August 19, 2025 • 20 mins
Explore the captivating life of Robert Louis Stevenson in this concise early twentieth-century biography, crafted by polymath G.K. Chesterton and acclaimed journalist J. H. Nicoll. Often referred to as ‘The Characteristics of Robert Louis Stevenson,’ this collaboration features distinct sections by each author, offering unique insights into Stevenson’s remarkable character. This recording presents the third edition, which includes structural changes and additional material not found in the first edition. Join David Wales as he brings this literary exploration to life.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part two of Robert Lewis Stevenson by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
and William Robertson Nicole. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Part two The Characteristics of Robert Lewis Stevenson
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton. All things and all men are
underrated much by others, especially by themselves. And men grow
(00:25):
tired of men, just as they do of green grass,
so that they have to seek for greener carnations. All
great men possess in themselves equalities which will certainly lay
them open to censure and diminishment. But these inevitable deficiencies
in the greatness of great men vary in the widest
(00:46):
degree of variety. Stephenson is open to a particularly subtle,
a particularly effective, and a particularly unjust disparagement. The advantage
of great men like Blake or Browning or Walt Whitman
is that they did not observe the niceties of technical literature.
(01:06):
The far greater disadvantage of Stephenson is that he did
because he had a conscience about small matters in art.
He is conceived not to have had an imagination about
big ones. It is assumed by some that he must
have been a bad architect, and the only reason that
they can assign is that he was a good workman.
(01:28):
The mistake which has given rise to this conception is
one that has much to answer for in numerous departments
of modern art, literature, religion, philosophy, and politics. The supreme
and splendid characteristic of Stevenson was his levity, and his
levity was the flower of one hundred grave philosophies. The
(01:51):
strong man is always light, the weak man is always heavy.
A swift and casual agility is the mark of bodily strength.
A humane levity is the mark of spiritual strength. A
thoroughly strong man swinging a sledgehammer can tap the top
of an eggshell. A weaker man swinging a sledgehammer will
(02:15):
break the table on which it stands into pieces. Also,
if he is a very weak man, he will be
proud of having broken the table and call himself a
strong man, dowered with the destructive power of an imperial race.
This is, superficially speaking, the peculiar interest of Stevenson. He
(02:35):
had what may be called a perfect mental athleticism, which
enabled him to leap from crag to crag and to
trust himself anywhere and upon any question. His splendid quality
as an essayist and controversialist was that he could always
recover his weapon. He was not like the average swashbuckler
(02:56):
of the current parties, tugged at the tail of his
own sold lord. This is what tends, for example, to
make him stand out so well beside his unhappy friend
mister Henley, whose true and unquestionable affection has lately taken
so bitter and feminine a form. Mister Henley, an admirable
(03:16):
poet and critic, is nevertheless the man of our excellence
who breaks the table instead of tapping the egg. In
his recent article on Stevenson, he entirely misses this peculiar
and supreme point about his subject. He there indulged in
a very emotional remonstrance against the reverence almost universally paid
(03:39):
to the physical misfortunes of his celebrated friend. If Stevenson
was a stricken man, he said, are we not all
stricken men? And he proceeded to call up the images
of the poor and sick, and of their stoicism under
their misfortunes. If sentimentalism be defined as the permitted of
(04:00):
an emotional movement to cloud a clear intellectual distinction. This
most assuredly is sentimentalism, for it would be impossible more
completely to misunderstand the real nature of the cult of
the Courage of Stevenson. The reason that Stephenson has been
selected out of the whole of suffering humanity as the
(04:23):
type of this more modern and occult martyrdom is a
very simple one. It is not that he merely contrived,
like any other man of reasonable manliness, to support pain
and limitation without whimpering, or committing suicide or taking to drink.
In that sense, of course, we are all stricken men,
and we are all stoics. The ground of Stephenson's particular
(04:47):
fascination in this matter was that he was the exponent
and the successful exponent, not merely of negative manliness, but
of a positive and lyric gaiety. This his wounded soldier
did not merely refrain from groans. He gave forth instead
a war song so juvenile and inspiriting that thousands of
(05:09):
men without a scratch went back into the battle. This
cripple did not merely bear his own burdens, but those
of thousands of contemporary men. No one can feel anything
but the most inexpressible kind of reverence for the patience
of the asthmatic charwoman or the consumptive tailor's assistant. Still,
(05:30):
the charwoman does not write as triplex, nor the tailor
the child's garden of verses. Their stoicism is magnificent, but
it is stoicism. But Stevenson did not face his troubles
as a stoic. He faced them as an epicurean. He
practiced with an austere triumph, that terrible asceticism of frivolity,
(05:54):
which is so much more difficult than the asceticism of gloom.
His resignation can own only be called an active and
uproarious resignation. It was not merely self sufficing. It was infectious.
His triumph was not that he went through his misfortunes
without becoming a cynic or a poltroon, but that he
(06:16):
went through his misfortunes and emerged quite exceptionally cheerful and
reasonable and courteous, quite exceptionally light hearted and liberal minded.
His triumph was, in other words, that he went through
his misfortunes and did not become like mister Innley. There
is one aspect of this matter, in particular, which it
(06:38):
is well to put somewhat more clearly before ourselves. This
triumph of Stevenson's over his physical disadvantages is commonly spoken
of with reference only to the elements of joy and faith,
and what may be called the new and essential virtue
of cosmic courage, but as a matter of fact, the
(06:59):
peculiar life, the interesting detachment of Stephenson from his own
body is exhibited in a quite equally striking way in
its purely intellectual aspect. Apart from any moral qualities, Stephenson
was characterized by a certain airy wisdom, a certain light
and cool rationality, which is very rare and very difficult,
(07:21):
indeed to those who are greatly thwarted or tormented in life.
It is possible to find an invalid capable of the
work of a strong man, but it is very rare
to find an invalid capable of the idleness of a
strong man. It is possible to find an invalid who
has the faith which removes mountains, but not easy to
(07:44):
find an invalid who has the faith that puts up
with pessimists. It may not be impossible or even unusual
for a man to lie on his back in a
sick bed in a dark room and be an optimist.
But it is very unusual, indeed, for a man to
lie on his back on a sick bed in a
dark room and be a reasonable optimist. And that is
(08:07):
what Stephenson, almost alone of modern optimists, succeeded in being.
The faith of Stephenson, like that of a great number
of very sane men, was founded on what is called
a paradox, the paradox that existence was splendid because it
was to owe outward appearance. Desperate paradox, so far from
(08:29):
being a modern and fanciful matter, is inherent in all
the great hypotheses of humanity. The Athenasian Creed, for example,
the supreme testimony of Catholic Christianity sparkles with paradox like
a modern society comedy. Thus, in the same manner, scientific
philosophy tells us that finite space is unthinkable, an infinite
(08:54):
space is unthinkable. Thus, the most influential modern metaphysician, Eagle declares,
without hesitation, when the last rag of theology is abandoned
and the last point of philosophy passed, that existence is
the same as non existence. Thus, the brilliant author of
Lady Windemere's fan in the electric glare of modernity, finds
(09:19):
that life is much too important to be taken seriously. Thus, Tertullian,
in the First Ages of Faith said, credo quia impossibility.
We must not therefore be immediately repelled by this paradoxical
character of Stephenson's optimism, or imagine for a moment that
(09:40):
it was merely a part of that artistic foppery or
faddling hedonism with which he has been ridiculously credited. His
optimism was one which, so far from dwelling upon those
flowers and sunbeams which formed the stock in trade of
conventional optimism, took a peculiar pleasure in the contemplation of
(10:02):
skulls and cudgels and gallows. It is one thing to
be the kind of optimist who can divert his mind
from personal suffering by dreaming of the face of an angel,
and quite another thing to be the kind of optimist
who can divert it by dreaming of the foul, fat
face of long John Silver. And this faith of his
(10:25):
had a very definite and a very original philosophical purport.
Other men have justified existence because it was a harmony.
He justified it because it was a battle, because it
was an inspiring and melodious discord. He appealed to a
certain set of facts which lie far deeper than any logic,
(10:47):
the great paradoxes of the soul. For the singular fact
is that the spirit of man is in reality depressed
by all the things which logically speaking should encourage it,
and encouraged by all the things which logically speaking should
depress it. Nothing, for example, can be conceived more really
(11:09):
dispiriting than that rationalistic explanation of pain, which conceives it
as a thing laid by providence upon the worst people. Nothing,
on the other hand, can be conceived as more exalting
and reassuring than that great mystical doctrine which teaches that
(11:29):
pain is a thing laid by providence upon the best.
We can accept the agony of heroes while we revolt
against the agony of culprits. We can all endure to
regard pain when it is mysterious. Our deepest nature protests
against it the moment that it is rational. This doctrine
(11:51):
that the best man suffers most is, of course, the
supreme doctrine of Christianity. Millions have found not merely an
elevating but a soothing story in the undeserved sufferings of Christ.
Had the sufferings been deserved, we should all have been pessimists.
Stephenson's great ethical and philosophical value lies in the fact
(12:16):
that he realized this great paradox, that life becomes more
fascinating the darker it grows. That life is worth living
only so far as it is difficult to live. The
more steadfastly and gloomily men clung to their sinister visions
of duty, the more in his eyes they swell the
(12:36):
chorus of the praise of things. He was an optimist
because to him everything was heroic, and nothing more heroic
than the pessimist. To Stephenson, the optimist belong the most
frightful epigrams of pessimism. It was he who said that
this planet on which we live was more dranched with blood, animal,
(12:58):
and vegetable than a pirate ship. It was he who
said that man was a disease of the agglutinated dust.
And his supreme position, and his supreme difference from all
common optimists, is merely this, that all common optimists say
that life is glorious in spite of these things. But
(13:20):
he said that all life was glorious because of them.
He discovered that a battle is more comforting than a truce.
He discovered the same great fact which was discovered by
a man so fantastically different from him that the mere
name of him may raise a legitimate laugh. General booth
he discovered, that is to say, that religious evolution might
(13:44):
tend at last to the discovery that the peace given
in the churches was less attractive to the religious spirit
than the war promised outside. That for one man who
wanted to be comforted, a hundred wanted to be stirred
man the even ordinary men wanted in the last resort,
(14:04):
not life or death, but drums. It may reasonably be
said that of all outrageous comparisons, one of the most
curious must be this between the old evangelical despot and
enthusiast and the elegant and almost hedonistic man of letters.
But these far fetched comparisons are infinitely the sanest, for
(14:27):
they remind us of the sanest of all conceptions, the
unity of things. A splendid, empathetic Prince of India, living
in far off Ians came to many of the same
conceptions as a rather dingy German professor in the nineteenth century.
For there are many essential resemblances between Buddha and Schopenhauer.
(14:49):
And if anyone should urge that lapse of time might
produce mere imitation, is as easy to point out that
the same great theory of evolution was pronounced simultaneously by Darwin,
who became so grim a rationalist that he ceased even
to care for the arts, and by Wallace, who has
(15:11):
become so fiery a spiritualist that he yearns after astrology
and table wrapping. Men of the most widely divergent types
are connected by these invisible chords across the world. And
Stevenson was essentially a colonel in the Salvation army. He believed,
that is to say, in making religion a military affair.
(15:34):
His militarism, of course, needs to be carefully understood. It
was considered entirely from the point of view of the
person fighting. It had none of that evil pleasure in
contemplating the killed and wounded, in realizing the agonies of
the vanquished, which has been turned by some modern writers
(15:55):
into an art, a literary sin which, though only in
black ink on white paper is far worse than the
mere sin of murder. Stephenson's militarism was as free from
all the mere poetry of conquest and dominion as the
militarism of an actual common soldier. It was mainly, that
(16:17):
is to say, a poetry of watches and parades and campfires.
He knew he was in the hosts of the lord.
He did not trouble much about the enemy. Here is
his own resemblance to that church militant, which, secure only
in its own rectitude, wages war upon the nameless thing
which has tormented and bewildered us from the beginning of
(16:41):
the world. Of course, this Stephensonian view of war suggests
in itself that other question touching which so much has
been written about him, the subject of childishness and the child.
It is true, of course, that the splendid, infantile character
of even since mind saved him from any evil arising
(17:03):
from his militarism. A child can hit his nurse hard
with a wooden sword without being an esthet of violence.
He may enjoy a hard whack, but he need not
enjoy the color harmonies of black and blue as they
are presented in a bruise. It is undoubtedly the truth,
of course, that Stephenson's interest in this fighting side of
(17:25):
human nature was mainly childish, that is to say, mainly subjective.
He thought of the whole matter in the primary colors
of poetic simplicity. He said, with splendid gusto in one
of his finest letters, shall we never taste blood? But
he did not really want blood. He wanted Crimson Lake.
(17:48):
But of course, in the case of so light and
elusive a figure as Stephenson, even the terms which have
been most definitely attached to him tend to become misleading
and inadequate. And the terms childlike or childish, true as
they are down to a very fundamental truth, are yet
the origin of a certain confusion. One of the greatest
(18:11):
errors in existing literary philosophy is that of confusing the
child with the boy. Many great moral teachers, beginning with
Jesus Christ, have perceived the profound philosophical importance of the child.
The child sees everything freshly and fully. As we advance
in life, it is true that we see things in
(18:33):
some degree less and less, that we are afflicted spiritually
and morally with the myopia of the student. But the
problem of the boy is essentially different from that of
the child. The boy represents the earliest growth of the earthly,
unmanageable qualities poetic still, but not quite so simple or
(18:55):
so universal. The child enjoys the plain picture of the
world world, the boy wants the secret. The end of
the story, the child wishes to dance in the sun,
but the boy wishes to sail after buried treasure. The
child enjoys a flower, and the boy a mechanical engine.
And the finest and most peculiar work of Stephenson is
(19:18):
rather that he was the first writer to treat seriously
and poetically the esthetic instincts of the boy. He celebrated
the toy gun rather than the rattle around the child
and his rattle. There has gathered a splendid service of
literature and art. Hans Christian and Charles Kingsley and George
MacDonald and Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, and a list
(19:42):
of celebrities a mile long bring their splendid gifts to
the christening. But the tragedy of the helpless infant, if
it be a male infant, girls are quite a different matter.
Is simply this that, having been fed on literature and
art as fine in its way as Shelley and Turner.
Up to the age of seven, he feels within him
(20:05):
new impulses and interests, growing a hunger for action and knowledge,
for fighting and discovery, for the witchery of facts and
the wild poetry of geography. And then he is suddenly
dropped with a crash out of literature, and can read
nothing but Jack Valliant among the Indians. For in the
(20:26):
whole scene there is only one book which is at
once literature like hanns Andersen, and yet a book for
boys and not for children. And its name is Treasure Island. G. K. Chesterton,
end of Part two,
Part two of Robert Lewis Stevenson by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
and William Robertson Nicole. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Part two The Characteristics of Robert Lewis Stevenson
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton. All things and all men are
underrated much by others, especially by themselves. And men grow
(00:25):
tired of men, just as they do of green grass,
so that they have to seek for greener carnations. All
great men possess in themselves equalities which will certainly lay
them open to censure and diminishment. But these inevitable deficiencies
in the greatness of great men vary in the widest
(00:46):
degree of variety. Stephenson is open to a particularly subtle,
a particularly effective, and a particularly unjust disparagement. The advantage
of great men like Blake or Browning or Walt Whitman
is that they did not observe the niceties of technical literature.
(01:06):
The far greater disadvantage of Stephenson is that he did
because he had a conscience about small matters in art.
He is conceived not to have had an imagination about
big ones. It is assumed by some that he must
have been a bad architect, and the only reason that
they can assign is that he was a good workman.
(01:28):
The mistake which has given rise to this conception is
one that has much to answer for in numerous departments
of modern art, literature, religion, philosophy, and politics. The supreme
and splendid characteristic of Stevenson was his levity, and his
levity was the flower of one hundred grave philosophies. The
(01:51):
strong man is always light, the weak man is always heavy.
A swift and casual agility is the mark of bodily strength.
A humane levity is the mark of spiritual strength. A
thoroughly strong man swinging a sledgehammer can tap the top
of an eggshell. A weaker man swinging a sledgehammer will
(02:15):
break the table on which it stands into pieces. Also,
if he is a very weak man, he will be
proud of having broken the table and call himself a
strong man, dowered with the destructive power of an imperial race.
This is, superficially speaking, the peculiar interest of Stevenson. He
(02:35):
had what may be called a perfect mental athleticism, which
enabled him to leap from crag to crag and to
trust himself anywhere and upon any question. His splendid quality
as an essayist and controversialist was that he could always
recover his weapon. He was not like the average swashbuckler
(02:56):
of the current parties, tugged at the tail of his
own sold lord. This is what tends, for example, to
make him stand out so well beside his unhappy friend
mister Henley, whose true and unquestionable affection has lately taken
so bitter and feminine a form. Mister Henley, an admirable
(03:16):
poet and critic, is nevertheless the man of our excellence
who breaks the table instead of tapping the egg. In
his recent article on Stevenson, he entirely misses this peculiar
and supreme point about his subject. He there indulged in
a very emotional remonstrance against the reverence almost universally paid
(03:39):
to the physical misfortunes of his celebrated friend. If Stevenson
was a stricken man, he said, are we not all
stricken men? And he proceeded to call up the images
of the poor and sick, and of their stoicism under
their misfortunes. If sentimentalism be defined as the permitted of
(04:00):
an emotional movement to cloud a clear intellectual distinction. This
most assuredly is sentimentalism, for it would be impossible more
completely to misunderstand the real nature of the cult of
the Courage of Stevenson. The reason that Stephenson has been
selected out of the whole of suffering humanity as the
(04:23):
type of this more modern and occult martyrdom is a
very simple one. It is not that he merely contrived,
like any other man of reasonable manliness, to support pain
and limitation without whimpering, or committing suicide or taking to drink.
In that sense, of course, we are all stricken men,
and we are all stoics. The ground of Stephenson's particular
(04:47):
fascination in this matter was that he was the exponent
and the successful exponent, not merely of negative manliness, but
of a positive and lyric gaiety. This his wounded soldier
did not merely refrain from groans. He gave forth instead
a war song so juvenile and inspiriting that thousands of
(05:09):
men without a scratch went back into the battle. This
cripple did not merely bear his own burdens, but those
of thousands of contemporary men. No one can feel anything
but the most inexpressible kind of reverence for the patience
of the asthmatic charwoman or the consumptive tailor's assistant. Still,
(05:30):
the charwoman does not write as triplex, nor the tailor
the child's garden of verses. Their stoicism is magnificent, but
it is stoicism. But Stevenson did not face his troubles
as a stoic. He faced them as an epicurean. He
practiced with an austere triumph, that terrible asceticism of frivolity,
(05:54):
which is so much more difficult than the asceticism of gloom.
His resignation can own only be called an active and
uproarious resignation. It was not merely self sufficing. It was infectious.
His triumph was not that he went through his misfortunes
without becoming a cynic or a poltroon, but that he
(06:16):
went through his misfortunes and emerged quite exceptionally cheerful and
reasonable and courteous, quite exceptionally light hearted and liberal minded.
His triumph was, in other words, that he went through
his misfortunes and did not become like mister Innley. There
is one aspect of this matter, in particular, which it
(06:38):
is well to put somewhat more clearly before ourselves. This
triumph of Stevenson's over his physical disadvantages is commonly spoken
of with reference only to the elements of joy and faith,
and what may be called the new and essential virtue
of cosmic courage, but as a matter of fact, the
(06:59):
peculiar life, the interesting detachment of Stephenson from his own
body is exhibited in a quite equally striking way in
its purely intellectual aspect. Apart from any moral qualities, Stephenson
was characterized by a certain airy wisdom, a certain light
and cool rationality, which is very rare and very difficult,
(07:21):
indeed to those who are greatly thwarted or tormented in life.
It is possible to find an invalid capable of the
work of a strong man, but it is very rare
to find an invalid capable of the idleness of a
strong man. It is possible to find an invalid who
has the faith which removes mountains, but not easy to
(07:44):
find an invalid who has the faith that puts up
with pessimists. It may not be impossible or even unusual
for a man to lie on his back in a
sick bed in a dark room and be an optimist.
But it is very unusual, indeed, for a man to
lie on his back on a sick bed in a
dark room and be a reasonable optimist. And that is
(08:07):
what Stephenson, almost alone of modern optimists, succeeded in being.
The faith of Stephenson, like that of a great number
of very sane men, was founded on what is called
a paradox, the paradox that existence was splendid because it
was to owe outward appearance. Desperate paradox, so far from
(08:29):
being a modern and fanciful matter, is inherent in all
the great hypotheses of humanity. The Athenasian Creed, for example,
the supreme testimony of Catholic Christianity sparkles with paradox like
a modern society comedy. Thus, in the same manner, scientific
philosophy tells us that finite space is unthinkable, an infinite
(08:54):
space is unthinkable. Thus, the most influential modern metaphysician, Eagle declares,
without hesitation, when the last rag of theology is abandoned
and the last point of philosophy passed, that existence is
the same as non existence. Thus, the brilliant author of
Lady Windemere's fan in the electric glare of modernity, finds
(09:19):
that life is much too important to be taken seriously. Thus, Tertullian,
in the First Ages of Faith said, credo quia impossibility.
We must not therefore be immediately repelled by this paradoxical
character of Stephenson's optimism, or imagine for a moment that
(09:40):
it was merely a part of that artistic foppery or
faddling hedonism with which he has been ridiculously credited. His
optimism was one which, so far from dwelling upon those
flowers and sunbeams which formed the stock in trade of
conventional optimism, took a peculiar pleasure in the contemplation of
(10:02):
skulls and cudgels and gallows. It is one thing to
be the kind of optimist who can divert his mind
from personal suffering by dreaming of the face of an angel,
and quite another thing to be the kind of optimist
who can divert it by dreaming of the foul, fat
face of long John Silver. And this faith of his
(10:25):
had a very definite and a very original philosophical purport.
Other men have justified existence because it was a harmony.
He justified it because it was a battle, because it
was an inspiring and melodious discord. He appealed to a
certain set of facts which lie far deeper than any logic,
(10:47):
the great paradoxes of the soul. For the singular fact
is that the spirit of man is in reality depressed
by all the things which logically speaking should encourage it,
and encouraged by all the things which logically speaking should
depress it. Nothing, for example, can be conceived more really
(11:09):
dispiriting than that rationalistic explanation of pain, which conceives it
as a thing laid by providence upon the worst people. Nothing,
on the other hand, can be conceived as more exalting
and reassuring than that great mystical doctrine which teaches that
(11:29):
pain is a thing laid by providence upon the best.
We can accept the agony of heroes while we revolt
against the agony of culprits. We can all endure to
regard pain when it is mysterious. Our deepest nature protests
against it the moment that it is rational. This doctrine
(11:51):
that the best man suffers most is, of course, the
supreme doctrine of Christianity. Millions have found not merely an
elevating but a soothing story in the undeserved sufferings of Christ.
Had the sufferings been deserved, we should all have been pessimists.
Stephenson's great ethical and philosophical value lies in the fact
(12:16):
that he realized this great paradox, that life becomes more
fascinating the darker it grows. That life is worth living
only so far as it is difficult to live. The
more steadfastly and gloomily men clung to their sinister visions
of duty, the more in his eyes they swell the
(12:36):
chorus of the praise of things. He was an optimist
because to him everything was heroic, and nothing more heroic
than the pessimist. To Stephenson, the optimist belong the most
frightful epigrams of pessimism. It was he who said that
this planet on which we live was more dranched with blood, animal,
(12:58):
and vegetable than a pirate ship. It was he who
said that man was a disease of the agglutinated dust.
And his supreme position, and his supreme difference from all
common optimists, is merely this, that all common optimists say
that life is glorious in spite of these things. But
(13:20):
he said that all life was glorious because of them.
He discovered that a battle is more comforting than a truce.
He discovered the same great fact which was discovered by
a man so fantastically different from him that the mere
name of him may raise a legitimate laugh. General booth
he discovered, that is to say, that religious evolution might
(13:44):
tend at last to the discovery that the peace given
in the churches was less attractive to the religious spirit
than the war promised outside. That for one man who
wanted to be comforted, a hundred wanted to be stirred
man the even ordinary men wanted in the last resort,
(14:04):
not life or death, but drums. It may reasonably be
said that of all outrageous comparisons, one of the most
curious must be this between the old evangelical despot and
enthusiast and the elegant and almost hedonistic man of letters.
But these far fetched comparisons are infinitely the sanest, for
(14:27):
they remind us of the sanest of all conceptions, the
unity of things. A splendid, empathetic Prince of India, living
in far off Ians came to many of the same
conceptions as a rather dingy German professor in the nineteenth century.
For there are many essential resemblances between Buddha and Schopenhauer.
(14:49):
And if anyone should urge that lapse of time might
produce mere imitation, is as easy to point out that
the same great theory of evolution was pronounced simultaneously by Darwin,
who became so grim a rationalist that he ceased even
to care for the arts, and by Wallace, who has
(15:11):
become so fiery a spiritualist that he yearns after astrology
and table wrapping. Men of the most widely divergent types
are connected by these invisible chords across the world. And
Stevenson was essentially a colonel in the Salvation army. He believed,
that is to say, in making religion a military affair.
(15:34):
His militarism, of course, needs to be carefully understood. It
was considered entirely from the point of view of the
person fighting. It had none of that evil pleasure in
contemplating the killed and wounded, in realizing the agonies of
the vanquished, which has been turned by some modern writers
(15:55):
into an art, a literary sin which, though only in
black ink on white paper is far worse than the
mere sin of murder. Stephenson's militarism was as free from
all the mere poetry of conquest and dominion as the
militarism of an actual common soldier. It was mainly, that
(16:17):
is to say, a poetry of watches and parades and campfires.
He knew he was in the hosts of the lord.
He did not trouble much about the enemy. Here is
his own resemblance to that church militant, which, secure only
in its own rectitude, wages war upon the nameless thing
which has tormented and bewildered us from the beginning of
(16:41):
the world. Of course, this Stephensonian view of war suggests
in itself that other question touching which so much has
been written about him, the subject of childishness and the child.
It is true, of course, that the splendid, infantile character
of even since mind saved him from any evil arising
(17:03):
from his militarism. A child can hit his nurse hard
with a wooden sword without being an esthet of violence.
He may enjoy a hard whack, but he need not
enjoy the color harmonies of black and blue as they
are presented in a bruise. It is undoubtedly the truth,
of course, that Stephenson's interest in this fighting side of
(17:25):
human nature was mainly childish, that is to say, mainly subjective.
He thought of the whole matter in the primary colors
of poetic simplicity. He said, with splendid gusto in one
of his finest letters, shall we never taste blood? But
he did not really want blood. He wanted Crimson Lake.
(17:48):
But of course, in the case of so light and
elusive a figure as Stephenson, even the terms which have
been most definitely attached to him tend to become misleading
and inadequate. And the terms childlike or childish, true as
they are down to a very fundamental truth, are yet
the origin of a certain confusion. One of the greatest
(18:11):
errors in existing literary philosophy is that of confusing the
child with the boy. Many great moral teachers, beginning with
Jesus Christ, have perceived the profound philosophical importance of the child.
The child sees everything freshly and fully. As we advance
in life, it is true that we see things in
(18:33):
some degree less and less, that we are afflicted spiritually
and morally with the myopia of the student. But the
problem of the boy is essentially different from that of
the child. The boy represents the earliest growth of the earthly,
unmanageable qualities poetic still, but not quite so simple or
(18:55):
so universal. The child enjoys the plain picture of the
world world, the boy wants the secret. The end of
the story, the child wishes to dance in the sun,
but the boy wishes to sail after buried treasure. The
child enjoys a flower, and the boy a mechanical engine.
And the finest and most peculiar work of Stephenson is
(19:18):
rather that he was the first writer to treat seriously
and poetically the esthetic instincts of the boy. He celebrated
the toy gun rather than the rattle around the child
and his rattle. There has gathered a splendid service of
literature and art. Hans Christian and Charles Kingsley and George
MacDonald and Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, and a list
(19:42):
of celebrities a mile long bring their splendid gifts to
the christening. But the tragedy of the helpless infant, if
it be a male infant, girls are quite a different matter.
Is simply this that, having been fed on literature and
art as fine in its way as Shelley and Turner.
Up to the age of seven, he feels within him
(20:05):
new impulses and interests, growing a hunger for action and knowledge,
for fighting and discovery, for the witchery of facts and
the wild poetry of geography. And then he is suddenly
dropped with a crash out of literature, and can read
nothing but Jack Valliant among the Indians. For in the
(20:26):
whole scene there is only one book which is at
once literature like hanns Andersen, and yet a book for
boys and not for children. And its name is Treasure Island. G. K. Chesterton,
end of Part two,
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