Notes on Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Marcel Schwob, in his essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, makes a claim that may not be true, but is charmingly suggestive:

“One could characterize the difference of the old regime in literature and that of our modern times by the inverse movements of style and orthography. It seems to us that all the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century were practitioners of an admirable language, while they wrote the word each in each’s own manner, without worrying about their form. Today, now that the words are fixed and rigid, dressed up in all their correct and polite letters, immutable in their orthography, like the guests at a soiree, they have lost their individualism of color. Those people dressed themselves differently: now the words, like the people, are dressed in black. And they are not very distinguishable. But they are correctly spelled. Languages, like peoples, have been organized in refined society where we have banished all clashing colors.”

It is interesting what a difference a Channel makes. Certain British writers come through, but often in a canon which is disproportionate to the canon’s of the Island’s own canon-makers. The French preferred the clashing colors – DeQuincy to Coleridge, Ruskin to Matthew Arnold, and Stevenson to Henry James. The line that runs through French poetry and prose from Baudelaire to Schwob to Proust was influenced by a line that is considered “minor” in the Great Books tradition. Stevenson, who is as Scots as Scots (his greatest novel, in my view, is The Master of the Ballantrae, and there the Scots tongue is allowed some leaway), became a boy’s writer because he was never a writer of what he called “drama”:  “Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.” Of course, the poetry of conduct includes women – the great exclues of Stevenson’s novels. This is why, much as I like Stevenson, I feel the missing link when I read a lot of him.

Especially on vacation, one feels the truth in Stevenson’s abiding aesthetic creed, which is that stories arise from places:

“The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.”