Or this:-
"To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else" (_Virginibus Puerisque_).
In his characterization he is at his best-like Scott and Borrow-when dealing with the picaresque elements in life. His rogues are depicted with infinite gusto and admirable art, and although even they, in common with most of his characters, lack occasionally in substance and objective reality, yet when he has to ill.u.s.trate a characteristic he will do so with a sure touch.
Take, for instance, this sketch of Herrick in _The Ebb Tide_-the weak, irresolute rascal, with just force enough to hate himself. He essays to end his ignominious career in the swift waters:-
. . . "Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming; there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?
"And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he-at once within and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain, which a single manly thought would suffice to open-and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a revelation-there was no escape possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow-a merciful chance blow-or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his infamy.
"There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who could not. His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself."
Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together d.i.c.kens, Browning, and Stevenson-a love of the grotesque, a pa.s.sion for the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of roughness, and in Browning"s case the relish imparts itself to his style.
Not so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious treasure; but not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of finished beauty will he allow you to get a glimpse of it.
This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with all the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson"s is always the better way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real attractiveness of certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness, their downright ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting would have shown off the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one has nothing but welcome for such memorable figures as John Silver, the Admiral in _The Story of a Lie_, Master Francis Villon, and a goodly company beside.
It is impossible even in such a cursory estimate of Stevenson as this to pa.s.s over his vignettes of Nature. And it is the more necessary to emphasize these, inasmuch as the Vagabond"s pa.s.sion for the Earth is clearly discernible in these pictures. They are no Nature sketches as imagined by a mere "ink-bottle feller"-to use a phrase of one of Mr.
Hardy"s rustics. One of Stevenson"s happiest recollections was an "open air" experience when he slept on the earth. He loved the largeness of the open air, and his intense joy in natural sights and sounds bespeaks the man of fine, even hectic sensibility, whose nerves quiver for the benison of the winds and suns.h.i.+ne.
Ever since the days of Mrs. Radcliffe, who used the stormier aspects of Nature with such effect in her stories, down to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose ma.s.sive scenic effects are so remarkable, Nature has been regarded as a kind of "stage property" by the novelist.
To the great writers the Song of the Earth has proved an inspiration only second to the "Song of Songs," and the lesser writer has imitated as best he could so effective a decoration. But there is no mistaking the genuine lover of the Earth. He does not-as Oscar Wilde wittily said of a certain popular novelist-"frighten the evening sky into violent chromo-lithographic effects"; he paints the sunrises and sunsets with a loving fidelity which there is no mistaking. Nor are all the times and seasons of equal interest in his eyes. If we look back at the masters of fiction (ay, and mistresses too) in the past age, we shall note how each one has his favourite aspect, how each responds more readily to one special mood of the ancient Earth.
Mention has been made of Mrs. Radcliffe. Extravagant and absurd as her stories are in many ways, she was a genuine lover of Nature, especially of its grand and sublime aspects. Her influence may be traced in Scott, still more in Byron. The mystic side of Nature finds its lovers chiefly in the poets, in Coleridge and in Sh.e.l.ley. But at a later date Nathaniel Hawthorne found in the mysticism of the Earth his finest inspiration; while throughout the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte wail the bleak winds of the North, and the grey storm-clouds are always hurrying past.
Even in d.i.c.kens there is more snow than suns.h.i.+ne, and we hear more of "the winds that would be howling at all hours" than of the brooding peace and quiet of summer days. Charles Kingsley is less partial towards the seasons, and cares less about the mysticism than the physical influences of Nature.
In our own day Mr. George Meredith has reminded us of the big geniality of the Earth; and the close relations.h.i.+p of the Earth and her moods with those who live nearest to her has found a faithful observer in Mr. Hardy.
Stevenson differs from Meredith and Hardy in this. He looks at her primarily with the eye of the artist. They look at her primarily with the eye of the scientific philosopher.
Here is a twilight effect from _The Return of the Native_:-
"The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep, the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its t.i.tanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis-the final overthrow. . . . Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity."
Contrast with this a twilight piece from Stevenson:-
"The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent"s back. The stars by innumerable millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter"s moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour-red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own l.u.s.tre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries-a hurly-burly of stars.
Against this the hill and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark."
Each pa.s.sage has a fresh beauty that removes it from the perfunctory tributes of the ordinary writer. But the difference between the Artist and the Philosopher is obvious. Not that Mr. Hardy has no claims as an artist. Different as their styles are, and although Stevenson has a more fastidious taste for words, the large, deliberate, ma.s.sive art of Hardy is equally effective in its fas.h.i.+on. That, however, by the way. The point is that Mr. Hardy never rests _as_ an artist-he is quite as concerned with the philosophic as with the pictorial aspects of the scene. Stevenson rejoices as a Romantic; admires like an Artist.
VI
But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature-herein parting company with Th.o.r.eau as well as Hardy-he can moralize on occasion, and with infinite relish too.
"Something of the Shorter Catechist," as his friend Henley so acutely said. There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories-_Jekyll and Hyde_ is a morality in disguise, and unblus.h.i.+ngly so is _A Christmas Sermon_.
Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.
Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow"s big green gamp or De Quincey"s insularity. "What business has a Vagabond to moralize?"
asks the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond (especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson gives an additional piquancy to his work. The _Lay Morals_ and the _Christmas Sermon_ may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in the _Fables_. And even if you do not care for Stevenson"s "Hamlet" and "Shorter Catechist" moods, is it wise, even from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament? Was it the absence of the "Shorter Catechist" in Edgar Allan Poe that sent him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring, grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And was it the "Shorter Catechist" in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of life"s possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder.
VI RICHARD JEFFERIES
"Noises of river and of grove And moving things in field and stall And night birds" whistle shall be all Of the world"s speech that we shall hear."
WILLIAM MORRIS.
"The poetry of earth is never dead."
KEATS.
I
The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come within its ken; the delight of a pa.s.sionate soul in the riotous wealth of the Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid in the splendid sanity of the sunlight-these are the sentiments that well up from the writings of Richard Jefferies.
By comparison with him, Th.o.r.eau"s Earth-wors.h.i.+p seems quite a stolid affair, and even Borrow"s frank enjoyment of the open air has a strangely apathetic touch about it.
No doubt he felt more keenly than did the Hermit of Walden, or the Norfolk giant, but it was not so much pa.s.sionate intensity as nervous susceptibility. He had the sensitive quivering nerves of the neurotic which respond to the slightest stimulus. Of all the "Children of the Open Air" Jefferies was the most sensitive; but for all that I would not say that he felt more deeply than Th.o.r.eau, Borrow, or Stevenson.
Some people are especially susceptible by const.i.tution to pain or pleasure, but it would be rash to a.s.sume hastily that on this account they have more deeply emotional natures. That they express their feelings more readily is no guarantee that they feel more deeply.
In other words, there is a difference between susceptibility and pa.s.sion.
Whether a man has pa.s.sion-be it of love or hate-can be judged only by his general att.i.tude towards his fellow-beings, and by the stability of the emotion.
Now Jefferies certainly had keener sympathies with humankind than Th.o.r.eau, and these sympathies intensified as the years rolled by. Few men have espoused more warmly the cause of the agricultural labourer.
Perhaps Hodge has never experienced a kinder advocate than Jefferies. To accuse him of superficiality of emotion would be unfair; for he was a man with much natural tenderness in his disposition.
All that I wish to protest against is the a.s.sumption made by some that because he has written so feelingly about Hodge, because he has shown so quick a response to the beauties of the natural world, he was therefore gifted with a deep nature, as has been claimed for him by some of his admirers.
One of the characteristics that differentiates the Vagabond writer from his fellows is, I think, a lack of pa.s.sion-always excepting a pa.s.sion for the earth, a quality lacking human significance. In their human sympathies they vary: but in no case, not even with Whitman, as I hope to show in my next paper, is there a _pa.s.sion_ for humankind. There may be curiosity about certain types, as with Borrow and Stevenson; a delight in simple natures, as with Th.o.r.eau; a broad, genial comrades.h.i.+p with all and sundry, as in the case of Whitman; but never do you find depth, intensity.
Jefferies then presents to my mind all the characteristics of the Vagabond, his many graces and charms, his notable deficiencies, especially the absence of emotional stability. This trait is, of course, more p.r.o.nounced in some Vagabonds than in others; but it belongs to his inmost being. Eager, curious, adventurous; tasting this experience and that; his emotions share with his intellect in a chronic restless transition. More easily felt than defined is the lack of permanence in his nature; his emotions flame fitfully and in gusts, rather than with steady persistence. Finally, despite the tenderness and kindliness he can show, the egotistic elements absorb too much of his nature. A great egotist can never be a great lover.
This may seem a singularly ungracious prelude to a consideration of Richard Jefferies; but whatever it may seem it is quite consistent with a hearty admiration for his genius, and a warm appreciation of the man.
Pa.s.sion he had of a kind, but it was the rapt, self-centred pa.s.sion of the mystic.