'Vessels of Very Limited Content'

I haven’t shaken the notion that Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer of children’s books. I read Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a boy, around the time I first read Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, though I’ve never thought of the latter as books written for kids. Perhaps it’s a matter of marketing or of Defoe and Swift’s essential seriousness. Neither thought he was writing for children. I’ve tried several times to read Stevenson’s other work, including his letters. I hated none of it and don’t recall boredom, but somehow Stevenson never took. I question my judgment because Henry James befriended him, admired his work and called him “an indispensable light.” James and Stevenson started as mutually admiring correspondents. They met at Bournemouth in 1885. Two years later, Stevenson left England for the last time, and in 1894 he was dead at age forty-four.

I’ve made another effort to work up enthusiasm for Stevenson. At least in the abstract, my favorite literary form is the essay, so I returned to a little brown volume published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1911, Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing, and read “Books Which Have Influenced Me” (1887). For Stevenson – not surprisingly for a novelist – most influential are works of fiction:

“They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.  To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.”

Stevenson’s experiences echo my own and his observations are remarkably similar to something Joseph Epstein writes in “A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature” (A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014):

“. . . if any inkling about the way the world works and the manner in which human nature is constituted were to be remotely available to me during my stay on the planet, I should have the best chance of discovering it through literature, and perhaps chiefly through the novel. The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works—these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.”

Stevenson offers Shakespeare perfunctory praise, but how do you say anything original about your debt to him? About “works of art,” Stevenson writes, “little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature.” He rightly describes Montaigne’s Essays as “a book not easily outlived,” and the list continues: the New Testament, Leaves of Grass, Herbert Spencer (!), The Story of Goethe’s Life by George Henry Lewes (Mr. George Eliot), Martial, Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth and George Meredith. As an afterthought he adds Hazlitt, Thoreau and William Penn’s aphorisms.

Like any true reader, Stevenson’s tastes are varied and inconsistent, and offer other true readers plenty to argue about. His conclusion is humble and humbling:

“. . . after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.  Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind.  A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written.”