous to these earnest souls. An Indian critic once called Stevenson 'a faddling Hedonist.'

Stevenson quotes the phrase with obvious amus.e.m.e.nt and without attempting to gainsay its accuracy.

But if he allowed the world to take its course he expected the same privilege. He wished neither to interfere nor to be interfered with.

And he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. He says: 'To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.' Independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one's own good estate.

He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, 'so long as he boasts of what he really has.' If people but knew this they would boast 'more freely and with a better grace.'

Stevenson was humorously alive to the old-fashioned quality of his doctrine of happiness and content. He says in the preface to an _Inland Voyage_ that although the book 'runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of G.o.d's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not know where my head can have been.'

But while this omission will, he fears, render his book 'philosophically unimportant' he hopes that 'the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles.'

Stevenson could be militant. His letter on Father Damien shows that.

But there was nothing of the professional reformer about him. He had no hobby, and he was the artist first and then the philanthropist.

This is right; it was the law of his being. Other men are better equipped to do the work of humanity's city missionaries than was he.

Let their more rugged health and less sensitive nerves bear the burden; his poet's mission was not the less important.

The remaining point I have to note, among a number which might be noted, is his firm grasp of this idea: that whether he is his brother's keeper or not he is at all events his brother's brother. It is 'philosophy' of a very good sort to have mastered this conception and to have made the life square with the theory. This doctrine is fashionable just now, and thick books have been written on the subject, filled with wise terms and arguments. I don't know whether Stevenson bothered his head with these matters from a scientific point of view or not, but there are many ill.u.s.trations of his interest. Was it this that made him so gentle in his unaffected manly way? He certainly understood how difficult it is for the well-to-do member of society to get any idea not wholly distorted of the feelings and motives of the lower cla.s.ses. He believed that certain virtues resided more conspicuously among the poor than among the rich. He declared that the poor were more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. 'A workman or a peddler cannot shutter himself off from his less comfortable neighbors. If he treats himself to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?' But with the advent of prosperity a man becomes incapable of understanding how the less fortunate live.

Stevenson likens that happy individual to a man going up in a balloon.

'He presently pa.s.ses through a zone of clouds and after that merely earthly things are hidden from his gaze. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order and positively as good as new.

He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the sky-larks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so una.s.suming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.'

In the three years since Stevenson's death many additions have been made to the body of literature by him and about him. There are letters, finished and unfinished novels, and recollections by the heaping handful. Critics are considerably exercised over the question whether any, or all, or only two or three of his books are to last.

The matter has, I believe, been definitely decided so that posterity, whatever other responsibilities it has, will at least not have that one; and anything that we can do to relieve the future of its burdens is altruism worthy the name.

Stevenson was one of the best tempered men that ever lived. He never prated about goodness, but was unaffectedly good and sunny-hearted as long as he lived. Of how many men can it be said, as it _can_ be said of him, that he was sick all his days and never uttered a whimper?

What rare health of mind was this which went with such poor health of body! I've known men to complain more over toothache than Stevenson thought it worth while to do with death staring him in the face. He did not, like Will o' the Mill, live until the snow began to thicken on his head. He never knew that which we call middle age.

He worked harder than a man in his condition should have done. At times he felt the need to write for money; and this was hostile to his theory of literature. He wrote to his friend Colvin: 'I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come in--mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. What I want is an income that really comes in of itself while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs.'

I wish he might have had it; I can think of no other man whose indolence would have been so profitable to the world.