Robert Louis Stevenson by G.K. Chesterton — Read

Proverbs are generally true, when they are the proverbs of the people; so long as they are not proverbs about another people. It was unwise to search Sussex to discover if Kentish men had tails, or England to learn if French husbands had horns. And obviously there is much that is misleading in the traditional type of the practical Puritanical Scotsman, with his dry thrift and bleak respectability. A figure of such severe decorum is not very vividly evoked either by the title of Rab the Ranter or the Wizard of the North. And few of our own generation are yet convinced of it, even by the scientific severity that has given us _Peter Pan_ or the sober responsibility that stiffens the narrative of _The New Arabian Nights._ The readers of the latter work will be much interested to realise that a Scotsman is incapable of seeing a joke, since he seems so eminently capable of making one; and the reader of the former will be disposed to suggest that the national jesting is not too sober but rather too extravagant. _Peter Pan_ carries on by lineal tradition the cult of the child, beginning with _Treasure Island; _ but if there be anything to criticise in Sir James Barrie's beautiful fantasia, it is that wilder things happen to Wendy in a London nursery than ever happened to Jim in a tropical island. The only object to living in a nursery where the dog is the nurse, or the father lives in the dog-kennel, is that there seems no necessity to go to the Never-Never Land to look for the things that never happen. Whatever else we say of the Scottish genius, it is certainly not merely dry or prosaic; and indeed the real mixture of the Scottish genius is as full of contradictions as that pattern of crosses in the Scottish plaid. And even here there is subtlety as well as cross-purposes; and the tartan may be an old tribal form of camouflage.

There is an aspect of a Scottish hill or moor, which for the moment will look grey and at the least change of light look purple; which is in itself an image of Scotland. A passing from the most dispassionate to the most passionate tint, which yet seems to be no more than a new shade, might well represent the mixture of restraint and violence that runs through the national history and the national character. Stevenson stands for one of those moments in the national history when the grey turned to purple; and yet in his purple there is still a great deal of grey. There is a great deal of restraint, artistic even more than moral; there is a certain coolness in the commentary even on picturesque objects; there is even a certain absence of the common conception of passion. There are shades even in purple; there are differences between the purple orchid and the purple heather; and his often seems to be like white heather, for luck. In other words, his idea of happiness is still of the breezy and boyish sort; and though he described the happiness of lovers very happily in _Catriona_ and began to foreshadow their unhappiness in _Weir of Hermiston,_ he attacked the theme relatively late in life; and it counted for little in that original idea of a return to simplicity, which had come upon him like a wind from a playground. Imagine how annoyed Jim Hawkins would have been, if a lot of girls had been allowed to muck up the business of going after treasure! So brilliant is this resurrection of boyhood, that we almost believe for the moment that Stevenson must have been as young and callous as Jim. Only I suspect, as I say, that in some ways he had even made himself a little callous in those matters. There his adventures had been misadventures. He did not recall for mere pleasure the memory of youth, as he did the memory of boyhood.