Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/21



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Genius proved not to exist, we would fain invent it, if only to account for the unaccountable graces and capricious defects of the author of "Prince Otto." In an age which had the usage and the right of conferring literary titles, he would surely have passed as "the Ingenious Mr. Stevenson," and deeply as he is tinctured with the fin du siècle, I somehow cannot but picture him among those Oxford Academics of the seventeenth century, litterati, humanists, and omniscientists, who crystallised into the Royal Society. Most of them had as little affinity as he to the modern scientific mind; intellectual aristocrats, they preserved the dignity of a stately dilettantism in their most trivial as in their gravest speculations, whether measuring the orbs of space, or hunting Echo in back gardens, or projecting the Cyclopean cesspool at New College, so vast that it should never need emptying till the end of time. How thirsty their curiosity, how exigent their demands at the Oracle of Nature, how versatile their lucubrations! Yet had they little of the utilitarian philanthropy of their grandsons. Nay, not even for its own sake did they pursue knowledge, but rather as a mental luxury, a noble diversion and exercise for the mind of the "gentleman scholar and philosopher," such as were tennis, bowls, and the high horse for his body. It needed a soul as coarse as Swift's to flout their complacent toils, for if by the way these Olympians divagate into triviality, extravagance, and paradox, they are never ridiculous; their very absurdities we welcome as gracious condescension, for each wayward, futile, pompous page is glorified by a nimbus of exquisite amenity and impregnable self-respect.

Stevenson's work is to me a fascinating problem; I fall back on this comparison, far-fetched, perhaps, yet not wholly infructuous. It may have been suggested by his singular power of reproducing the diction of more eloquent days, but the parallel lies much deeper down. In those happy times Science was not yet divorced from Letters; the profoundest knowledge disdained not the embellishment of Style, which in turn lent its dignity to trifles.