第21章 SOME CHARACTERISTICS(2)

BALFOUR, it is still fine and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too.He makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said.One could almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels - the one would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour, humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of progenitors.How characteristic it is of him - a man who for so many years suffered as an invalid - that he should lay it down that the two great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in labour.

One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:

"Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its success on high animal spirits.They have written histories, essays, contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not merely to collect and arrange, but to project and body forth? Has any true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as he himself said apropos of the CHILD'S GARDEN, he could 'speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production.Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh.From that time forward not only did he live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously.Add to all this that he was a slow and laborious writer, who would take more pains with a phrase than Scott with a chapter - then look at the stately shelf of his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the joy of life, and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his tenacity and fortitude unique!"

Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life - we had fain hoped that in that air he found so favourable he might have lived for many years, to add to the precious stock of innocent delight he has given to the world - to do yet more and greater.It was not to be.They buried him, with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300 feet high - a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on the slopes of the hill.There he has a resting-place not all unfit - for he sought the pure and clearer air on the heights from whence there are widest prospects;

yet not in the spot he would have chosen - for his heart was at home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with pathetic reference now:

"Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours;

Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood -

Fair shine the day on the house with open door;

Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney -

But I go for ever and come again no more."