My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 9

showed himself alive to the fingertips. He was in constant
conscious search of felicities in expression, and his taste was
exquisitely just. His discernment in the use of words kept equal pace
with his invention--he knew at once how to be fastidious and daring. It
is to be doubted if any writer has laboured with more constancy to
enrich and harden the texture of his style, and at the last a page of his
was like cloth of gold for purity and solidity.
This is the praise which the future critics of English literature will
award him. But in this age of critical hysteria it is not enough to yield a
man the palm for his own qualities. With regard to Stevenson our
professional guides have gone fairly demented, and it is worth while to
make an effort to give him the place he has honestly earned, before the
inevitable reaction sets in, and unmerited laudations have brought about
an unmerited neglect. His life was arduous. His meagre physical means
and his fervent spirit were pathetically ill-mated. It was impossible to
survey his career without a sympathy which trembled from admiration
to pity. Certain, in spite of all precaution, to die young, and in the face
of that stern fact genially and unconquerably brave, he extorted love.
Let the whole virtue of this truth be acknowledged, and let it stand in
excuse for praises which have been carried beyond the limits of
absurdity. It is hard to exercise a sober judgment where the emotions
are brought strongly into play. The inevitable tragedy of Stevenson's
fate, the unescapable assurance that he would not live to do all which
such a spirit in a sounder frame would have done for an art he loved so
fondly, the magnetism of his friendship, his downright incapacity for
envy, his genuine humility with regard to his own work and reputation,
his unboastful and untiring courage, made a profound impression upon
many of his contemporaries. It is, perhaps, small wonder if critical
opinion were in part moulded by such influences as these. Errors of
judgment thus induced are easily condoned. They are at least a million
times more respectable than the mendacities of the publisher's tout, or
the mutual ecstasies of the rollers of logs and the grinders of axes.
The curious ease with which, nowadays, every puny whipster gets the
sword of Sir Walter has already been remarked. If any Tom o' Bedlam

chooses to tell the world that all the New Scottish novelists are Sir
Walter's masters, what does it matter to anybody? It is shamelessly silly
and impertinent, of course, and it brings newspaper criticism into
contempt, but there is an end of it. If the writers who are thus made
ridiculous choose to pluck the straws out of their critics' hair and stick
them in their own, they are poorer creatures than I take them for. The
thing makes us laugh, or makes us mourn, just as it happens to hit our
humour; but it really matters very little. It establishes one of two
things--the critic is hopelessly incapable or hopelessly dishonest. The
dilemma is absolute. The peccant gentleman may choose his horn, and
no honest and capable reader cares one copper which he takes.
But with regard to Stevenson the case is very different. Stevenson has
made a bid for lasting fame. He is formally entered in the list of starters
for the great prize of literary immortality. No man alive can say with
certainty whether he will get it. Every forced eulogy handicaps his
chances. Every exaggeration of his merits will tend to obscure them.
The pendulum of taste is remorseless. Swing it too far on one side, it
will swing itself too far on the other.
In his case it has unfortunately become a critical fashion to set him side
by side with the greatest master of narrative fiction the world has ever
seen. In the interests of a true artist, whom this abuse of praise will
greatly injure if it be persisted in, it will be well to endeavour soberly
and quietly to measure the man, and to arrive at some approximate
estimate of his stature.
It may be assumed that the least conscientious and instructed of our
professional guides has read something of the history of Sir Walter
Scott, and is, if dimly, aware of the effect he produced in the realm of
literature in his lifetime. Sir Walter (who is surpassed or equalled by
six writers of our own day, in the judgment of those astounding
gentlemen who periodically tell us what we ought to think) was the
founder of three great schools. He founded the school of romantic
mediaeval poetry; he founded the school of antiquarian romance; and
he founded the school of Scottish-character romance. He