Walter Raleigh | Page 4

of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the
aspiration and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:

'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a
precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love
die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of death also
in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to
die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion
from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a- tiptoe on the highest point of
being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet
and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing,
when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded
spirit shoots into the spiritual land.'
But we on this side are the poorer - by how much we can never know.
What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed
himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, for
the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his earliest
writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant series of books,
so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure and occasions so gaily
executed, that here was a finished literary craftsman, who had served
his period of apprenticeship and was playing with his tools. The
pleasure of wielding the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was
strong upon him, and many of the works he has left are the overflow of
a laughing energy, arabesques carved on the rock in the artist's painless
hours.
All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to translate a
German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power; Sophocles,
Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make
game of life. But to make game of life was to each of these the very
loftiest and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet;
to hold the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see
herself; to 'be a candle-holder and look on' at the pageantry which, but
for the candle-holder, would huddle along in the undistinguishable
blackness, filled them with the pride of place. Stevenson had the
sport-impulse at the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he
had inherited, an instinct for work in more blockish material, for
lighthouse- building and iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,'
contributed to a magazine years ago, he compares the artist in paint or
in words to the keeper of a booth at the world's fair, dependent for his
bread on his success in amusing others. In his volume of poems he
almost apologises for his excellence in literature:

'Say not of me, that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled
the sea, The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, To play at home
with paper like a child; But rather say: IN THE AFTERNOON OF
TIME A STRENUOUS FAMILY DUSTED FROM ITS HANDS THE
SAND OF GRANITE, AND BEHOLDING FAR ALONG THE
SOUNDING COASTS ITS PYRAMIDS AND TALL MEMORIALS
CATCH THE DYING SUN, SMILED WELL-CONTENT, AND TO
THIS CHILDISH TASK AROUND THE FIRE ADDRESSED ITS
EVENING HOURS.'
Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In
THE WRONG BOX, for instance, there is something very like the
card- game commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous
corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a
pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance. It is
an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the
breath of reality, full of fantastic character; the strange funeral
procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally
melts into space.
But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is
stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy
and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if
they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals. The
decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these
half-human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked
at last to paint an easel picture.
Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich
fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave
him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an
exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity for art and
labour; the