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Title: R. L. Stevenson
A critical study
Author: Frank Swinnerton
Illustrator: John Singer Sargent
Release date: January 24, 2024 [eBook #72789]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Martin Secker, 1914
Credits: Terry Jeffress, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK R. L. STEVENSON ***
R. L. STEVENSON
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_:
J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE
HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS
THOMAS HARDY
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
BERNARD SHAW
BY P. P. HOWE
WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMAS
WALT WHITMAN
BY BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT
SAMUEL BUTLER
BY GILBERT CANNAN
A. C. SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THOMAS
GEORGE GISSING
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
RUDYARD KIPLING
BY CYRIL FALLS
WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER
ROBERT BRIDGES
BY F. E. BRETT YOUNG
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
BY UNA TAYLOR
[Illustration:
_Yours truly_
_Robert Louis Stevenson_]
R. L. STEVENSON
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
FRANK SWINNERTON
LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI
MCMXIV
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE MERRY HEART
THE YOUNG IDEA
THE CASEMENT
THE HAPPY FAMILY
ON THE STAIRCASE
GEORGE GISSING:
A CRITICAL STUDY
_The Sargent portrait of Stevenson which forms the frontispiece to
this volume has been included by permission of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, to
whom the publisher wishes to express his acknowledgments and thanks._
TO
DOUGLAS GRAY
IN MALICE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BIOGRAPHICAL 9
II. JUVENILIA 36
III. TRAVEL BOOKS 42
IV. ESSAYS 62
V. POEMS 90
VI. PLAYS 102
VII. SHORT STORIES 116
VIII. NOVELS AND ROMANCES 143
IX. CONCLUSION 185
BIBLIOGRAPHY 211
I
BIOGRAPHICAL
I
As the purpose of this book is entirely critical, and as there already
exist several works dealing extensively with the life of Stevenson, the
present biographical section is intentionally summary. Its object is
merely to sketch in outline the principal events of Stevenson’s life,
in order that what follows may require no passages of biographical
elucidation. Stevenson was a writer of many sorts of stories, essays,
poems; and in all this diversity he was at no time preoccupied with
one particular form of art. In considering each form separately, as I
purpose doing, it has been necessary to group into single divisions
work written at greatly different times and in greatly differing
conditions. In Mr. Graham Balfour’s “Life,” and very remarkably in
Sir Sidney Colvin’s able commentaries upon Stevenson’s letters, may
be found information at first hand which I could only give by acts of
piracy. To those works, therefore, I refer the reader who wishes to
follow in chronological detail the growth of Stevenson’s talent. They
are, indeed, essential to all who are primarily interested in Stevenson
the man. Here, the attempt will be made only to summarise the events
of his days, and to estimate the ultimate value of his work in various
departments of letters. This book is not a biography; it is not an
“appreciation”; it is simply a critical study.
II
Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850; and he died, almost exactly
forty-four years later, on December 3, 1894. His first literary work,
undertaken at the age of six, was an essay upon the history of Moses.
This he dictated to his mother, and was rewarded for it by the gift
of a Bible picture book. It is from the date of that triumph that
Stevenson’s desire to be a writer must be calculated. A history of
Joseph followed, and later on, apparently at the age of nine, he
again dictated an account of certain travels in Perth. His first
published work was a pamphlet on The Pentland Rising, written (but
full of quotations) at the age of sixteen. His first “regular or paid
contribution to periodical literature” was the essay called _Roads_
(now included in _Essays of Travel_), which was written when the
author was between twenty-two and twenty-three. The first actual book
to be published was _An Inland Voyage_ (1878), written when Stevenson
was twenty-seven; but all the essays which ultimately formed the
volumes entitled _Virginibus Puerisque_ (1881) and _Familiar Studies
of Men and Books_ (1882) are the product of 1874 and onwards. These,
indicated very roughly, are the beginnings of his literary career.
Of course there were many other contributary facts which led to his
turning author; and there is probably no writer whose childhood is so
fully “documented” as Stevenson’s. He claimed to be one of those who
do not forget their own lives, and, in accordance with his practice,
he has supplied us with numerous essays in which we may trace his
growth and his experiences. That he was an only child and a delicate
one we all know; so, too, we know that his grandfather was that Robert
Stevenson who built the Bell Rock lighthouse. In the few chapters
contributed by Robert Louis to _A Family of Engineers_ we shall find an
account, some of it fanciful, but some of it also perfectly accurate,
of the Stevenson family and of Robert Stevenson, the grandfather, in
particular. In _Memories and Portraits_ is included a sketch of Thomas
Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis; and in Mr. Balfour’s “Life”
there is ample information for those who wish to study the influences
of heredity.
For our own purpose it may be interesting to note three points in this
connection. As a boy, and even as a youth, Stevenson was expected by
his father to be an engineer and to carry on the family tradition.
His early training therefore brought him much to the sea, with rather
special facilities for appreciating the more active relations of man to
the sea. The second point is that the Stevensons had always been, true
to their Scots instincts, very strict religious disciplinarians (Robert
Stevenson the elder is very illuminating on this); but that they
were also very shrewd and determined men of action. Finally, another
grandfather of Robert Louis, this time on the Balfour side, was in fact
a clergyman. Stevenson significantly admits that he may have inherited
from this grandfather the love of sermonising, which is as noticeable
in _An Inland Voyage_ and in _Virginibus Puerisque_ as it is in his
latest non-fictional work. We cannot forget that his contribution
to festivities marking the anniversary of his marriage was upon one
occasion a sermon on St. Jacob’s Oil, delivered from a pulpit carried
as part-cargo by the “Janet Nichol.” From his mother, too, he is said
to have inherited that constitutional delicacy which made him subject
throughout his life to periods of serious illness, and which eventually
led to his early death.
There was one other influence upon his childhood which must not be
neglected as long as the pendulum of thought association swings
steadily from heredity to environment. That influence was the influence
exercised by his nurse, Alison Cunningham. It is admitted to have been
enormous, and I am not sure that it is desirable to repeat in this
place what is so much common knowledge. But it is perhaps worth while
to emphasise the fact that, while Alison Cunningham was not only a
devoted nurse, night and day, to the delicate child, she actually was
in many ways responsible for the peculiar bent of Stevenson’s mind.
She it was who read to him, who declaimed to him, the sounds of fine
words which he loved so well in after life. The meaning of the words
he sometimes did not grasp; the sounds--so admirable, it would seem,
was her delivery--were his deep delight. Not only that: she introduced
him thus early to the Covenanting writers upon whom he claimed to
have based his sense of style; and, however lightly we may regard his
various affirmations as to the source of his “style,” and as to the
principles upon which we might expect to find it based, the sense of
style, which is quite another thing, was almost certainly awakened in
him by these means. Sense of style, I think, is a much greater point in
Stevenson’s equipment than the actual “style.” The style varies; the
sense of style is constant, as it must be in any writer who is not a
Freeman. Alison Cunningham, being herself possessed of this sense, or
of the savour of words, impressed it upon “her boy”; and the result we
may see. All Stevenson’s subsequent “learning” was so much exercise: no
man learns how to write solely by observation and imitation.
From being a lonely and delicate child spinning fancies and hearing
stirring words and stories and sermons in the nursery, Stevenson became
a lonely and delicate child in many places. One of them was the Manse
at Colinton, the home of his clerical grandfather. Another was the
house in Heriot Row, Edinburgh, where he played with his brilliant
cousin R. A. M. Stevenson. R. A. M. was not his only cousin--there
were many others; but the personality of R. A. M. is such that one
could wish to know the whole of it, so attractive are the references
in Stevenson’s essays and letters, and in Mr. Balfour’s biography.
I imagine, although I cannot be sure, that it was with R. A. M. that
Stevenson played at producing plays on toy-stages. We shall see later
how impossible he found it, when he came to consider the drama as
a literary field, to shake off the influence of Skelt’s drama; but
anybody who has played with toy-stages will respond to the enthusiasm
discovered in _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_, and will
sympathise with the delight which Stevenson must later have felt on
being able to revive in Mr. Lloyd Osbourne’s company the old Skeltian
joys.
School followed in due course, the attendances broken by sickness
and possibly by the incurable idleness which one supposes to have
been due to lassitude rather than to mischief. Mr. Balfour details
the components of Stevenson’s education, from Latin and French and
German, to bathing and dancing. Football is also mentioned, while
riding seems to have developed into a sort of reckless horsemanship.
When he was eleven or twelve Stevenson came first to London, and went
with his father to Homburg. Later he went twice with Mrs. Stevenson to
Mentone, travelling, besides, on the first occasion, through Italy, and
returning by way of Germany and the Rhine. It is, however, remarkable
that he does not seem to have retained much memory of so interesting
an experience; a fact which would suggest that, although he was able at
this time to store for future use ample impressions of his own feelings
and his own habits, he had not yet awakened to any very lively or
precise observation of the external world. That observation began with
the determination to write, and Stevenson then lost no opportunity of
setting down exactly his impressions of things seen.
In 1867--that is, after the publication, and after the withdrawal,
of _The Pentland Rising_--Stevenson began his training as a civil
engineer, working for a Science degree at Edinburgh University. One may
learn something of his experience there from _Memories and Portraits_
and even from _The Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_. It was now that he met
Charles Baxter (the letters to whom are the jolliest and apparently
most candid of any he wrote), James Walter Ferrier, Sir Walter Simpson
(the real hero of _An Inland Voyage_), and Fleeming Jenkin, whose wife
mistook Stevenson for a poet. Here, too, he joined the “Speculative
Society,” of which presently he became an unimportant president.
Moreover, the friendships formed at the University led to the
foundation of a mysterious society of six members, called the L.J.R.
(signifying Liberty, Justice, Reverence), which has been the occasion
of much comment on account of the secrecy with which the meaning of the
initials has been guarded.
It was while he was at the University that his desire to write became
acute. By his own account, he went everywhere with two little books,
one to read, and one to write in. He read a great deal, talked a great
deal, made friends, and charmed everybody very much. In 1868, 1869, and
1870 he spent some time on the West Coast of Scotland, watching the
work which was being carried on by his father’s firm at Anstruther,
Wick, and finally at Earraid (an island introduced into _Catriona_
and _The Merry Men_). In 1871 he received from the Scottish Society
of Arts a silver medal for a paper (_A New Form of Intermittent
Light for Lighthouses_); and two years later another paper, _On the
Thermal Influence of Forests_, was communicated to the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. But it was in 1871 that Stevenson gave up, and induced
his father most unwillingly to give up, the plans hitherto regarded as
definite for his future career. He could not become a civil engineer;
but determined that he must make his way by letters. A compromise was
effected, by the terms of which he read for the Bar; and he passed his
preliminary examination in 1872.
III
In 1873 Stevenson, then in great distress because of religious
differences with his father, made the acquaintance of Mrs. Sitwell (now
Lady Colvin) and, through her, of Sidney Colvin himself. The importance
of these two friendships could hardly be over-estimated. Mrs. Sitwell
gave readily and generously the sympathy of which Stevenson was so
much in need; and Mr. Colvin (as he then was) proved to be, not only
a friend, but a guide and a most influential champion. It was through
Mr. Colvin that Stevenson made his real start as a professional writer,
for Mr. Colvin was a writer and the friend of writers, a critic and
the friend of--editors. Stevenson’s plans for removal to London were
made, and to London he came; but he was then so prostrated with nervous
exhaustion, with danger of serious complications, that he was sent
to the Riviera for the winter. Mr. Colvin joined him at Mentone, and
introduced him to Andrew Lang. Thereafter, Stevenson went to Paris; and
it was not until the end of April, 1874, that he returned to Edinburgh,
apparently so far recovered that he could enjoy, three months later, a
long yachting excursion on the West Coast. Further study followed, and
at length Stevenson was in 1875 called to the Scottish Bar, having been
elected previously, through Mr. Colvin’s kindly agency, a member of
the Savile Club. Membership of the Savile led to the beginning of his
association with Leslie Stephen, and to his introduction to the then
editors of “The Academy” and “The Saturday Review.” In this period of
his life occurred the journey described in _An Inland Voyage_, and his
highly important “discovery” of W. E. Henley in an Edinburgh hospital.
Finally, it is important to remember that in these full years,
1874-1879, Stevenson spent a considerable amount of time in France,
where he stayed as a rule either in Paris or in the neighbourhood of
Fontainebleau, most frequently at Barbizon. Details of his life in
France are to be found in _The Wrecker_, in the essay called _Forest
Notes_ in _Essays of Travel_, and in that on _Fontainebleau_ in _Across
the Plains_. He was writing fairly steadily, and he was getting his
work published without embarrassing difficulty, from _Ordered South_
in 1874 to _Travels with a Donkey_ in 1879. And it was in Grez in
1876 that he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Osbourne, an American lady
separated from her husband. The meeting was in fact the turning-point
in his career: even _Travels with a Donkey_, as he admitted in a
letter to his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, contains “lots of mere
protestations to F.” When Mrs. Osbourne returned to America in 1878
she sought and obtained a divorce from her husband. Stevenson heard of
her intention, and heard also that she was ill. He was filled with the
idea of marrying Mrs. Osbourne, and was determined to put his character
to the test of so long and arduous a journey for the purpose, with the
inevitable strain which his purpose involved. With perhaps a final
exhibition of quite youthful affectation, and a serious misconception
of his parents’ attitude to himself and to the desirability of such a
marriage, Stevenson took parental opposition for granted. Nevertheless,
it is a proof of considerable, if unnecessary, courage, that he
followed Mrs. Osbourne to California by a sort of emigrant ship and an
American emigrant train. His experiences on the journey are veraciously
recorded in _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_.
The rough, miserable journey, and the exhaustion consequent upon the
undertaking of so long and difficult an expedition, brought Stevenson’s
vitality very low; so that, after much strain, much miscellaneous
literary work, and many self-imposed privations, he fell seriously
ill at San Francisco towards the end of 1879. Only careful nursing,
and a genial cable from his father, promising an annual sum of £250,
restored health and spirits; and on May 19, 1880, he was married to
Mrs. Osbourne. Their life at Silverado has already been described in
_The Silverado Squatters_; it was followed by a return to Europe, a
succession of journeys from Scotland to Davos, Barbizon, Paris, and St.
Germain; and a further series back again to Pitlochry and Braemar. At
the last-named place _Treasure Island_ was begun, and nineteen chapters
of the book were written: here, too, we gather, the first poems for _A
Child’s Garden of Verses_ laid the foundations of that book. Again,
owing to bad weather in Scotland, it was found necessary to resort to
Davos, where the Stevensons lived in a châlet, and where the works
of the Davos Press saw the light. After a winter so spent, Stevenson
was pronounced well enough to resume normal life, and he returned
accordingly to England and Scotland. But before long it was necessary
to go to the South of France, and after various misfortunes he settled
at length at Hyères. Here he wrote _The Silverado Squatters_ and
resumed work on _Prince Otto_, a work long before planned as both novel
and play.
Further illness succeeded, until it was found possible to settle
at Bournemouth, in the house called Skerryvore; and in Bournemouth
Stevenson spent a comparatively long time (from 1884 to 1887). Here
he made new friendships and revived old ones. Now were published _A
Child’s Garden_, _Prince Otto_, _The Dynamiter_, _Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde_, and _Kidnapped_; and now, in 1887, occurred the death
of Stevenson’s father, of whom a sketch is given in _Memories and
Portraits_.
The relations of father and son were obviously peculiar. Thomas
Stevenson was strict in the matter of faith--more strict than those
of this day can perhaps understand--and it is evident that this
strictness provoked conflict between Robert Louis and his father. By
the letters to Mrs. Sitwell we gather that the differences greatly
troubled Robert Louis; but it seems very clear on the other hand that
wherever the elder Stevenson’s character is actively illustrated in
Mr. Balfour’s “Life,” or in Stevenson’s letters, the instance is one
of kindness and consideration. Mr. Charles Baxter recalls the dreadful
expression of his friend when the first draft of propositions for the
L.J.R. fell into Thomas Stevenson’s hands; and no doubt there is much
that is personal in such stories as _Weir_, _The Wrecker_, and _John
Nicholson_, in which the relations of fathers and sons are studied.
That Thomas loved and admired his son seems certain; but it must be
supposed that his own austerity was not always tolerable to a nature
less austere and sensitive to the charge of levity.
Almost immediately after the death of his father, Stevenson left
England finally. He went first to New York, and then to Saranac (in
the Adirondacks), where the climate was said to be beneficial to those
suffering from lung trouble. Here he began _The Master of Ballantrae_
while Mr. Lloyd Osbourne was busy on _The Wrong Box_; and, when summer
was returning, the whole party removed, first to New Jersey, and then
to the schooner “Casco,” in which they travelled to the Marquesas. In
the next three years they wandered much among the groups of islands in
the South Seas. _The Master of Ballantrae_ was finished in a house, or
rather, in a pavilion, at Waikiki, a short distance from Honolulu. It
was after finishing that book that Stevenson made further journeys,
until at last, by means of a trading schooner called “The Equator,” the
Stevensons all went to Samoa, where they settled in Apia. Here Robert
Louis bought land, and built a home; and here, during the last years of
his life, he lived in greater continuous health--broken though it was
with occasional periods of illness more or less serious--than he had
enjoyed for a number of years.
IV
At Apia he was active, both physically and in the way of authorship:
his exile, trying though it must at times have been, involved health
and happiness; and his loyal friends and his increasingly numerous
admirers kept him, as far as they were able to do, from the dire
neglect into which the thousands of miles’ distance from home might
suggest that he would inevitably fall. I say his loyal friends, rather
than many, because Mrs. Stevenson particularly declares that Stevenson
had few intimate friends. Well-wishers and admirers he had; but there
is noticeable in the majority of those letters so ably collected and
edited by Sir Sidney Colvin a lack of the genuine give and take of
true intimacy. Information concerning himself and his doings, which
suggests the use of his friends as tests or sounding-boards, forms
the staple of such letters. I am told that many intimate letters are
not included--for reasons which are perfectly clear and good; but the
truth is that it is only in the letters to Baxter that there is any
sense of great ease. Even the letters to Sir Sidney Colvin, full,
clear, friendly as they are, suggest impenetrable reserves and an
intense respect for the man to whom they were written. They suggest
that Stevenson very much wanted Sir Sidney to go on admiring, liking,
and believing in him; but they are not letters showing any deep
understanding or taking-for-granted of understanding. Candour, of
course, there is; a jocularity natural to Stevenson; a reliance upon
the integrity and goodwill of his correspondent; a complete gratitude.
All we miss is the little tick of feeling which would give ease to the
whole series of letters. They might all have been written for other
eyes. When one says that, one dismisses the complete spontaneity of the
letters in what may seem to be an arbitrary fashion. But one is not,
after all, surprised that Stevenson should have made the request that a
selection of his letters should be published.
Of friends, then, there must be few, because Mrs. Stevenson is
obviously in a better position than anybody else to judge upon this
point. She says that, contrary to the general impression, Stevenson had
few really intimate friends, because his nature was deeply reserved.
From that we may infer that, like other vain men, who, however, are
purged by their vanity rather than destroyed by it, he told much about
himself without finally, as the phrase is, “giving himself away.” His
high spirits, his “bursts of confidence,” his gay jocularity--all
these things, part of the man’s irrepressible vanity, were health
to him: they enabled him to keep light in a system which might have
developed, through physical delicacy, in the direction of morbidity.
That he was naturally cold, in the sense that he kept his face always
towards his friends, I am prepared to believe: if he had not done
that he perhaps would have lost their respect, since personal charm
is a fragile base for friendship. By his own family at Vailima he was
accused of being “secretive,” as Mrs. Strong records in “Memories of
Vailima.” And Stevenson, it must be remembered, was a Scotsman, with a
great fund of melancholy. Quite clearly, Henley, his friend for years
and his collaborator, never understood him. Henley deplored the later
Stevenson, and loved the Louis (or rather, the Lewis) he had known in
early days. He loved, that is, the charming person who had discovered
him, and with whom he had talked and plotted and bragged. He did not
love the man who seems to have turned from him. The cause of their
estrangement I do not know. I imagine that they thought differently
of the merits of the plays, that Henley pressed Stevenson at a time
when Stevenson felt himself to be drawing away from Henley and passing
into a rather delightful isolation, and that when Henley clung to
their old comradeship with characteristic vehemence, Stevenson felt
suddenly bored with so loud an ally. That may be sheer nonsense: I only
infer it. Whatever the cause, Stevenson seems to me always a little
patronising to Henley, and Henley’s attack in the “Pall Mall Magazine”
(December, 1901) suggests as well as envy the blunt bewilderment of
a man forsaken. Henley, of course, knew that he lacked the inventive
power of Stevenson; and he knew that his power to feel was more intense
than Stevenson’s. That in itself makes a sufficient explanation of the
quarrel: literary friends must not be rivals, or their critical faculty
will overrun into spleen at any injudicious comparisons.
Besides Henley, there is R. A. M. Stevenson, a fascinating figure; but
imperfectly shown in the “Letters.” There is Sir Sidney Colvin, best
and truest of friends. There is Charles Baxter, the recipient of the
letters which seem to me the jolliest Stevenson wrote--a man of much
joviality, I am told, and a very loyal worker on his friend’s behalf.
For the rest, they are friends in a general sense: not intimates, but
men whose good opinion Stevenson was proud to have earned: friends in
the wide (but not the most subtle) scheme of friendship which makes
for social ease and confidence and interest. Baxter and R. A. M.
Stevenson were survivors of early intimacies. Mrs. Sitwell and Sir
Sidney Colvin belonged to a later time, a time of stress, but a time
also of growth. The others, whom we thus objectionably lump together
in a single questionable word, were the warm, kind acquaintances of
manhood. It is useless to demand intimacy in these cases, and I should
not have laboured the point if it had not been suggested that Stevenson
was one of those who had a genius for friendship. He was always, I
imagine, cordial, friendly, charming to these friends; but his letters
(unless we suppose Sir Sidney Colvin to have edited more freely than we
should ordinarily suspect) do not seem to have much to say about his
correspondents, and it is not perhaps very unreasonable to think that
his own work and his own character were the basis of the exchange of
letters. Stevenson no doubt liked these friends; but I am disposed to
question whether he was very much interested in them. I think Stevenson
generally inspired more affection than he was accustomed to give in
return.
V
We must remember, in thus speaking of Stevenson’s friendships, that
he was a Scotsman, that he had been really a lonely child and boy,
accustomed to a degree of solitude, that he was an egoist (as,
presumably, all writers are egoists), and that his personal charm
is unquestioned. Men who met him for the first time were fascinated
by his vivacity, his fresh play of expression, his manner; and
Stevenson, of course, as was only natural, responded instantly to their
admiration. He was carried away in talk, and in talk walked with his
new friends until they, forced as they were by other engagements to
leave him, gained from such a vivid ripple of comment an impression
of something alive and mercurial, something like the wonderful run of
quicksilver, in a companion so inexhaustibly vivacious. It was the
nervous brilliance of Stevenson which attracted men often of greater
real ability; he possessed a quality which they felt to be foreign,
almost dazzling. So Stevenson, leaving them, strung to a height of
exhilaration by his own excited verbosity, would go upon his way,
also attracted by his happy feelings and his happy phrases. In such
a case the man of charm has two alternatives: he can suppress his
ebullience for the purpose of learning or giving; or he can recognise
the excitement and, supposing it to be lyricism, can, if I may use
that word (as I have above used the word “verbosity”) without any
evil meaning being attached to it, _exploit_ his charm. Stevenson, I
believe, exploited his charm. It is often so exploited; the temptation
to exploit it is sometimes irresistible. The kind thing, the attractive
thing, the charming thing--this is the thing to say and do, rather
than the honest thing. Instinctively a girl learns the better side of
her face, the particular irresistible turn of her head, the perfect
cadence of voice. So does the man who has this personal charm. So,
too, does he realise instinctively the value of the external details
of friendship. In only one point does the knowledge of such externals
fail. The kind thing makes friends (in the sense of cordial strangers);
but it does not make anything more subtle than cordial strangeness; and
it does not seem to me that anybody really ever knew Stevenson very
well. He told them much about himself, gaily; and they knew he was
charming. I do not suggest any duplicity on his part. He was perfectly
real in his vivacity, but it was nervous vivacity, an excitement that
led, when it relaxed, or was relaxed, to exhaustion, possibly even
to tears, just as we know that Stevenson could be carried by his own
fooling to the verge of hysteria. So it was that Stevenson became a
figure to himself, as well as to his friends; by his desire to continue
the pleasant impression already created, he did tend to see himself
objectively (just as he is said to have made the gestures he was
describing in his work, and even to have gone running to a mirror to
see the expression the imagined person in his book was wearing). In his
early books that is plain; in _Lay Morals_ we may feel that he is all
the time in the pulpit, leaning over, and talking very earnestly, very
gently, very persuasively, and with extraordinary self-consciousness,
to a congregation that is quite clearly charmed by his personality.
Above all, very persuasively; and above even his persuasiveness, the
deprecating sense of charm, the use of personal anecdote to give the
sermon an authentic air of confession.
The nervous, vivid buoyancy of his characteristic manner was a part
of his lack of health. He was, it is known, rarely in actual pain;
and it is very often the case that delicate persons have this nervous
exuberance of temperament, which has almost the show of vitality. It
has the show; but when the person is no longer before us, our memory
is a vague, fond dream of something intangible--what we call, elusive.
We talk of elusive charm when we cannot remember a single thing that
has aroused in us the impression of having been charmed. Exactly in
that way was Stevenson remembered by those he met--as a vivid butterfly
is remembered; something indescribably strange and curious, not to
be caught and held, for its brilliant and wayward fluttering. The
charm was the thing that attracted men kinder, more staid, more truly
genial, wiser than himself; it excused the meagre philosophisings
and it excused some of those rather selfish and thoughtless actions
which Mr. Balfour says nobody dreamed of resenting. The same charm
we shall find in most of Stevenson’s work, until it grows stale in
_St. Ives_. We shall speak of its literary aspects later. At this
moment we are dealing exclusively with his manner. I want to show
that Stevenson’s ill-health was not the ill-health which makes a man
peevish through constant pain. It was, in fact, extreme delicacy,
rather than ill-health; and the reaction from delicacy of physical
health (or, in reality, the consequence of this delicacy) was this
peculiar nervous brilliancy of manner which I have described. It
is often mistaken by writers on Stevenson for courage; but this is
an unimaginative conception resulting from the notion that he was
constantly in pain, and that he deliberately _willed_ to be cheerful
and gay. Nobody who deliberately wills to be cheerful ever succeeds
in being more than drolly unconvincing. Stevenson had courage which
was otherwise illustrated: this cheerfulness, this “funning” was the
natural consequence of nervous excitability, which, as I have said,
often appears as though it was vitality, as though it must be of more
substance than we know it really is. It is like the colour in an
invalid’s cheek, like the invalid’s energy, like the invalid’s bright
eyes: it is due to the stimulus of excitement. Stevenson, alone, had
his flat moments of dull mood and tired vanity; Stevenson, in company,
thrilled with the life which his friends regarded as his inimitable and
unquestionable personal charm.
You are thus to imagine a nervously-moving man, tall, very dark, very
thin; his hair generally worn long; his eyes, large, dark, and bright,
unusually wide apart; his face long, markedly boned. His dress, with
velvet jacket, is bizarre; his whole manner is restless; his hands,
skeleton-thin, constantly flickering with every change of pose. His
grace of movement, his extraordinary play of expression, are everywhere
commented upon by those who essay verbal portraiture; and all agree
that the photographs in existence reproduce only the dead features
which expression changed each instant. Stevenson, it seems, varied his
position suddenly and frequently--moving from hearth-rug to chair, from
chair, again, to table, walking quickly and brushing his moustache
as we may see in Sargent’s brilliant impression. Nervousness was in
every movement, every gesture; and the figure of Stevenson seems to be
recalled, by many of those who attempt the description, as invariably
in motion, the face alive with interest and expression, while the man
all the time talked, like “young Mr. Harry Fielding, who pours out
everything he has in his heart, and is, in effect, as brilliant, as
engaging, and as arresting a talker as Colonel Esmond has known.”
I give the portrait for what it may be worth. No doubt it does not
represent the Stevenson of Samoa; perhaps it does not represent the
real Stevenson at all. It is Stevenson as one may imagine him, and
as another may find it impossible to imagine him. There is room,
surely, for a variety of portraits, as for the inevitable variety of
critical estimates; and if the estimates hitherto have all followed
a particular line of pleasant comment, at least the portraits one
sees and reads are all portraits of diverse Stevensons made dull or
trivial or engrossing according to the opportunities and skill of the
delineator. I offer my portrait, in this and in succeeding chapters, in
good faith: more, it would be impossible for me to claim.
II
JUVENILIA
I
Before we come to the main divisions of Stevenson’s work it may be as
well to consider briefly those few early works which, to the majority
of readers, were first made known by their inclusion in the Edinburgh
Edition. It is unfortunately impossible to recover the original essay
upon Moses, or the earliest romances; so that we are presented first
with _The Pentland Rising_, published as a pamphlet when Stevenson was
sixteen. This is conscientious and fully-documented work, written too
close to authorities to have much flexibility or personal interest; but
it is not strikingly immature. Daniel Defoe, Burnet, Fuller’s “History
of the Holy Warre,” and a surprising number of other writers upon the
period are successively quoted with good effect; and it is amusing to
note the references to “A Cloud of Witnesses,” which appears to have
been a favourite with Alison Cunningham. This pamphlet is decidedly
the outcome of Alison Cunningham’s teaching, full as it is of the
authentic manner of the Covenanters, which Stevenson was presently to
imitate to the admiration of all the world.
Many readers of Stevenson must have regarded with eyes of marvel the
two serious papers, the gravity of which is perfect, dealing with the
Thermal Influence of Forests, and with a new form of Intermittent
Light. I have no ability to determine the scientific value of these
papers; and as literary works they have less interest than most of the
other instances of Juvenilia. They are illustrated with diagrams, and
they possess coherence and lucidity. In any work these two qualities
are important, and we shall find that clearness is a quality which
Stevenson never lost. He always succeeded in being clear, in escaping
the obscure sayings of the philosopher or the enthusiast. That is to
say, he was a writer. He was a writer in those two scientific papers,
no less than in _Virginibus Puerisque_ or _Prince Otto_. When obscurity
is so easy, clearness is a distinguished virtue; and if Stevenson
sometimes errs to the extent of robbing his work of thickets and dim
frightening darknesses, that is also because he was a writer, and
because he preferred to be a writer.
There follow a number of shorter pieces, some of them the fruit of
his University days of practising; some later, so that they include
the papers on _Roads_ and _Forest Notes_ which are mentioned in the
next chapter. These sometimes show obvious immaturity, but they also
show more than anything else could do the real doggedness with which
Stevenson pursued his aim of learning to write. They show him, at
least, forming his sentences with careful attention to rhythm and
to sound--not yet elaborate, not yet so “kneaded” as his manner
was in a little while to be. It is here sometimes thin, as is the
subject-matter. In one sketch, _The Wreath of Immortelles_, we may
catch a glimpse of the method of opening an essay which Stevenson
developed later; but, on the other hand, in the _Forest Notes_
(possibly more mature work) there is really excellent treatment of
good and interesting matter. Three “criticisms” have point. One, of
Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Slang,” is fairly conventional; the second,
on Salvini’s Macbeth, was the one condemned by Fleeming Jenkin because
it showed Stevenson thinking more about himself than about Salvini;
the third is a very delightful little paper on Bagster’s illustrated
edition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
All these short pieces are of interest because they show the growth of
Stevenson as a writer. They are the more interesting because at the
same time they illustrate the way in which Stevenson gradually made
his work take on the impress of his personality. All young work lacks
character, as young hand-writing does, and as young style does; and
all young essay-work in particular appears sometimes rather tepid and
even silly when the author tries to interest us in his “ego.” Stevenson
from the first saw himself as the central object in his essay: it
is amusing to watch how soon he begins to make himself count as an
effective central object. At first the personality is thin: it has not
carried. Later it develops with the development of style: the use of
words becomes firmer, and with that firmness comes greater confidence,
greater ease, in the projection of the author’s self. It is perhaps not
until we reach the familiar essays that we find Stevenson fully master
of himself, for literary purposes; but the growth provides matter for
rather ingenious study.
II
In that volume of the collected editions which contains these early
essays it is customary to include the works issued by the Davos Press;
and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne (at the age of twelve the proprietor of the
Davos Press) has also discovered a wholly amusing account of an
important military campaign conducted in an attic at Davos by himself
and Stevenson as opposed commanders of tin soldiers. The game, which
had of course inexhaustible interest, has also, as described by Mr.
Osbourne, its intricacies for the lay mind; but Stevenson’s account
of this particular campaign, written by means of official reports,
rumours, newspapers yellow and otherwise, offers no difficulty. It is
an excellent piece of pretence. The Davos Press, which provided the
world with unique works by Stevenson and by Mr. Osbourne, illustrated
with original woodcuts, belongs, as does the war-game, to the time
spent in the châlet at Davos shortly after Stevenson’s marriage. It
shows how easily he could enjoy elaborate games (as most men do enjoy
them, if they are not deterred by self-importance or preoccupation
with matters more strictly commercial); and the relationship with Mr.
Osbourne seems to have been as frank and lively as anybody could desire.
I have mentioned these matters out of their due place because they seem
to me to have a value as contributing to certain suggestions which I
shall make later. By his marriage, Stevenson gained not only a very
devoted wife but a very intimate boy-friend, the kind of friend he
very likely had long wanted. There was almost twenty years’ difference
between them; but that, I think, made the friendship more suited to
Stevenson’s nature. By means of this difference he could indulge in
that very conscious make-belief for which his nature craved--a detached
make-belief, which enabled him to enjoy the play both in fact and as
a spectator, to make up for Mr. Osbourne’s admitted superiority in
marksmanship by the subtilty of his own military devices; finally, to
enjoy the quite personal pleasure of placing upon record, with plans
and military terms, in the best journalistic style, accounts of his
military achievements. The art of gloating innocently over his own
power to gloat; the power to delight consciously in his own delight at
being able to play--these, I believe, are naturally Scots pleasures,
and profoundly Stevensonian pleasures. I hope that no reader will
deny Stevenson the right to such enjoyments, for Stevenson’s not very
complex nature is really bound up in them. If we take from him the
satisfaction of seeing himself in every conceivable posture, we take
from him a vanity which permeates his whole life-work, and which,
properly regarded, is harmless to offend our taste.
III
TRAVEL BOOKS
I
“One of the pleasantest things in the world,” says Hazlitt, “is going
on a journey; but I like to go alone.” In his earliest days of manhood,
Stevenson also formed the habit of going alone; and in his own essay
upon _Walking Tours_ he very circumstantially endorses Hazlitt’s
view, for reasons into which we need not enter here. We may find
an indication of his habit even so early as the fragment, included
in _Essays of Travel_, which describes a journey from Cockermouth
to Keswick. Other papers, of various dates, show that, either from
choice or from necessity, he often did tramp solitary; but it is worth
noting that only in the walk through the Cevennes and in his journey
to America did Stevenson ever travel alone for any length of time.
His other, and on the whole more important, travel-books are the
descriptions of journeys taken in company.
Furthermore, in the early essay which we have just noted he rather
ostentatiously proclaims his practice in writing accounts of his tours.
He says, “I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the moment,
or that has been before me only a little while before; I must allow
my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till
nothing be except the pure gold.” Apart from the surprising alchemy of
the declaration, this disability is wholly to his credit; but Stevenson
found, of course, that when he planned to record a journey of some
duration, in a form more or less chronological, he must preserve a
sense of fabric in his book by keeping a daily diary of experiences.
That is why, in his earliest book of travel, _An Inland Voyage_,
he mentions “writing-up” his diary at the end of each day; and it
explains also the frequent references in later books to such an evening
occupation. As Stevenson admitted in _Cockermouth and Keswick_, the
process of incubation might in the long run be unreasonably prolonged;
and perhaps it is true that experience taught him very early that in
the professional writer thrift is a virtue. It was, if so, a lesson
that he never forgot.
Although the fragment on Keswick to which I have referred is clearly a
juvenile piece of work, it is highly entertaining as a small piece of
autobiography. On its own account the essay is rather pragmatical and
anecdotal, after the manner of an afternoon sermon, and it gives as
yet small evidence that the writer has any highly developed sense of
accurate and significant observation. But to the reader who cares to go
below its superficial interest, there is other material. Not without
value are the boyish allusions to his pipe, to his whisky-and-soda,
and to his importance in the smoking-room of the hotel. These are all
typical, and interesting. What, however, is clear on the question of
mere literary talent, is Stevenson’s ability to spin something out of
himself. He must be talking; and, if he has nothing of much moment to
say, there must follow some apt reflection, or a “tale of an old Scots
minister.”
Would that the ability, a very dangerous ability, had been shed as soon
as were some of Stevenson’s juvenile theories about the art of writing!
This particular ability remains very noticeably in his first full-size
travel-book, _An Inland Voyage_, along with another trait--his abnormal
consciousness of his own appearance in the eyes of other people.
Stevenson was always interested in that aspect of his personality: he
could not forget for a moment that his costume, his face, his manner,
all carried some impression to the beholder. It was a part of his
nature that he should see children upon the river bank, not merely as
children, but as an audience, a congregation of speculating souls busy
wondering about him, likening him among themselves to some particular
figure, interested in him. Nobody, I think, had ever failed to be
interested in him.
II
_An Inland Voyage_, on the whole, is a poor book. It records a canoeing
expedition made with a friend; and it is full of Puritanical obtuseness
and a strained vanity which interferes with the main narrative. Setting
out from Antwerp, the two friends paddled, often in the rain, and
sometimes--as in the case of Stevenson’s arrest, and his dangerous
accident with the fallen tree across the swollen Oise--in dire straits.
They travelled on the Sambre and down the Oise by Origny and Moy,
Noyon, Compiègne, and Précy; but the weather was bad, and there were
trying difficulties about lodgings; and Stevenson’s account reads as
though he had been chilled through and through, and as though he needed
nothing so much as his home. Almost invariably, in this book, his
little spurts of epigram and apophthegm suggest low spirits as well
as a sort of cautious experimentalism; and the book, which apparently
was very handsomely received by the Press on its publication, is eked
out with matter which, beneath the nervous delicacy of Stevenson’s
practising style, is raw and sometimes _banale_. In no other
travel-book is there shown such obvious effort. What emerges from
_An Inland Voyage_ is the charmingly natural behaviour on several
occasions of Stevenson’s companion, a proof even thus early of the
author’s ability to be aware of these traits in his friends which, on
the printed page, convey to the reader an impression of the person so
lightly sketched. This, however, is an exiguous interest in a book
supposed to be a picturesque work of travel and topography.
Very much superior is the Sternian _Travels with a Donkey_. Here there
is much greater lightness of touch, and a really admirable sense of
observation is revealed. Some of the descriptions of things seen are
written with indescribable delicacy, as are the character sketches.
Just so are some of the descriptions of places contained in the
series of letters to Mrs. Sitwell. In _Travels with a Donkey_ for
the first time the reader actually makes a third with Stevenson and
the endearing Modestine upon their journey, travelling with them and
sharing the sensations of the human pedestrian. If we resent certain
intolerable affectations--such as the pretentious and penurious fancy
of placing money by the roadside in payment for lodgings in the open
air--that resentment may be partly due to the fact that we are not
told the amount of the payment, as well, of course, as to the fact
that we suspect the author’s motive in detailing his charities.
Stevenson seems, in fact, to be asking for commendation of a fantastic
generosity without giving us sufficient evidence to evoke any feeling
of conviction. We see him here, not so much obeying a happy impulse as
observing himself in the light of his own esteem; and that is hardly a
pleasant sight to the onlooker. To counterbalance such lapses--which,
very likely, are regarded by lovers of Stevenson as no lapses at
all, but as delightful exhalations of personality, as glimpses of
his character which they are enabled to enjoy only through this very
innocent vanity which we have noted,--there are a thousand graceful
touches, fit to remind us that _Travels with a Donkey_ is a much
better book than _An Inland Voyage_, and, in fact, the best of his
travel-books until we reach that delightfully modest one which is too
little known--_The Silverado Squatters_. The _Donkey_ is the first in
which the charming side of his personality really “gets going,” and it
will always remain a pretty and effective sketch of a journey taken in
wayward weather, with good spirits, a shrewd and observant eye, and,
what is also to the point, a commendable courage.
_The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_, two long records
which, although published separately, are practically a single work,
for all their difference from that book are a drop to the executive
level of _An Inland Voyage_. Here again Stevenson was affected by
the discomforts of his lonely travelling, and no doubt by his poor
health. Both records are for the most part superficial and crabbed.
The descriptions of travelling-companions are conscientious, but they
have, as Stevenson’s earliest admirers were the first to remark, no
imagination or genuine moulding: the accounts are a good deal like
uninspired letters home. If one thinks what Stevenson, in happy
circumstances, might have made of the tale of his journey, one realises
how lifeless are the descriptions given. They have no sense of actual
contact; they have lost grip in losing charm, and might have been
written by somebody with far less of an eye to the significance of
the passing scene. Stevenson claimed to have been aware of the prosaic
character of the records, and, indeed, in one letter to Sir Sidney
Colvin he said, “It bored me hellishly to write; well, it’s going to
bore others to read; that’s only fair.” So perhaps it is not worth
while to analyse such confessedly inferior works. Only once in _The
Amateur Emigrant_--in the anecdote of two men who lodged perilously in
New York--does Stevenson’s boyish love of the picturesquely terrible
bring a note of tense reality to the writing. In its own way the
account of the two men looking from their bedroom, through the frame of
a seeming picture, into another room where three men are crouching in
darkness, is a little masterpiece of horror. It belongs to his romances
rather than to his travel-books; but it is the passage that stands out
most distinctly from the two which are under notice at the moment. No
other scene in either _The Amateur Emigrant_ or _Across the Plains_
compares with it for interest or value.
III
Following upon his tedious journey to America, and the hardships and
illness which, before his marriage, brought him nearly to his grave,
Stevenson went to the mountains for health. _The Silverado Squatters_
was written-up later, and, from Stevenson’s letters of that time, it
seems to have been condemned as uncharacteristic. But it may have been
that, as I think was the case, Stevenson’s voyage to America and his
marriage considerably affected his outlook. For one thing he really
had come into contact with hard inconvenience and loneliness, with a
self-inflicted exile from his family (and a hostility to his marriage
on their part which existed more in his imagination than in fact),
which matured him. Those of us who never take these voyages out into
the unknown, who sit tight and think comfortably of such things as
emigrant trains, cannot realise with what sudden effect the stubborn
impact of realities can work upon those who actually venture forth. One
small instance will show something of the experience Stevenson gained.
On the voyage he met emigrants who were leaving Scotland because there
was nothing else for them to do, because to stay meant “to starve.”
Coming to these men, and hearing from them something of the lives
they had left, he touched a new aspect of life which, in spite of
his runnings to-and-fro in Edinburgh and elsewhere, he had never
appreciated. He writes, in _The Amateur Emigrant_:
I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
And when, in _Across the Plains_, he tells how his emigrant train,
going in one direction, crowded, was met by another, also crowded,
_returning_, must that not have reacted upon his mind? My own
impression, which of course is based upon nothing more than the
apparent change in Stevenson’s manner of writing, is that _The
Silverado Squatters_, as we now have it, very much altered from
the condemned first drafts, represents the emergence of a new
Stevenson, who, in _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_,
had been overweighted by the material realities he had in bad health
encountered, and who, in consequence, had failed to make those
accounts vivid. _The Silverado Squatters_ has more substance than its
predecessors. It is much more free, it is almost entirely free, from
affectation. The style is less full of trope, and may be considered
therefore, by some readers, as the less individual. But the matter and
manner are more strictly united than hitherto. We are not interrupted
by such trivial explosions of sententiousness as “We must all set our
pocket-watches by the clock of Fate,” and in the degree in which the
matter entirely “fills-out” the manner the book is so far remarkable.
It is not generally regarded as convenient to say that Stevenson’s
matter was often thin, and his style a mere ruffle and scent to draw
off the more frigid kind of reader; yet when we come to work so able
and so unpretentious as _The Silverado Squatters_, in which Stevenson
is honestly trying to show what he saw and knew (instead of trying
to show the effect of his address upon a strange community) we do
seem to feel that what has gone before has been less immediately the
natural work of the writer, and more the fancy sketch of the writer’s
own sense of his picturesque figure. In one aspect, in its lack of
vivacity, _The Silverado Squatters_ may compare to disadvantage with
earlier work; it may seem, and indeed is ordinarily condemned as, less
pungent, and less elastic; but that could only be to those who miss
the fact that Stevenson’s pungency and elasticity were the consequence
of the unwearying revision to which most of his work was subjected.
He was never a quick worker, never one of those careless writers
whose ear approves while the pen is in motion. He had a fine ear, but
not essentially a quick ear; he was not what is sometimes called a
“natural” writer, but with devoted labour went again and again through
what he had written, revising it until his fastidiousness was relieved.
This way of working, while it served to allay what he called the “heat
of composition”--a heat which some readers find very grateful in other,
less painstaking writers--has patent virtues. It is likely to make work
more polished and more finely balanced. Nevertheless, it probably has
the effect of reducing the vigour and resilience of a style. However
that may be, it is a method making great demands upon a writer’s deep
conscientiousness; and it is not the purpose of this book to extol
the rapid method or the quick ear. All we may do at this moment is
to suggest that Stevenson, having done well in practising year after
year the craft of the writer, had now turned very deliberately and
honourably in the first year of his marriage to that other side of
the writer’s craft, the sober description, free from the amateur’s
experimentalism, of the real world as he saw it. Even so, it is a
world made smooth by his temperament--his love of smoothness, which
one may see exemplified in his declared love of simple landscape--and
by his matured dexterity in manipulating sentences. It is a world
seen, not with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in
a fair haven, whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture
to him. Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his
descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa,
have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest
intuitions of beauty. Not his the ecstatic oneness with the lovely
things of Nature which makes Keats the purest exponent of what Keats
himself called “that delicate snail’s-horn perception of beauty”:
Stevenson’s ecstasy had to be stirred by excitement; he had not the
poet’s open-handed out-running to the emotion of place. But his sense
of the remoteness of the squatters of Silverado, his early-morning
peeps into the wonders of colour and aspect in a strange corner of the
earth, his shrewd understanding of sullen human nature, are made clear
to the reader by plain expression. The book is self-conscious in a
good sense; not, as has often hitherto been the case, in a bad one.
IV
If we notice such a change of attitude in _The Silverado Squatters_,
we shall find it even more fully revealed in the volume of his letters
for an American magazine which appeared under the title of _In the
South Seas_. Some of the letters were withheld, as too tedious; even
now, the book is frankly called dull by many staunch admirers of
Stevenson. To others, however, it must surely appear otherwise. It is,
in effect, a sort of glorified log; but a log of real enterprise and
adventure in a marvellous part of the world. Stevenson heroically tried
to penetrate to the heart of the South Seas. He was caught up by the
islands and their people, and was bent upon making them known to those
who lived afar. In the political intrigues so honestly described in his
letters, Stevenson may, indeed, appear to throw away the importance of
his own genius; but the sacrifice is made in obedience to his deepest
convictions of right. He still sees himself as the point of focus;
but we do not resent that when we find ourselves so clearly in his
train. Even while his friends were urging him to give up the Samoan
politics which threatened to become the King Charles’s head of his
correspondence, he continued to live amid the difficulties from which
he felt that he could not in honour withdraw. And although the Samoan
period had its fluctuations of talent, it was, upon the whole, the
time when his boyish love of game took on a keener zest of earnest
and made him indeed a man. The period marks a further decline in the
more strictly romantic nature of his work, as we may later on be able
to discuss in comparing _St. Ives_ with earlier and more triumphant
experiments in that field; but it opens the path for the sober realism
(if that word may here be used without sinister connotation) of the
torso known as _Weir of Hermiston_, a fragment in which it is usual
to find the greatest promise of all. This is all of a piece with the
increasing purpose of Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a
professional author forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance
may be conjured for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most
persuasive cajollery. Stevenson was the professional author in his
collaborations, and in such work as _St. Ives_; but in _In the South
Seas_ as in _Weir_ he is writing truth for the love of truth, than
which there can be no more noble kind of authorship.
V
In San Francisco, as we have seen, Stevenson chartered a
schooner-yacht, and went to the South Seas in pursuit of health. On
board ship he was always happy; and he made more than one cruise, in
different ships, among the Gilbert, Paumotuan, and Marquesan groups
of islands. He also stayed for periods of varying length in the three
groups of islands, became familiar with the manners of the natives,
realised their distinctions, and made many new friends among them.
His mind was entirely occupied with them; he saw everything he could,
and learned everything he could, his shrewd Scots habit of inquiry
filling him with a satisfied sense of labour. A big book, proving
beyond doubt the entire peculiarity of the South Sea islands and
their islanders, was planning in his mind; a book which would soundly
establish his reputation as something other than a literary man and a
teller of tales. _In the South Seas_, as I have already mentioned, was
found dull by friendly critics; yet it is full of observation and of
feeling. It is the wisest of the travel-books, and the most genuine,
for Stevenson has put picturesqueness behind him for what it is--the
hall-mark of the second-rate writer; and he has risen to a height of
understanding which adds to his stature. There is, in the portrait
of Tembinok’, a simplicity which is impressive: throughout, there is
a simple exposition of a fascinating subject, a kind of life remote
from our experience, a civilisation strict and dignified, minds and
habits interesting in themselves and by contrast with our own. The
book may not be the epitome of the South Seas for which the chapters
were planned as rough notes; other writers may have known more than
Stevenson knew of the actual life of the islands. It is true that he
frequented kings’ palaces, and that his acquaintance with common native
life was very largely a matter of observation caught up in passing,
or by hearsay, or by the contemplation of public gatherings. That is
true. What we, as readers endeavouring patiently to trace the growth
of Stevenson’s knowledge, must, however, remember above all things, is
that the book is really a finer and a more distinguished work than _An
Inland Voyage_ or _Travels with a Donkey_. It has not the grimaces of
the first, or the pleasing delicacy of the second. It is a better book
than _The Amateur Emigrant_ and _Across the Plains_. It is fuller and
richer than _The Silverado Squatters_. What, then, do we ask of a book
of travel? Is it that we may see the author goading his donkey, or
putting money by the wayside for his night’s lodging; or is it that we
may see what he has seen? With Stevenson, the trouble is, I suppose,
that, having thought of him always as a dilettante, his admirers
cannot reconcile themselves to his wish to be a real traveller and a
real historian. Perhaps they recognise that he had not the necessary
equipment? Rather, it is very likely that, being largely uncreative
themselves, they had planned for Stevenson a future different from the
one into which gradually he drifted. All creative writers have such
friends. We may say, perhaps, that a man who was not Stevenson could
have written _In the South Seas_, though I believe that is not the
case. But if we put the books slowly in order we shall almost certainly
find that while _Travels with a Donkey_ is a pretty favourite, with
airs and graces, and a rather imaginary figure charmingly posed as its
chief attraction, _In the South Seas_ is the work of the same writer,
grown less affected, more intent upon seeing things as they are, and
less intent upon being seen in their midst. There is the problem. If
a travel-book is an exploitation of the traveller’s self, we can be
charmed with it: let us not, therefore, because we find less charm in
_In the South Seas_, find the later book dull. Stevenson is duller
because he is older: the bloom is going: he is not equal intellectually
to the task he has set himself. But there is a greater sincerity in
the later travel-books, an honest looking upon the world. It is surely
better to look straight with clear eyes than to dress life up in a
bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard mountain. Stevenson’s
admirers want the song upon the mountain, because they want to continue
the legend that he never grew up. They want him to be the little boy
with a fine night of stars in his eyes and a pack upon his back,
singing cheerily that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
That is why Stevenson’s best work is, relatively speaking, neglected
in favour of work that tarnishes with the passing of youth. And it is
all because of the insatiable desire of mediocrity for the picturesque.
We must be surprised and startled, and have our senses titillated
by savours and perfumes; we must have the strange and the new; we
must have a fashion to follow and to forget. Stevenson has been a
fashionable traveller, and his sober maturity is too dull; he has lost
his charm. Well, we must make a new fashion. Interest in a figure must
give place to interest in the work. If the work no longer interests,
then our worship of Stevenson is founded upon a shadow, is founded,
let us say, upon the applause of his friends, who sought in his work
the fascination they found in his person.
IV
ESSAYS
I
There have been some English essayists whose writing is so packed
with thought that it is almost difficult to follow the thought in
its condensation. Such was Bacon, whose essays were by way of being
“assays,” written so tightly that each little sentence was the
compression of the author’s furthest belief upon that aspect of his
subject, and so that to modern students the reading of Bacon’s essays
resembles the reading of a whole volume printed in Diamond type. There
have been English essayists whose essays are clear-cut refinements of
truth more superficial or more simple. Such was Addison, who wrote with
a deliberate and flowing elegance, and whose essays Stevenson found
himself unable to read. There have been such essayists as Hazlitt,
the shrewd sincerity of whose perceptions is expressed with so much
appropriateness that his essays are examples of what essays should
be. There has never been in England a critic or an essayist of quite
the same calibre as Hazlitt. It was of Hazlitt that Stevenson wrote,
in words so true that they summarily arrest by their significance the
reader who does not expect to find in _Walking Tours_ so vital an
appraisement: “Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot
write like Hazlitt.” And, in succession, for there would be no purpose
in continuing the list for its own sake, there have been essayists
who, intentionally resting their work upon style and upon the charm
of personality, have in a thousand ways diversified their ordinary
experience, and so have been enabled to disclose as many new aspects
and delights to the reader. Such an essayist was Lamb. Hazlitt, I
think, was the last of the great English essayists, because Hazlitt
sought truth continuously and found his incomparable manner in the
disinterested love of precision to truth. But Lamb is the favourite;
and Lamb is the English writer of whom most readers think first when
the word “essay” is mentioned. That is because Lamb brought to its
highest pitch that personal and idiosyncratic sort of excursion among
memories which has created the modern essay, and which has severed
it from the older traditions of both Bacon and Addison. It is to the
school of Lamb, in that one sense, that Stevenson belonged. He did
not “write for antiquity,” as Lamb did; he did not write deliberately
in the antique vein or in what Andrew Lang called “elderly English”;
but he wrote, with conscious and anxious literary finish, essays
which had as their object the conveyance in an alluring manner of his
own predilections. He quite early made his personality what Henley
more exactly supposed that it only afterwards became--a marketable
commodity--as all writers of strong or acquired personality are bound
to do.
Since Stevenson there have been few essayists of classic rank, largely
because the essay has lost ground, and because interest in “pure”
literature has been confined to work of established position (by which
is meant the work of defunct writers). There has been Arthur Symons,
of whose following of Pater as an epicure of sensation we have heard
so much that the original quality of his fine work--both in criticism
and in the essay--has been obscured. There has been an imitator of
Stevenson, an invalid lady using the pseudonym “Michael Fairless”; and
there have been Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Belloc, Mr.
Chesterton, Mr. Street, Mr. A. C. Benson, and Mr. Filson Young. These
writers have all been of the “personal” school, frankly accepting the
essay as the most personal form in literature, and impressing upon
their work the particular personal qualities which they enjoy. Some of
them have been more robust than others, some less distinguished; but
all of them are known to us (in relation to their essays) as writers
of personality rather than as writers of abstract excellence. An essay
upon the art of the essay, tracing its development, examining its
purpose, and distinguishing between its exponents, might be a very
fascinating work. Such an essay is manifestly out of place here; but it
is noteworthy that, apart from the distinguished writers whose names
I have given, nearly all the minor writers (that is, nearly all those
whose names I have not mentioned) who have produced essays since the
death of Stevenson, or who are nowadays producing genteel essays, have
been deeply under his influence. It is further noteworthy that most of
those who have been so powerfully influenced have been women.
II
From the grimly earnest abstracts of knowledge contributed by Bacon
to the art of the essay, to the dilettante survey of a few fancies,
or memories, or aspects of common truth which ordinarily composed a
single essay by Stevenson, is a far cry. But Stevenson, as I have said,
belonged to the kind of essayist of whom in England Charles Lamb is
most representative, and of whom Montaigne was most probably his more
direct model--the writer who conveyed information about his personal
tastes and friends and ancient practices in a form made prepossessing
by a flavoured style. To those traits, in Stevenson’s case, was added
a strong didactic strain, as much marked in his early essays as in the
later ones; and it is this strain which differentiates Stevenson’s
work from that of Lamb and Montaigne. Montaigne’s essays are the
delicious vintage of a ripe mind both credulous and sceptical, grown
old enough to examine with great candour and curiousness the details
of its own vagaries: many of Stevenson’s most characteristic essays
are the work of his youth, as they proclaim by the substitution of
the pseudo-candour of vanity for the difficult candour of Montaigne’s
shrewd naïveté. He was thirty or thirty-one when the collection
entitled _Virginibus Puerisque_ was published. A year later there
followed _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. He was only thirty-seven
(Montaigne was thirty-eight when he “retired” from active life and
began to produce his essays) when his third collection, _Memories
and Portraits_, obviously more sedate and less open to the charge of
literary affectation, completed the familiar trilogy. Although _Across
the Plains_ did not appear until 1892, many of the essays which help to
form that book had earlier received periodical publication (the dated
essays range from 1878 to 1888); while some of the papers posthumously
collected in _The Art of Writing_ belong to 1881. So it is not unfair
to say that the bulk of Stevenson’s essays were composed before he
reached the age of thirty-five; and thirty-five, although it is an age
by which many writers have achieved fame, is not quite the age by which
personality is so much matured as to yield readily to condensation.
Therefore we must not look, in Stevenson’s essays, for the judgments
of maturity, although we may find in _Virginibus Puerisque_ a rather
middle-aged inexperience. We must rather seek the significance of these
essays in the degree in which they reveal consciously the graces and
the faultless negligé of an attractive temperament. We may look to find
at its highest point the illustration of those principles of style
which Stevenson endeavoured to formulate in one very careful essay
upon the subject (to the chagrin, I seem to remember, at the time of
its republication, of so many critics who misunderstood the aim of
the essay). And we shall assuredly find exhibited the power Stevenson
possessed of quoting happily from other writers. Quotation with effect
is a matter of great skill; and Stevenson, although his reading was
peculiar rather than wide, drew from this very fact much of the
inimitable effect obtained by references so apt.
III
One note which we shall find persistently struck and re-struck in
Stevenson’s essays is the memory of childhood. From _Child’s Play_ to
_The Lantern-Bearers_ we are confronted by a mass of material regarding
one childhood, by which is supported a series of generalisations
about all children and their early years. So we proceed to youth, to
the story of _A College Magazine_; and so to _Ordered South_. Then
we return again to _An Old Scotch Gardener_ and _The Manse_, where
again that single childhood, so well-stored with memories, provides
the picture. Now it is one thing for Stevenson to re-vivify his own
childhood, for that is a very legitimate satisfaction which nobody
would deny him; but it is another thing for Stevenson, from that
single experience and with no other apparent observation or inquiry,
to generalise about all children. While he tells us what he did, in
what books and adventures and happenings he found his delight, we may
read with amusement. When, upon the other hand, he says, “children
are thus or thus,” it is open to any candid reader to disagree with
Stevenson. Whether it is that he has set the example, or whether it is
that he merely exemplifies the practice, I cannot say; but Stevenson
is one of those very numerous people who talk wisely and shrewdly
about children in the bulk without seeming to know anything about
them. These wiseacres alternately under-rate and make too ingenious
the intelligence and the calculations of childhood, so that children
in their hands seem to become either sentimental barbarians or callous
schemers, but are never, in the main, children at all. Stevenson has a
few excellent words upon children: he admirably says, “It is the grown
people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously
to preserve the text”: but I am sorry to say that, upon the whole, I
can find little else that is of value in his general observations.
It is open to anybody to reconstruct a single real childhood from
Stevenson’s essays, and no doubt that is a matter of considerable
interest, as anything which enables us to understand a man is of
value. Curiously enough, however, Stevenson’s essays upon the habits
and notions of children seem to suggest a great deal too much thought
about play, and too little actual play. They seem to show him, as a
little boy, so precocious and lacking in heart, that he is watching
himself play rather than playing. It is not the preliminary planning
of play that delights children, not the academic invention of games
and deceits; it is the immediate and enjoyable act of play. Our
author shows us a rather elderly child who, in deceiving himself, has
savoured not so much the game as the supreme cleverness of his own
self-deception. That, to any person who truly remembers the state of
childhood, may be accepted as a perfectly legitimate recollection; and
it is so far coherent. That his own habit should be, in these essays,
extended to all other children whatsoever--in fact, to “children”--is
to make all children delicate little Scots boys, greatly loved, very
self-conscious, and, in the long run, rather tiresome, as lonely,
delicate little boys incline to become towards the end of the day.
Unfortunately the readers of Stevenson’s essays about little boys have
mostly been little girls; and they are not themselves children, but
grown-up people who are looking back at their own childhood through
the falsifying medium of culture and indulgent, dishonest memory.
Culture, in dwelling upon interpretations and upon purposes, and in
seeing childhood always through the refraction of consequence, destroys
interest in play itself; and if play is once called in question it very
quickly becomes tedious rigmarole.
Stevenson’s essays must thus be divided into two parts, the first
descriptive, the second generalised. The first division, sometimes
delightful, is also sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes is
exaggerative of the originality of certain examples of play. The
second is about as questionable as any writing on children has ever
been, because it is based too strictly upon expanded recollections
of a single abnormal model. You do not, by such means, obtain good
generalisations.
IV
Something of the same objection might be urged against Stevenson’s
rather unpleasant descriptions of adolescence. These again are not
typical. Stevenson himself was the only youth he ever knew--he never
had the detachment to examine disinterestedly the qualities of any
person but himself--and we might gain from his descriptions an
impression of youth which actually will not bear the stereoscopic
test to which we are bound to submit all generalisations. To read
the essays with the ingenuous mind of youth is to feel wisdom, grown
old and immaculate, passing from author to reader. It is to marvel
at this debonair philosopher, who finds himself never in a quandary,
and who has the strategies of childhood and of youth balanced in his
extended hand. It is to proceed from childhood to youth, and from youth
to the married state; and our adviser describes to us in turn, with
astonishing confidence, the simplified relations, which otherwise we
might have supposed so intricate, of the lover, the husband, and the
wife. Nothing comes amiss to him: love, jealousy, the blind bow-boy,
truth of intercourse--these and many other aspects of married life are
discoursed upon with grace and the wistful sagaciousness of a decayed
inexperience. But when we consider the various arguments, and when we
bring the essays _Virginibus Puerisque_ back to their starting-point,
we shall find that they rest upon the boyish discovery that marriages
occur between unlikely persons. Stevenson has not been able to resist
the desire to institute an inquiry into the reasons. He cannot suppose
that these persons love one another; and yet why else should they
marry? Well, he is writing an essay, and not a sociological study,
so that--as the result of his inquiry--we must not expect to receive
a very distinct contribution to our knowledge. We may prepare only
to be edified, to be, perhaps, greatly amused by a young man who may
at least shock us, or stir us, if he is unable to show this fruitful
source of comedy in action. We are even, possibly, alert to render our
author the compliment of preliminary enjoyment, before we have come to
his inquiry. What Stevenson has to tell us about marriage, however, is
a commonplace; even if it is a commonplace dressed and flavoured. It
is that “marriage is a field of battle--not a bed of roses”; and it
is that “to marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.” “Alas!” as
Stevenson says of another matter, “If that were all!”
I wonder what it is that makes such phrases (for they are no more than
phrases, phrases which are not true to experience, and which therefore
can have no value as propositions or as explanations) give so much
pleasure to such a number of readers. How can we explain it, unless it
be simply by the explanation that Stevenson has been idolised? This
book, _Virginibus Puerisque_, has been a favourite for many years,
sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense unoriginal. It is the
most quoted; it is the one which most certainly may be regarded as
the typical book of Stevenson’s early period. Surely it is because a
half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a phrase and remembered
only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a whole truth, upon which
the reader must engage his attention? It must, I mean, be the trope
that lures readers of _Virginibus Puerisque_ into acceptance of thought
so threadbare and ill-nourished. Such an essay as _Æs Triplex_ seems
by its air to hold all the wisdom of the ages, brought steadfastly to
the contemplation of the end to which all must come. If it is read
sentimentally, with the mind swooning, it may give the reader the
feeling that he has looked upon the bright face of danger and seen
death as no such bad thing. For a moment, as it might be by a drug,
he has received some stimulation which is purely temporary. The essay
has not changed his thought of death; it has not transformed his fear
of death into an heroic love; it slides imperceptibly, unheeded, from
his memory, and remains dishevelled forever as “that rather fine thing
of Stevenson’s,” for which he never knows where to look. Only its
phrases remain for quotation, for use in calendars, common thoughts
turned into remembrances and mottoes ready for the rubricator. When
an ordinary person says, “It’s nice to have something to look forward
to,” Stevenson is ready with, “It is better to travel hopefully than to
arrive, and the true success is to labour.” There is all the difference
between this and that advice of Browning’s that “a man’s reach should
exceed his grasp.” Stevenson has not sought to invigorate the toiler,
he has not caught up with optimism the spirit of mankind: what he has
done is to make a phrase for the boudoir. There is no philosophic
optimism in Stevenson’s essays: there is sometimes high spirits, and
sometimes there is a cheerful saying; but at heart the “teaching” of
these things is as prosaic as is the instruction of any lay preacher.
When the more solemn sort of subject, such as death, comes to be dealt
with, we find Stevenson, the actor, falling into the feeling of his
own intonations, gravely reassuring, like a politician explaining a
defeat. When he is describing acts of bravery, as in _The English
Admirals_, his love of courage rises and his feelings seem to glow; but
the phrases with which he adorns the tale and with which eventually he
points the moral are phrases made to be read, not phrases that break
from his full heart. They are not the phrases made, will he nill he, by
his enthusiasm; they are such phrases as are publicly conveyed from
one king or statesman or commander to another upon the occasion of some
notable event. I do not mean that they are as baldly expressed, though
I think they are often as baldly conceived. They are very handsomely
expressed, too handsomely for the occasion, if one agrees with Bob
Acres that “the sound should be an echo of the sense.” Although it may
be true that, as Stevenson says, “people nowhere demand the picturesque
so much as in their virtues,” for a self-respecting author to give them
the picturesque for that reason seems to me a most immoral and, in the
end, a most ill-judged proceeding. Cultivation of the picturesque,
fondness for phrase, is inevitably productive of falseness; it is
literary gesture, a cultivable habit, such as the habit of any vain
person who flickers his hands or persistently turns the “better side”
of his face or character to the beholder. The first instinctive vanity
develops rapidly into a pose, and pose can never be much more than
amusing. Appropriateness of phrase to meaning is lost in the sense of
phrase, honesty of intention does not suffice to cover inexactitude
of expression. Unconsciously, Stevenson often approved a phrase that
expressed something not in exact accordance with his belief; he was
misled by its splendour or its picturesqueness or its heroic virtue.
So it is that the parts of Stevenson’s essays which at first drew and
held us breathless with a sort of wonder, cease at length to awaken
this wonder, and even seem to degenerate into exhibitions of knack, as
though they were the sign of something wholly artificial in the writer.
They grow tedious, like the grimaces of a spoilt child; and we no
longer respond to that spurious galvanism which of old we mistook for a
thrill of nature.
To Stevenson’s less elaborate essays the mind turns with greater
pleasure. We are displeased in _Virginibus Puerisque_ by the excess
of manner over matter: wherever the matter is original the manner is
invariably less figured. Our trouble then is that, as in the case
of such essays as _The Foreigner at Home_ and _Pastoral_, where the
matter is of great interest, there is produced the feeling that
Stevenson has not developed it to its fullest extent. His essay on the
English, to take the first of the two we have named, is partial and
incomplete--faults due to lack of sympathy. Its incompleteness seems
to me more serious than its partiality; and by “incompleteness” I do
not mean that it should have been more exhaustive, but that it does not
appear quite to work out its own thesis, but presents an air of having
been finished on a smaller scale than is attempted in other parts. In
exactly the same way, the _Pastoral_ engages our interest completely,
and then, for the reason, it would seem, that the author’s memory runs
short, the portrait is left suddenly. It is not left in such a state
that the reader’s imagination fills in every detail: the effect is
again one of truncation.
The best of these essays are probably those two, which are written in
the vein of Hazlitt, on _Talk and Talkers_. Here the matter is ample;
and the manner is studiously moderate. I note, by the way, that Sir
Sidney Colvin mentions the composition of this essay at about the time
of Stevenson’s proposal for writing a life of Hazlitt; so that it would
not be very reckless to say that the manner of _Talk and Talkers_ may
be due to a contemporary familiarity with Hazlitt’s essays. However
that may be, these two essays in particular have distinguished
qualities. They have point, character, and thought.
V
The two essays which conclude _Memories and Portraits_, respectively
entitled _A Gossip on Romance_ and _A Humble Remonstrance_, are by
way of being essays in constructive criticism, showing why the novel
of incident (i.e. the romance) is superior to the domestic novel. The
former belongs to 1882, the latter to 1884. _A Gossip on Romance_
expresses for “Robinson Crusoe” a greater liking than that held for
“Clarissa Harlowe,” and concludes with great praise of Scott; _A Humble
Remonstrance_ shows Stevenson entering, with something of the _Father
Damien_ manner, into a debate which was at that time taking place
between Sir Walter Besant, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. W. D. Howells.
Besant’s arguments were contained in an essay on “The Art of Fiction,”
which may still be had as a negligible little book; Mr. Henry James’s
reply, a wholly delightful performance, is reprinted in “Partial
Portraits.” The point was that Besant wanted to express his amiable and
workmanlike notions, that Mr. Henry James preferred to talk about the
art of fiction, and that Stevenson, who seems never to have felt entire
approval of the subject-matter of Mr. James’s books, felt called upon
to rally to the defence of his own practices. Unfortunately he could
not do this without savaging Mr. James and Mr. Howells, and this, while
it makes the essay a rather honest, unaffected piece of work, does not
increase its lucidity.
But we may very well turn at this point to notice that Stevenson’s one
legitimate book of essays on specifically literary subjects--_Familiar
Studies of Men and Books_--illustrates very well his attitude to the
writers in whom he was interested to the point of personal study. The
nine subjects of the essays in this book do not seem to us at this time
a specially interesting selection; and indeed the essays themselves
are not remarkable for originality or insight. It does show, however,
some range of understanding to wish to write upon subjects so varied
as Hugo, Burns, Whitman, Thoreau, Villon, Charles of Orleans, Pepys,
and John Knox. It is true that Stevenson (the Hugo essay is perhaps an
exception to this) never gets very far away from his “authorities” or
from quotations from the works of his subject; and that his criticism
is “safe” rather than personal; but these facts, while they interfere
with the value of the essays as essays, give them the interest of being
single and without parallel in Stevenson’s output. They show that he
was a good enough journeyman critic to stand beside those who write
essays on literary subjects for the reviews. They conform, as far as I
can tell, to the standard of such work; they are useful and plain, and
some of them, but not all, are interesting. In each case the interest
is chiefly a moral interest; it is the “teaching” of the various
writers, the moral vagaries of the different delinquents, that engage
the critic’s attention.
It must be borne in mind that Stevenson was not primarily a literary
critic. His flashes of insight were more remarkable than his considered
judgments, because, as I have suggested elsewhere in this book, he had
not the kind of mind that takes delight in pursuing a subject to its
logical conclusion. He had the inventive, but not the constructive
mind, and he had the nervous and delicate man’s intolerance of anything
requiring sustained intellectual effort. I imagine that in reading
books he “read for the story,” and that his perception of qualities in
the telling (apart from the excellence of the story) was spasmodic.
It may be noticed as a defect in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_
that no _character_, apart from traditional character, as in the case
of Pepys, emerges from any of the essays: we are given accounts and
criticisms of, for example, Burns; but we do not have them flashed
out at us as real men. Stevenson, I think, had a very poor sense of
character. In all these essays there is the same defect, an air of
flatness, of colourlessness, such as we may find in any case where
character has not been imagined.
Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could
grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character,
which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a personality all
was different; then, every touch told, as we may see in the picture
of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the character he could
see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for quiet, unpicturesque
men baffled his powers of reproduction. He could admire, but he
could not draw them. There is a very curious instance of this in the
_Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_, which is worth commenting on here. That
memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a whole it belongs to the same
uncharacterised class of portrait-studies as these _Men and Books_.
Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he might be anybody. But there are
passages in the _Memoir_ which are the most moving passages that
Stevenson ever wrote. They do not relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is
all out of focus: they relate to the parents of Jenkin and his wife.
Jenkin’s personality, it would seem, was never grasped by Stevenson;
these vignettes, on the other hand, are quite poignantly real and quite
pathetically beautiful.
VI
The characteristics of Stevenson’s essays are in general, as I have
tried to indicate, characteristics of manner rather than of matter.
Happy notions for slight papers need not be detailed--there are many,
which have in their time provoked great enthusiasm, and which will
continue to give pleasure because they are a little whimsical in
conception and very finished in performance. These essays owe their
charm to the fact that Stevenson was often writing about himself,
for he always wrote entertainingly about himself. He was charmed
by himself, in a way that the common egoist has not the courage or
possibly the imagination to be. Henley will tell you that Stevenson
took every mirror into his confidence; an amusing and not at all
distressing piece of vanity. His whole life was deliciously joined
together by his naïve and attractive vanity. His essays, the most
personal work of any he wrote, are filled with the same vanity which
brought him (and kept him) such good friends. It was not the unhappy
vanity that drives friends away, that is suspicious of all kindness:
Stevenson had been too much petted as a child to permit of such
wanton and morbid self-distrust. He was confident, but not vulgarly
confident; vain, to the extent of being more interested in himself
than in anything else; but he was not dependent upon his earnings,
and success came early enough to keep sweet his happy complacency.
His essays show these things as clearly as do his letters. His
essays “are like milestones upon the wayside of his life,” and they
are so obviously milestones, that all readers who are fascinated
by autobiography, particularly if it be veiled, have been drawn to
Stevenson as they are drawn to an attractive, laughing child. My own
opinion is that Stevenson has sent his lovers away no richer than they
came; but there are many who could not share that view, because there
are many who are thankful to him for telling them that “it is better to
be a fool than to be dead.” I think Stevenson did not know what it was
to be either a fool or dead. That state of nervous high spirits which
is a part of his natural equipment for the battle, which lent even his
most artificial writing a semblance of vivacity, prevented him from
ever being dead (in the sense of supine or dull, as I suppose he meant
it); and I cannot persuade myself that Stevenson was ever a fool.
It is for these reasons that I regard all such phrases in Stevenson’s
essays as pieces of purple, as things which, however they please some
readers, are in themselves inherently false and artificial. That they
were consciously false I do not believe. Stevenson, I am sure, had
the phrase-making instinct: such a thing cannot be learned, as anyone
may see by examining the work of merely imitative writers: it is a
part of Stevenson’s nature that he crystallised into a figure some
obvious half-truth about life, and love, and fate, and the gimcrack
relics of old heroisms. It is equally a part of his nature that he fell
naturally into a sententious habit of moral utterance. Morality--as we
may realise from the lengthy fragment called _Lay Morals_--preoccupied
him. But it was morality expressed with the wagged head of sententious
dogma. Finally, it comes to be true that, by whatever means, by
whatever labour the art was attained, Stevenson was, above everything
else, a writer. “There is no wonder,” said Henley, in the notorious
review of Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography, “there is no wonder that
Stevenson wrote his best in the shadow of the Shade; for writing his
best was very life to him.”
VII
As a writer, then, let Stevenson be regarded in the conclusion of
this chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his
deliberate example in that one essay _On some technical elements of
Style in Literature_; and his theories have aroused bitter comment.
Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants recurrent
in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he lived in
a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of course, was
a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because Stevenson was a
prolific writer, and could never have afforded the time to be a mere
hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first to realise that a
prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that an evil use
of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he realised that
a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive cunning
by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with ever-growing
interest into the most remote passages of his work. He was a careful
writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some sentences of
Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their consonants and syllables
and “knots,” to their destined conclusion, are still, and I suppose
always will be capable of yielding, a pure delight to the ear. Those
who do not take Stevenson’s pains will qualify his denunciation of the
“natural” writer, because a natural writer is one whose ear is quick
and fairly true: he is not necessarily producing “the disjointed
babble of the chronicler,” but he is incapable of the fine point of
exquisite rhythm which we may find in Stevenson’s best writing. That
writing, various though it is (various, I mean, in “styles”), remains
true to its musical principles. It is the result of trained ear and
recognition of language as a conscious instrument. It has innumerable,
most insidious appeals, to disregard which is a task for the barbarian.
It is patterned, it is built of sounds,--“one sound suggests, echoes,
demands, and harmonises with another,”--all in accordance with the
expressed theory of Stevenson. We will grant it the delights, because
they are incontestable. Let us now question whether it has not one
grave defect.
All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its
music, its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that
old dance music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband,
stately as they are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear
resolution with immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven
figured style, than which we could hardly have an illustration more
fit. They are examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but
in Stevenson’s writing there is no violence to old airs and the old
order. His writing is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and
in its differentiation from the old way of writing is to be found,
not a revolution, not anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style,
graceful, sustained though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but
it has no vigour. The passages to which one turns are passages of
delicious, stealthy accomplishment. They are passages which suggest
the slow encroaching fingers of the in-coming tide, creeping and
whispering further and further up the sand; and our watchful delight
in the attainment of each sentence is the delight we feel in seeing
the waves come very gently, pushed on by an incalculable necessity,
until their length is reached and their substance is withdrawn. There
is no tempestuous certainty in Stevenson’s writing; there is not
the magnificent wine of Shakespeare’s prose, which has marvellous
strength as well as its delicate precision. Stevenson’s style,
clearly invalidish in his imitators, has in itself the germs of their
consumption. It is quiet, pretty, picturesque, graceful; it has figure
and trope in plenty; but it has no vehemence. You may find in it an
amazing variety of pitch and cadence; but at length the care that has
made it betrays the artificer; at length the reader will look in vain
for the rough word. That is the pity of Stevenson’s style--not that
he should have sought it, and exercised it, and made language quite
the most important thing in his writing; but that his very artfulness
should have yielded him no protection against the demand of nature for
something which no care or cunning can ever put into style that does
not carry its own impetus.
V
POEMS
I
The Scottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely
ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy
and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance.
Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among
all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality,
in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the
same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons.
It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among
the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found
both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a
conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every
meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware
of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very
appreciative of good actions contributed by other persons to that
advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by
encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I
mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or
verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily
moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain
sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the
voice of a singer--especially when the singer happens to be the person
who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities,
although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case
the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes
the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a
certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken
person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is
entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is
simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who
do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned.
It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show
affection or weep: how hard it is that we should weigh in the balance
of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!
This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to
explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to
explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any
impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous
“grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part
of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their
tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears
and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not
vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae
appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and
inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed
because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing
and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman.
Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a
good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans,
whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of
extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems
to me important that we should be slow to charge a race that is
impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we
might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be
a great poet is another matter.
II
Stevenson’s poems are contained in four small volumes--_Underwoods_,
_Ballads_, _Songs of Travel_ (a collection made by himself, but
published posthumously), and _A Child’s Garden of Verses_. Of the
four volumes the one that has enjoyed most popularity, as well as
most critical esteem, is _A Child’s Garden of Verses_, which book,
although, by Stevenson’s account, very easily produced, has the value
of being unique in scheme and contents. The other volumes have less in
them of wide interest, and so they are less generally read. Certain
poems, such as the _Requiem_ (“Under the wide and starry sky”) and _The
Vagabond_ (“Give to me the life I love”) arise whenever the name of
Stevenson is fondly mentioned; they are, as it were, the stock-in-trade
of the conversational anthologist, who, in the same spirit, will have
suggested to him by the name of Meredith the words, “Enter these
enchanted woods, Ye who dare.” These two poems are not the best poems
Stevenson wrote; but they are handy for remembrance. That explains
their frequent employment; that, and their appropriateness to the
conventional idea of Stevenson, which is based upon a sentimental and
mediocre marvel at the unconventionality of the open road.
The best poems Stevenson wrote are his ballads. With a story to tell,
he was keener to represent truly the subject-matter upon which he was
engaged; and this engendered the “heat of composition,” if it did not
always spring from the native heat or intensity of inspiration. The
ballads, especially _Ticonderoga_, have a swift effectiveness and an
adherence to theme which is not so marked in the poems provoked by
occasional events. In these the rhyme and form sometimes lead the way,
and the poems become exercises in friendly versification, without
much feeling, and with only that Scottish affectionateness to which
reference has already been made. Examples of impoverished emotion
may be found in the two poems expressing gladness at visits from Mr.
Henry James. As cheerful little outbursts of pleasure, such poems, in
manuscript, would be interesting, even delightful: as poems they fall
short of complete success, even in their own class, for the reason that
they are as conversational and as fluent as Stevenson’s letters, and
are diffuse as his prose rarely is.
Better than these are some of the dryly humorous Scots dialect poems,
such as _The Spaewife_, with its refrain of “--_It’s gey an’ easy
spierin’_, says the beggar-wife to me.” These again are often purely
experimental versifications; but they are more than the casual rhymings
of the pleased householder, and they have more interest as poetry. Far
and away better even than these, however, because it is the expression
of a personal and, I think, a deep feeling, is that poem, included in
_Songs of Travel_, and quoted in _The Master of Ballantrae_, which is
untitled, but which is written “To the tune of Wandering Willie.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
In this poem there seems to be real emotion, as I think there is in the
dedication to Mrs. Stevenson of _Weir of Hermiston_. In other poems
there is a grace and the mellifluous flow of words which Stevenson
could always command; but the verses make a pattern, and a pattern of
only occasional significance. They are thus robbed of any power to move
us æsthetically.
The two long narrative poems, _The Ballad of Rahero_ and _The Feast
of Famine_, are both well-sustained by a body of incident. They
have, in lieu of emotion, a certain vividness of excitement. One is
excited by what is going forward, one must read on for the story. In
the degree, therefore, in which one’s attention is removed from the
versification, these two narratives are good; and those other verses
based on legends--_Heather Ale_ and _Ticonderoga_--would be sufficient
to emphasise the fact that Stevenson loved a story and was always at
his best with a tale to spin. When, however, we reach poems in which
no story is to be told, we are confronted with an absence of emotion
which robs the pages we read of all that exceeds mere pleasurable
line-scanning. Happy lines there are, turns of phrase that perhaps have
given rise to the poem into which they are woven. But they are only, at
best, the amiable pleasantries of one who could handle with dexterity
the words of whose music his mind was full. “The bright ring of words”
is not the phrase of a poet; it is the phrase of a connoisseur, and of
one who used words as a connoisseur uses them. The poet is a singer
first: he does not make a poem out of his craft. And the tendency to
diffuseness which mars many of the longer lyrics is a curious instance
of failure in a writer who regarded compression as an essential of good
style.
III
In _A Child’s Garden of Verses_ Stevenson was doing a thing which
had never really been done before. There are nursery rhymes which
crystallise children’s ideas; but this book actually shows, in what
we must believe to be an extraordinarily happy way, the working of a
particular child mind over a great variety of matters. Its excellence
is due to the fact that Stevenson’s young days, lonely as some of
them had been, had never lacked interest, had always been full of
those simple and direct pleasures of incident and encounter and memory
which happy children enjoy. The world had been full of a number of
things; and the memory of those things had abided. It was the memory
of a fanciful rather than an imaginative childhood, a childhood of
superstitions and sports, of a buried tin soldier and of the pleasant
land of play; but we must not forget that such poems as _My Treasures_,
poor in some of their lines, are finely imaginative reconstructions,
the naïveté of which prevents many readers from estimating their
quality. So with _The Unseen Playmate_, which, although it is a poem
for grown-ups, reveals an understanding of a most important fact in
children’s games far more profound than are the pretentious and
unconvincing lines to R. A. M. Stevenson in _Underwoods_. Even if the
idea of _The Unseen Playmate_ may be the idea of a grown-up pretending,
the writing of this, as of the other verses, is almost without lapse,
charmingly simple and natural. I believe it is a fact that children
appreciate and even delight in _A Child’s Garden of Verses_, not
merely at the bidding of their parents, but as a normal manifestation
of taste. This in itself would be a proof that the book is already a
secondary nursery classic. For our present purpose, if that does not
seem rather an over-bearing way of valuing a book so slight in form,
it is sufficient to say that Stevenson’s success here was due to the
fact that he was legitimately using the memory of actual experience.
Too many of his serious, or grown-up, poems show their models; too many
of them flow undistinguished by any truly poetic quality; too many of
them are experiments in metre or rhyme, such as one may write for fun,
but never for free circulation. _The Child’s Garden of Verses_ alone,
then, of the four volumes, exhibits a strict harmony of design with
performance. Its dedication to Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham,
serves only to make the book more complete.
IV
Implicit in the strictures upon Stevenson’s poetry which have
preceded this paragraph is the assumption that Milton’s requirements
of poetry--that it should be simple, sensuous, passionate--is
fundamentally true as applied to lyrical poetry. It would be
troublesome to apply such a test to many of the minor poets; and it may
be that a few of Stevenson’s poems would stand the test. Not many of
them, however, because none of them shows a depth of emotion uncommon
to the ordinarily sensitive person. Stevenson was sensitive to many
things; without sensitiveness he could not have written _A Child’s
Garden of Verses_ or that very excellent ballad _Ticonderoga_. But
sensitiveness is only a poor substitute for emotion; and Stevenson’s
emotion ran in the few ordinary channels of the normal Scotsman. He
loved home; he loved those around him; he desired to be loved, to be
free of the fear of poverty, to live in comfort and in health. Those
things he felt deeply, as Scotsmen, as most men, do. He loved truth;
but it was a conventional truth; a truth, that is to say, improvised
from ordinary usage, from hearsay, from the dogma of “that station of
life”; a truth such as any man who finds himself born in a little pit
of earth may harden his moral shell and his imagination and stultify
his spiritual curiosity by accepting; and it was a truth out of which
Stevenson was escaping towards the end of his life. But in all this
love of virtues and duties and usages there was never until Stevenson’s
emergence into the greater freedom of life in the South Seas the
passionate love of anything for its own sake. If he loved the open air
it was with a pleasant, “playing” love, a sort of self-indulgence.
Over his heart he kept the watchful guard of a Protestant Scotsman. It
was unmoved, a secret, not to be known. It did not inform his work,
in which there is sometimes a heat of composition, or even a heat of
feeling, but never the cold heat of profound and piercing emotion. That
he was capable of being easily moved, that he loved virtue and hated
cruelty and wrong, these things are true. That he could grow hot at a
calumny, as he did in the defence of Father Damien, is equally true.
But these things are the signs of a prudent man, eagerly interested in
life, rather taking pleasure in the thought that he is hot to attack
injustice; not of a profound thinker or of a poet. They warm us with,
perhaps, affection for Stevenson; they keep alive our admiration
for him as an attractive figure in our literary history. They do
not thrill us, because they appeal to the interest and excitement
and honesty and feeling in us, and not to those more secret, more
passionate reserves which we yield only to the poet.
VI
PLAYS
I
It is a commonplace of dramatic reporting, which in spite of its
frequently doubtful application has the truth of an old saw, that
the novelist cannot write plays. Certainly, it would seem that the
qualities which go to the making of good plays are not precisely those
which make good novels; for while it is possible to conceive a novel
in terms of narrative, descriptions of abounding nature, psychological
analysis, and tableaux, the play has rules more strictly objective
and more definitely rigid. Now if we, for the moment, pass over the
question of Stevenson’s collaborator in the four printed plays with
which his name is associated, and if we, for this occasion, treat
them as though they were his work entirely, we shall be better able
to distinguish certain remarkable characteristics of these plays,
and, anticipating certain general conclusions to be made later, of
Stevenson’s talent.
Stevenson, we are all aware, was never, strictly speaking, in spite
of _Catriona_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, a novelist. He was a writer of
many kinds of stories; but they were not primarily, until we come to
_Weir_, domestic or psychological. Many of them were what no doubt
would commonly be called “dramatic,” in the sense that they contained
scenes of some violence; but for the most part they were narrative
interspersed with tableaux. They were “picturesque,” not because
they were startlingly visual, but because Stevenson had that _flair_
for the odd, the startling, or the vivid effect of contrast which is
generally described by the word “picturesque.” It was the oddness of
_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ that allured him before he became oppressed
by its symbolism. It was, equally, oddness that always attracted
him in character: he had no profound sense of character, for this
reason. Passivity he never understood. His characters must forever be
in action. That, it might be supposed, was in itself a first reason
for turning to the theatre, since, according to modern dramatic
reporters, “drama” is a word synonymous with the word “action.” Action,
something doing--that, by the recipe, is the certain play. But while
action may give a play breathless suspense, while it may provide the
kind of play which, in a specifically theatrical sense, is called a
“drama,” action is not the whole battle. To action, or at least to
the psychological excitement created by a sense of action in progress
and a climax pending, must be added a very powerful sense of what is
effective in the theatre. A pause, a sound, verbal repetition, an
abrupt change--these things are crude examples, chosen at random from
among the obvious instances of what contributes to the sense of the
theatre. If we think of such things as the tapping of Pew’s stick (in
_Admiral Guinea_), and, in _Deacon Brodie_, the appearance of the
masked Deacon at the window by which Leslie is watching for him, we
shall realise that in some degree, in some very obvious and primitive
form, Stevenson was possessed of this attribute. But one thing we
shall infallibly discover him to lack, a thing which Mr. Henry James
missed in _Catriona_, a thing which has vital importance in drama--the
visual sense. These plays show no real power of visualising a scene.
Picturesque they all are; they all have qualities which make them
engrossing--as reading. But they are not focussed for the eyes, and
they are not well constructed for real dramatic effect.
_Deacon Brodie_ is in five acts and eight tableaux, and its effects
are indescribably broken, so that irrelevancies are numerous,
distracting side issues over-emphasised, and so that the Deacon is
almost a minor character. It is hard to realise that there are only a
dozen persons in the play, for their comings and goings are so frequent
as to give the effect of a confused number of straggling participants
in desultory action. The play itself centres round an historical
figure--Deacon Brodie--who was an honest man before the world by day,
and by night an expert cracksman. His name is familiar both in criminal
history and in the annals of Edinburgh, where his activities became,
after his death, notorious. In the play, Brodie at last is eager for
reform; but one of his cronies, tempted by a Bow Street runner, and
the only one of Brodie’s friends to yield to temptation, betrays him.
Though Brodie escapes, his absence from home has been discovered in
the excitement consequent upon his father’s death, and, when arrest
is imminent, he takes his own life. Stevenson had found the details
of Brodie’s life while he was preparing the sketches collected under
the title _Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes_; and it is conceivable that
in some measure the play’s technique was a little influenced by a
reading of some eighteenth-century episodic plays, such, for example,
as Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which is similarly broken in construction,
though more permissibly so, because “The Beggar’s Opera” is no more
than a skein in which ballads and satire may be found to provide our
entertainment. This mention of “The Beggar’s Opera” must not be taken
too seriously, however, because although that play deals with the
life of highwaymen and pickpurses and thief-takers in the eighteenth
century, as _Deacon Brodie_ does, it is profoundly real, whereas
_Deacon Brodie_ is only too obviously modern fake. Macheath and Polly
Peachum are infinitely more real than Brodie and his doxy. Moreover
the ensemble in _Deacon Brodie_ is on the whole poorly conceived. The
minor persons are mere figures, introduced to stand here or there, or
do this or that, and are labelled with names and idiosyncrasies. The
major persons, though more detailed, have an equal lack of vitality. It
is necessary to add the further explanation that _Deacon Brodie_ is the
first of the plays, and that it dates from 1880. It is easily the least
coherent of them all. Stevenson was to improve upon _Deacon Brodie_ in
that respect, at least.
II
The two lightest plays--_Beau Austin_ and _Macaire_--are experiments,
the one in manner, the other in bizarre or, as it is styled by the
authors, “melodramatic farce.” The manner of _Beau Austin_ is the
manner of the costume play. It is highly sophisticated, and its
keynote is powder and patches. The beau is at his toilet, and one of
the women he has betrayed is in the town, still sick with despair
at her soiled virtue. Her true love hears from the lady’s lips the
story of her betrayal, and, on being forbidden to challenge the beau,
contents himself with demanding a marriage ceremony. His flatteries
are effective, the beau consents, and the formal proposal is made,
only to be rejected by the lady, whose hauteur is aroused. So matters
stand when the lady’s brother, learning by chance of the betrayal,
insults the beau before an important personage. As climax, the beau
proposes publicly, and is as publicly accepted. It will be seen that
the play could not claim, excepting in respect of verbal artifice, to
be more than a pretty jig-saw. It could have no effect of reality: the
effect desired by the authors was one purely of the stage. Verbally
it is exquisitely dexterous. That is its undoing. The attempt is
made to convey in words something more than the action of the piece
would successfully carry: words are to create an atmosphere of the
eighteenth-century fashionable life, to indicate the possibility that
calm picturesque heartless exteriors shielded even then hearts that
beat warmly beneath lace and brocade. The play was a pretence that
nothing was something, a pretty moving picture under the perception
of which, beating out in pianissimo airs from appropriate music, and
the faint throb of an unseen minuet, was the delicate heart of the
period. It was an æsthetic view of the eighteenth century, the century
of Fielding and of Smollett, tinkered about to make a perpetual _bal
masque_, or, shall we say, a picture by Watteau or Fragonard. In
point of fact the play is too slight to bear its weight of intention:
it remains verbal. As drama it is more negligible than “Monsieur
Beaucaire” or “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” because its literary
pretensions are so much more elaborate. It has sometimes fine shades of
close verbal fence that are Meredithian: it is better to read than it
could be to see. But it is an attempt, one might say an almost basely
cunning attempt, to capture the theatre as a place where costumes grace
a barren play. It failed because its authors were two conscientious
literary men, bent upon a superficial perfection undreamed of by
practical dramatists. Just as Cowper, in translating Homer, made an
epic for a tea-party, so Henley and Stevenson made about the rational
and cynical eighteenth century a sophisticated play for a boudoir. They
concentrated upon the superficial, and only said, but did not show,
that the men and women of the eighteenth century had hearts as true
and passionate as those of our day. The play lacked realism, and, more
disastrously, it lacked reality.
On the other hand, _Macaire_ has a thin air of jocularity which almost
carries it through. It has a sententious cleric, a drunken notary, a
repetitious father for the bride, a courteous host, a little mystery
of the bridegroom’s nurseling days, the facetious Macaire and his
companion. It has all these things, and it has an idea, strong enough
for a single act, stretched to its thinnest over several acts which
demand cuts more severe than the authors allow.
Macaire escaping from justice, threatened each moment, in the face
of the audience, with instant arrest, carries himself with unfailing
_sang-froid_ through all his difficulties but the last. Finding a
chance of sport, and possibly of profit, he impersonates an erring
father. The real father appears. Macaire still, after the manner of Mr.
Jingle, is imperturbable. Competition follows, until the desire for
the genuine father’s money becomes too strong for Macaire. Then only
does he show the blackness of his heart, which does not shrink, in such
desperate situations, from murder. So Macaire, still talking, still
watchful and unscrupulous, is brought to bay. Fiercely turning, in a
picturesque situation, upon the stairs, he is shot by a gendarme on the
stage. That is a skeleton of the play; but the play is again a literary
play, so that sensationalism will not redeem it. By repetitions of
catch-phrases and by trivial incidents which (e.g. the exchanging of
the wine-bottles) are not unknown to the humbler kinds of drama, the
story is continued until its idle joking can no longer be suddenly
stirred into flaming melodrama by the noise and zest of bloody crime.
It has many shrewd bids for theatrical effectiveness; but it faints for
want of a fabric upon which its devices might flourish and triumphantly
justify themselves.
III
The fourth play, _Admiral Guinea_, has fine qualities, both literary
and dramatic; it is the least literary and the most dramatically
effective of all the plays. It contains one figure, in Pew, which
might have been, as far as one may judge in reading, a hauntingly
gruesome object; and, in spite of Stevenson’s own subsequent contempt
for this play and for _Macaire_, shows a greater, if conventional,
power of simplification than does any of the other plays. Admiral
Guinea, a retired and penitent slaver, refuses his daughter her lover,
on the ground that the lover is ungodly. Pew, an old associate of
Admiral Guinea, become blind for his sins, and still full of vengeful
wickedness, arrives in the neighbourhood, catches the lover drunk,
leads him back to Admiral Guinea’s cottage, and tries, with his aid,
to rob his old captain of certain riches which he supposes to lie in a
brass-bound chest. The young man’s reaction, their discovery by Admiral
Guinea, the violent death of the unrepentant Pew follow; whereupon the
lovers are suitably blessed by Admiral Guinea.
It has been said, above, that this play shows a greater power of
simplification than the others; the action of it is certainly quicker,
more obvious, less choked with verbal expressiveness, than is the
action of the other plays; and in so far as this is so it would appear
that _Admiral Guinea_ is a considerable advance, technically, upon
them.
The simplification is, to some considerable extent, effected by a
strange poverty of invention, and the play is likest of all to those
nondescripts which Stevenson as a little boy must have performed upon
his toy stage, with paper figures pushed hither and thither in tin
slides upon the boards. In spite of that, _Admiral Guinea_ is the
best of the plays because, in a higher degree than its fellows, it is
truly actable. We cannot regard the confused cramped episodic _Deacon
Brodie_ as theatrically effective. Equally it is impossible, from the
standpoint of public performance, to consider as satisfactory either
_Beau Austin_ or _Macaire_. _Admiral Guinea_, however, even if it
belongs to a class of play which is associated in our minds with such
titles as “Black-Eyed Susan,” has its action very largely comprised in
the material put upon the stage; it has the obvious stage effects of
darkness and the dreadful tapping stick of Pew; and it has picturesque
struggles, death, wounded and reasserted honour, and, for these
plays, a minimum of soliloquy. More it would be impossible to claim
for _Admiral Guinea_ without seeing it performed: again we have types
roughly “mannered” to serve as persons of the play: but they are types
clearly in accordance with tradition, and they preserve their interest
fully until they are done with and put away with the footlight-wicks,
and the tin slides, and the other paraphernalia of the toy stage--paper
figures, a penny plain, and twopence coloured.
IV
For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure
of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in
drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual
sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail
because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much
to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the
dramatist’s formal conventions. We do not, in the theatre, demand that
“King Lear” shall be accompanied by a pandemonium of crackling tin
and iron and artificial whoopings of wind. Those things we prefer to
imagine for ourselves. But somehow the mixture of legitimate convention
and the basest imitation of reality has been confused in the theatre.
The exaggeration regarded as necessary by an effete system of acting
and production has created other unpardonable falsenesses. The stage
has been a place upon which actors disported themselves. It was of
such a stage that Stevenson thought. In each case he hung a play upon
a sensational figure--Brodie, Macaire, Pew, and, in a much lesser
degree, upon the picturesque figure of Beau Austin. To him the drama
was nothing but play. It was an excuse--nay, a demand, for unreality.
He supposed that stage characters really were cardboard figures such
as he had known, moralising ranters, virtuous girls, spouters of Latin
tags, pious brands from the burning, handsome courageous puppet-like
juvenile leads, and so on. It never occurred to him to put a real
figure in a play: he never supposed that a character in a play had any
end but to be put back in the box with the other playthings. That is
really the cause of the shallowness of these four plays. As Stevenson
admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them
acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people
talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception
of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without
developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are
bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson
realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to
realise them. We find them, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically
found Catriona herself, bloodless. Professor Saintsbury found Catriona
full of sawdust, while of the characters in the plays we have used the
word “paper”: very well, the impression of lifelessness is as clearly
felt in each case. And such an impression, carried to its logical end,
explains why, in at least one department of letters, Stevenson from the
first mistook his ground. Not one of the four plays has serious value
as an example of dramatic art; it is clear that not one of them so far
has commended itself to the public or to the actor-managers. Yet the
plays were obviously set to catch the popular taste, and their literary
finish, a confession in itself of an absence of dramatic impulse, does
not succeed in commending them to those who judge by more exacting
standards.
VII
SHORT STORIES
I
Stevenson himself establishes the fact that he found short-story
writing easier than the writing of novels. “It is the length that
kills,” he confessed. But length offered difficulties in the longer
stories because Stevenson, besides lacking the physical endurance for
continuous imaginative effort, had the experimental and inventive mind
rather than the synthetic or the analytical. It was easier for him to
see the whole of a short story. It could be compressed: it had not
to be sustained. And in the writing of a short story his confidence
never slackened. He was then not sailing in uncharted seas. It is for
this reason, in the first place, that Stevenson’s short stories are
better as works of art than his long ones. A little idea, a flash,
it may be, of inspiration; and Stevenson had his story complete,
ready for that scrupulous handling and manipulation which the actual
composition always involved. He did not greatly deal in anecdote;
his psychological studies are inclined to be hollow; but he was
perfectly effective in his not very powerful vein of fantasy, could
tell a fairy tale with distinction, succeeded once without question in
picturesque drama, and, when he fell to anecdote, as in _The Treasure
of Franchard_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Beach of Falesá_,
he was pleasantly triumphant. Moreover, in two of his “bogle” stories,
the one inserted in _Catriona_, and the other famous to all the world
as _Thrawn Janet_, he seems to me to have risen clearly above anecdote
with matter which might have been left as unsatisfactory as it remains
in _The Body-Snatcher_.
In one of his reviews Stevenson speaks of “that compression which
is the mark of a really sovereign style.” Compression is no more
the mark of a sovereign style, of course, than it is of a suit of
clothes. Compression brings with it obscurity, and is a mark of
self-consciousness. What Stevenson meant was possibly a justification
of apophthegm and figure. He rather enjoyed what somebody once
called “minting the arresting phrase.” There is, at any rate, a
palpable connection between our two quotations. But it is certain
that precision, austerity, or, if I may use the word, chastity, of
expression is a sign of good style; and compression, where it takes
the form of heightening and intensification of effect, is the mark of a
good short story. It is the mark of Stevenson’s best stories. It is the
mark of _Thrawn Janet_, of _The Pavilion on the Links_, of _The Bottle
Imp_. Sometimes, after promising well, Stevenson abandons himself, it
is true, to his natural Scottish aptitude, and literally “talks out”
such tales as _Markheim_ and _A Lodging for the Night_; but, quite as
often, his judgment beats his inclination, and the result is a classic
short story in a language not too brilliantly equipped with examples of
the craft.
For the short story is above all a matter of _justesse_, by which word
I mean to suggest delicate propriety of expression to idea. Mr. Henry
James can tell a short story, because Mr. Henry James writes, as it
were, with a very fine pen. Stevenson was not comparable as an artist
with Mr. Henry James; but he wrote in a less rarified atmosphere; and
it is still practically an unsettled question whether a distinguished
artist (one who perfectly expresses a fine conception), such as
Turgenev or Mr. Henry James, is the superior or the inferior of the
writer with more tumultuous sympathies whose sense of form is less than
his sense of life. So that when Stevenson wrote _The Pavilion on the
Links_, or _The Bottle Imp_, or _Thrawn Janet_, or _Markheim_, he was
writing particular stories of which only the last, one supposes, could
ever have occurred to Mr. James as a subject for a short story at all.
Conversely, one sees Stevenson blundering into the bluntnesses and
certainly the ultimate failure of _Olalla_, with the knowledge that his
delicacy of style was more marked than the poignancy of his perception;
and the psychological explorations of _Olalla_ are jejune stumblings
compared with the finished delicacy of “Washington Square.” One does
not think, in reading, of Mr. James; but one may perhaps be permitted
to illustrate a point by a reference to his work, which has no precise
significance as a parallel. That fact, I hope, will excuse a momentary
comparison for the purpose of showing that _Will o’ the Mill_, for
all its stylistic accomplishment, is a barren piece of moralising.
Where Stevenson essayed profundity, as all writers are drawn to essay
profundity, whether it is from natural profoundness or from the
instinct of imitation, he was badly hampered by his inexperience as an
inductive philosopher. Both _Will o’ the Mill_ and _Markheim_ are, as
it were, appendages to that doleful failure _Prince Otto_. They were
experiments for Stevenson in a particular genre for which talent and
his mental training had lent him no aptitude. It was on other work
that he more successfully took his stand as a writer of short stories.
His success--considering that we are now examining his position among
the masters of our literature--can only be attested where his work
stands supreme or, at any rate, is clearly distinguished, in its own
class. It cannot be doubted for one moment that Stevenson wrote some
exceedingly fine short stories, fit to be compared, in their own line,
with any that have been written in English. What follows must be read
in the light of this claim. In their own way, I regard _The Suicide
Club_, _The Pavilion on the Links_, _Providence and the Guitar_,
_Thrawn Janet_, _The Treasure of Franchard_, _The Beach of Falesá_,
and _The Bottle Imp_ as first-class short stories. In a distinct
second class I should place _The Rajah’s Diamond_, some of _The
Dynamiter_ stories, _The Merry Men_, _Will o’ the Mill_, _Markheim_,
_Olalla_, _The Isle of Voices_, and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. The
least successful short stories seem to me to be _The Story of a Lie_,
_A Lodging for the Night_, _The Sire de Malétroit’s Door_, _The
Misadventures of John Nicholson_, and _The Body-Snatcher_. I am aware
that one at least of the stories which I have placed in this third
division--_The Sire de Malétroit’s Door_--has given great pleasure to
many readers, and has even been not without its direct influence upon
Stevenson’s imitators, while another--_A Lodging for the Night_--is
greatly admired, and has been very highly praised; so that it seems
hardly necessary to say that the classification is roughly made,
and that it is only here attempted for reasons of convenience. The
stories will hereafter be grouped according to subject or treatment,
and will be examined individually. Those in the first division are, I
think, completely successful in their own conventions; those in the
second division are either incompletely successful or successful in
conventions which seem to me inferior in artistic value; those in the
third division are, as far as I can see, unsuccessful either because
they fail to impose their conventions upon the reader or because they
fail to convince the reader that Stevenson had mastered the craft of
short-story writing. But, upon the whole, I believe Stevenson’s short
stories to represent more successfully than any other part of his
output the variety and the brilliance of his talent. It is for this
reason that I shall endeavour in some detail to justify the divisions
indicated above, and to emphasise the fact that such tentative
distinctions, even if they prove inaccurate in the case of some one or
two stories, may yet have some value as providing a basis for agreement
or disagreement.
II
For that reason I shall add that the stories in the third division seem
to me to fail for these reasons. _The Story of a Lie_ is obviously
prentice work. It is presumably based upon some experience of his own
in France; but the action, once transferred from the Continent, is
filled with sentimentality. Although written, apparently, much later
than _The Story of a Lie_, _The Misadventures of John Nicholson_ is a
protracted anecdote which does not awaken very much interest by its
attempt to blend humorous exaggeration with bizarre incidents. _The
Body-Snatcher_ is one which Stevenson had to supply in order to satisfy
a journal with which he had made a contract. It is meant to shock us,
but it loses power before the climax, which thereupon fails to shock.
The idea is horrible, and affords scope for much dreadful detail:
Stevenson, however, perhaps through ill-health, was unsuccessful with
it, and possibly the ugliness of the whole thing is at fault. For _The
Sire de Malétroit’s Door_ I must confess to the greatest distaste.
It seems to me to have neither historical nor human convincingness;
and the phrase at the end of the story, “her falling body” very
significantly conveys the pin-cushion substance of the demoiselle
whose indiscretion gives rise to the sickly and cloying tale. The
last story in this division is one that enjoys great reputation, first
because it deals with Villon, second because there is an outburst of
Villon’s against the red hair of a murdered man, and last because there
is an elaborately written but entirely inconclusive duologue between
Villon and his host. The story seems to me to be without point or form.
I believe that popular admiration for _A Lodging for the Night_
is largely founded upon tradition or imitation, like the popular
admiration for Shakespeare, without the basis of fact upon which
the popular admiration for Shakespeare rests. It is well known that
popular appreciation of great things is shallow, and that it rises from
a common attempt to emulate the enthusiasm of the apostles of Art.
Unfortunately, popular appreciation is more easily aroused by artifice
than by art. Accordingly, those who have been taught to cite “Put out
the light, and then--Put out the light” as a profundity are ready to
cite with equal conviction the saying of Villon in this story that the
murdered man had no right to have red hair. It is one of those dreadful
æsthetic blunders that quickly pass into unquestionable dogma. If no
protest is made, if those who detect an imposture remain supine, the
false continues to masquerade as the magnificent; and common opinions
are so impervious to proclaimed fact that it is at length impossible
to cope with them, save by some such wearisome exposition as this. It
should be remembered that common appreciation of art is not guided by
principles but by intuitions and imitations. The decay of a thing once
widely popular is slow; and it is due, not to any native perception
of mistake, but to the sluggard realisation that the old enthusiasm
is less ardently canvassed than it was. _A Lodging for the Night_ has
enjoyed great repute, because Stevenson “found” Villon at a time when
other young men were finding Villon; and now that Villon is quite
settled among the young men, Stevenson’s essay on Villon and his story
about Villon have reached the larger public that is always some years
after the fleeting fashion. The result is that, by imitation of those
who ought to have known better, and even by its muddled acceptance of
a bad play about Villon (called “If I were King”), the public has been
led to esteem _A Lodging for the Night_ as something more than the
piece of laboured artifice that it always was.
In the second class I believe that _The Rajah’s Diamond_, _The
Dynamiter_, and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ are very efficient pieces
of craftsmanship, strong enough in invention to delight that typical
person called by Mr. H. G. Wells the “weary giant,” engrossing reading
to the accompaniment of cigars and whisky-and-soda, but not, in the
way of art, quite what we require from works of creative imagination.
_The Merry Men_, with one striking piece of characterisation, has
vigour, but poor form and several superfluities of invention. _The
Isle of Voices_ is a pleasant enough fairy tale, but clearly inferior
to its companion piece _The Bottle Imp_. The other three tales, _Will
o’ the Mill_, _Markheim_, and _Olalla_ are all psychological studies
of a kind that is nowadays called arid. That is to say, they have
greater elaborateness of treatment than their intrinsic importance
quite justifies. _Will o’ the Mill_ is written with great softness and
delicacy, in a sort of slow and lulling drone very sweet to the ear;
_Markheim_ has great virtuosity, is faint and exquisite in manner,
feeble in perception, and is sometimes, I believe, false in psychology.
Its plan and its manner would only be finally true if its understanding
pierced more sharply and finely to the heart of truth. It lacks
penetration. _Olalla_ is, in many ways, fine, in some, beautiful. It
is, however, as Stevenson came to be aware, false. It is false, not
because it is insincere, but because Stevenson’s knowledge had not
the temper and the needle-like capacity to go ever deeper into the
subtleties upon which he was engaged. I suspect that he dared not trust
his imagination, that his imagination had more ingenuity than courage
or strength. The story does not produce æsthetic emotion: it is as
though the author had made a fine net to trap a moonbeam, as though,
when he thought to have come at the heart of the matter, it had escaped
him. He was perhaps not wise enough in the mysteries of the human soul.
Sensitiveness, and the desire to create a passionate beauty, were
not fit substitutes for that patient and courageous, that fearless
imagination which alone could have given truth to so simple and so
unseizable a problem. More, in his handling of the conclusion of his
tale, Stevenson’s emotion fell to a lower plane, and his talent played
him quite false. He became too intent upon his _rendering_ of the idea;
his literary sense took command when his knowledge failed. That is the
weakness of all these three stories.
III
Finally, in the first division, we have seven stories. _Providence
and the Guitar_ and _The Treasure of Franchard_ are what we may call,
if we wish to do so, sentimental stories. Both are comedies of light
character, both show certain influences; but to both the manner, tender
and amused, is so appropriate that we are pleased as we were meant
to be pleased. Both contain good characterisation and an unstrained
knowledge. Both are so entirely naïve in conception that we do not
question the inspiration by which they were produced. In style and
character dissimilar, but in humour of a like kind, are _The Suicide
Club_ and _The Bottle Imp_. These four stories are all marked with the
whimsical and charming manner which made Stevenson so many friends in
life. All are more or less lifted by fantasy above their common play
with the humours and the pathos of daily affairs. They are founded upon
Stevenson’s natural attitude--_The Suicide Club_, more convincingly
than _The Superfluous Mansion_, in which story the idea appears in
its native ingenuousness, is an example of Stevenson’s constant
wish (a wish not unshared by others) that he might be singled out
mysteriously by the agent for some strange adventure in the manner of
“The White Cat.” The young man in _The Superfluous Mansion_, it will be
remembered, was thrilled by an invitation to enter a carriage in which
a solitary lady sat: his adventure thereafter was more commonplace,
for Stevenson’s wish had in fact gone no further than the invitation
to the carriage. So Prince Florizel embodied a desire for strange safe
experience, such as all lonely children feel; and Stevenson was as much
gratified as we are at the adventure of the young man with the cream
tarts. My own opinion is, that it was the young man with the cream
tarts who mattered; and that in the subsequent intrigues the story
falls away to the level of _The Rajah’s Diamond_. To be accosted by a
young man with cream tarts in a locality so picturesque as Leicester
Square--that is romance: to go to the suicide club, and to participate
in what follows, is to leave romance for picturesque stimulation of
interest by bizarre incident. The young man, I think, is art: the rest
might have been invented by a person without imagination, and so we
might call it craft. Nevertheless, even if the events subsequent to
the young man with the cream tarts take on a more commonplace air,
they have yet an individuality above that of the tales in _The Rajah’s
Diamond_, and the peculiar fantastic bravado of Stevenson’s writing
maintains the quality of surprise with extreme gusto. _The Bottle Imp_
is, to me, comparable in quality with _Thrawn Janet_ alone; and these
two stories offer the two most successful examples of Stevenson’s art
as a short-story writer. Each in its way is perfect, in form and in
manner. _The Beach of Falesá_, more anecdotal, and less fine in form
than any of the other stories in this division, has excellences of
character, emotion, and reality which may elsewhere be considered to
be lacking. In all its details it is possibly more vital and more
worth the telling than _The Pavilion on the Links_, which in form is
superior, but which, in convention, is inferior. I know of nothing
with which to compare _The Beach of Falesá_; and _The Pavilion on the
Links_ is perhaps not wholly outside the range of so accomplished a
craftsman as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or so determined a romancer as
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. That may be so, and very likely both those
gentlemen admire _The Pavilion on the Links_ very much. The fact that
requires to be recorded here of this story is that it sustains its
own note magnificently; and that if we grant this type of story the
right to be described as art _The Pavilion on the Links_ is the best
example of the type known to us. It is continuously exciting; it is not
oppressively false; and it is handled with extreme competence. Possibly
one admires its craftsmanship, its consummate treatment of a theme from
whose reality one withdraws one’s conviction when the story’s grip has
relaxed, more than one admires its quality as a work of imagination.
If that is so, one must certainly regard _The Pavilion on the Links_
as a magnificent example of craft, but on a lower artistic plane than
Stevenson’s best work.
That brings to an end our consideration of the three rough divisions
formulated at the beginning of this chapter. It is possible now to
group the stories into their particular kinds, and to attempt to
obtain, from an examination of these, some more general estimate of
Stevenson’s ability as a writer of short stories. As a preliminary
to this it will be desirable to set forth what may be regarded as
a principle of judgment; and then to tabulate the stories in their
various kinds. Thus we shall be able to eliminate the inferior stories,
and to arrive at certain, I hope reasonable, conclusions as to the
place occupied by the better stories both in Stevenson’s output and in
the art of the short story.
IV
What do we demand of a short story before we are willing to consider
that it deserves the name of art? And is art, as I am sorry to know
that many admirers of Stevenson would at this juncture ask, worth
bothering about? Art is surely the quality which distinguishes some
of these stories from others; and art, to me, is the disinterested
rendering, to perfection, of a theme intensely felt through, and in
accordance with, the artist’s philosophic conception of life. I do not
suggest that art must involve the conscious expression of a consistent
philosophy. I think it should not do that. But unless a writer has a
considerable æsthetic and emotional experience which does directly
inform his work with a wisdom greater than our utilitarian scheme of
conventional morality, no practical experience of life and no sense
of æsthetic form can suffice to make that writer an artist. Mr. Clive
Bell, in his very brilliant and amusing book “Art,” says that “art is
significant form,” which is a very much better and less pretentious
definition than the one I have given. It is also easier to apply; but
I purposely added a reference to the artist’s philosophic conception,
because it seems to me that there can be no art which is not primarily
a thing of unblemished artistic sincerity. A thing pretended
(artistically, not morally pretended) can, I think, no more be art, in
spite of its significant form, than it can be artistically sincere. It
may be retorted that there is nothing in this connection between the
artist and the charlatan; but there is. There is the craftsman, one
who, denied or forgoing the artist’s intellectual basis, makes goods
like unto works of art, which are charged with significance of form,
but not with that consistency with philosophic belief which makes
significant the artistic vision. For the artist’s vision is not merely
executive: it is conceptual. And while significant form means perfect
execution of the artist’s concept, there must be a relative connection
between the concept and the artist’s fundamental, and possibly
inscrutable or inexpressible, “idea.” Otherwise the brilliant men would
have it all their own way, which is obviously not the law of such
things. To take an example. I regard _The Pavilion on the Links_ as
doubtful art. In form it is better than certain stories which seem to
me superior in content, better than, say, _The Beach of Falesá_. But it
seems to me empty, without heart, so that its warmth is like the warmth
of anger, and is chilled when its excitement is done. Ought there not
to remain in one’s mind, when the story is finished, some other emotion
than stale excitement? I think there ought. I think that an æsthetic
emotion remains in the case of all art that is really art; that one
continues to feel, not the immediate clash of will or incident, but
the author’s true emotion, of which the mere incidents of the story
are only the bridge which the author has chosen to bear his emotion by
symbol, or example, into our hearts. If I were to say of _The Pavilion
on the Links_: “It is not _true_,” I should by ninety-nine of every
hundred people be called unimaginative, and told that “nobody ever said
it was.” But of course I should mean, not that the incidents were rare,
but that Stevenson had never _artistically_ believed them, that they
hung suspended in the air only by virtue of their power to interest or
to excite, by means of the “heat of composition.” I should mean that
Stevenson had not first _imagined_ the story, but that he had planned
it in cold blood, saying, “We’ll have an estate, and a pavilion, and
two men who have quarrelled ...” and so on, when he might equally well
have been planning to describe a dairy, or a balloon, or a cataclysm
at St. Malo. If I look for emotion in the story I find none. If I
look for an æsthetic idea I find none. Perhaps that is where Mr. Bell
revives. The story stands there as a piece of virtuosity; and if that
is deliberate virtuosity, if there is no artistic conviction behind
it, then the story is a fake. I think it is a fake. I am quite ready
to think of it as an extraordinary clever piece of business. But if it
is fake, it is not art. Does significant form imply the presence of a
conviction or merely of craft?
On the other hand, I find what I should like to call conceptual
integrity in _Thrawn Janet_ and in _The Beach of Falesá_, and these
stories seem to me to be art. For the same reason, _The Treasure of
Franchard_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Bottle Imp_ seem
to me to be art. In all these stories I am conscious of æsthetic
conviction. I am aware of that delightful emotion also in _The
Young Man with the Cream Tarts_, and in other parts of _The Suicide
Club_, but not in all. I see art baulked by literature in _Will
o’ the Mill_, in _Markheim_, and _Olalla_; and, greatly muddied
by clotted moralising, in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, which as a
whole is suspiciously glib, as though it had been falsified in the
transformation from dream to morality. I do not find art in the other
short stories by Stevenson. They seem all to have been produced, some
from one impulse, some from another, some with painstaking shrewdness,
some from vanity, some even from a want of something better to do. The
artist receives an inspiration, which shapes his work with the fine
glow of vitality (much as a sick person is transformed by mountain
air, until his features shape and colour into a new fleshly verve).
The craftsman waits upon invention, and sedulously cultivates its
friendliness, with a thrifty economy which brings him in the course
of his life much respect from his fellows. _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
was dreamed by an artist; and was written by a craftsman. If Sir J.
M. Barrie had, as Stevenson once wrote, “a journalist at his elbow,”
shall we not admit that, in the same position, Stevenson had an equally
dangerous devil, who goes by the name of a craftsman?
V
If what has been said above has any applicability to this matter, we
have reduced to five the number of Stevenson’s short stories to which
we can give the name of art. In mentioning that number, I have ventured
to eliminate _The Suicide Club_, which contains several episodes,
excluding _The Young Man with the Cream Tarts_ whose particular
character does not seem to me to warrant the use of the term “art.”
That leaves us with _Thrawn Janet_, _The Beach of Falesá_, _The Bottle
Imp_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Treasure of Franchard_. One
of these is a “bogle” story, one is a realistic story of adventure in
the South Seas, one is a fairy tale, and the others are light comedies,
touched with fancy which transfigures without falsifying the underlying
artistic sincerity of their conception. We have eliminated, for what
may in some cases appear to be insufficient reasons, some twenty odd
stories (counting the various episodes of _The Rajah’s Diamond_ and
_The Dynamiter_ as stories). Of the whole number of stories, two
(or, with the little tale in _Catriona_, three) are concerned with
“bogles,” namely _Thrawn Janet_ and _The Body-Snatcher_. Two others
are also concerned with the supernatural: they are _The Bottle Imp_
and _The Isle of Voices_. Three are psychological--_Will o’ the Mill_,
_Markheim_, and _Olalla_. Four are light comedies--_The Story of a
Lie_, _John Nicholson_, _The Treasure of Franchard_, _Providence and
the Guitar_. Two are picturesque or romantic tales of incident--_The
Pavilion on the Links_ and _The Merry Men_. One is a realistic tale
of incident--_The Beach of Falesá_. The rest belong to a class of
fantastic mystery or criminal tale which is not, apart from the
attractiveness of its mayonnaise, intrinsically of great value. It
is from the five tales named at the beginning of this section that
we shall perhaps draw our best material for the appraisement of
Stevenson’s chief success as a short-story writer.
_Thrawn Janet_, then, is an extraordinarily successful tale of the
devil’s entry into the body of an old woman, imagined with great power,
and told with enormous spirit. _The Beach of Falesá_ is the narrative,
by a trader, of his arrival at a South Sea island, his marriage to a
native girl, and his overthrow of a treacherous rival. The character
of the man who tells the story--Wiltshire--is well-sustained, the
character of Uma, the native wife, is amazingly suggested, considering
how little we see her and considering that we receive her, as it
were, through the trader’s report alone. For the rest, the story has
vividness of local colouring, and a good deal of feeling. _The Bottle
Imp_, the fairy tale, is told without fault in a manner of great
simplicity. It relates to the successive purchases and sales, the sales
always, by the conditions of purchase, being made at a figure lower
than that of the purchase, of a magic bottle as potent as Aladdin’s
lamp; and to the certainty of Hell which is involved in the continued
possession of the bottle until the lessee’s death. The story was
written for the Samoan natives, and, as far as I am able to judge, it
bears in a remarkable degree the impress of native ways of thought.
It has, that is to say, the _naïveté_ and gravity of the folk-tale.
_Providence and the Guitar_ is a gay story of the misadventures of some
travelling musicians who receive poor welcome from those whom they seek
to entertain, but who reconcile at length the claims of art and duty as
they find them opposed in the lives of certain disunited hosts. _The
Treasure of Franchard_ is the simple tale of an eccentric philosopher,
his more stolid wife, and of a little boy whose wisdom leads him to
check, by means which are proved legitimate only by their adequacy, the
philosopher’s diversion from the path of happiness. The theft by the
waif of certain treasure which the philosopher has discovered, to the
risk of his immortal soul and the danger of his present happiness; and
the appropriate restoration of that treasure when it will be of vital
service--upon so slight an invention does the story progress.
The point to be observed in all these stories is that they possess
unquestionable unity. Only one of them, _The Beach of Falesá_, is
in any true sense a narrative. The others are examples of situation
imposed upon character. In each there is an absolute relation between
the conception or inspiration and Stevenson’s treatment. Each will
bear the pressure which may legitimately be exerted by the seeking
imagination. In _Providence and the Guitar_ alone is there the least
air of accident; and for this reason _Providence and the Guitar_, which
has this slight air of possible manipulation, is less good than the
others. _The Beach of Falesá_, although a narrative, and although its
perfection of form is thus affected (since, with our consciousness of
narrative, is interrupted the singleness of our æsthetic emotion) has
a strict consistency of action. Whether this consistency is native,
or whether it is aided by the imagined personality of the narrator,
which may thus impose an artificial unity upon the tale, I am unable
to determine. The other three stories, _The Bottle Imp_, _Thrawn
Janet_, and _The Treasure of Franchard_, granting to each story its own
convention, seem to me to be perfect examples of their craft.
VI
To have written three such stories would alone be a sufficient
performance to give Stevenson’s name continued life among our most
distinguished writers. That, in addition to these three stories, he
should have written two others of such considerable value as _The
Beach of Falesá_ and _Providence and the Guitar_, and so many more of
varying degrees of excellence, from _The Pavilion on the Links_ and
_The Suicide Club_ to _The Merry Men_ and _The Isle of Voices_, is,
I think, enough to warrant a very confident claim that Stevenson not
only was at his best in the short story, but that he was among the
best English writers of short stories. His particular aptitude in this
branch of his many-sided talent was due, as I have said, to the fact
that he was here able to see and to perform with a single effort which
did not unduly strain his physical endurance. Whereas, in continuous
effort, he lost the strength of his first impulse in the exhausting
labour which is involved in any lengthy exercise of the imagination, in
the short story he was able to give effect immediately to his impulse
to set out or to create complete his imagined or invented theme. What
fluctuation there is to be observed of talent or performance is due
entirely to the nature of his inspiration. If the idea came unsought,
if some clear and inevitable idea for a short story suggested itself to
him, the result, providing it was suited to his genius, and not merely
to his literary ability, was a short story of distinguished or even of
first-class quality. If, in the pursuance of his business as a literary
craftsman, he “hit-on” a practicable plan for a short story, the result
was almost certain to be distinguished in craftsmanship, acceptable
to the wide and diversified tastes of the educated public, and, in
fact, to be distinguishable from his genuine works of art only by the
application of some test which should call in question the nature of
his preliminary inspiration.
Stevenson was so distinguished a craftsman that he could often deceive
his critics, but for that deception I do not think he can be held
morally responsible. His other habit, of being able to deceive himself
about the nature of his inspiration--exemplified, I believe, in _The
Suicide Club_, for reasons which I have already given--is more serious.
It is a habit illustrated with more force in the longer romances, and
takes the form of beginning a story with a genuine romantic notion (or,
if the reader prefers, inspiration), of finding that inspiration fail,
and of proceeding nevertheless with the work so begun, relying upon
his talent, his invention, or his literary skill to carry through the
remaining performance at a level near enough to that established by his
first inspiration to convince (at its worst, to delude) the reader.
This habit, I am sure, was not indulged in bad faith; it was sometimes,
perhaps nearly always, unconscious, or only partly conscious. It very
likely is the habit of all modern writers whose work is regulated by
the laws of supply and demand. Equally, it was possibly the habit of
all past writers of fiction, because they too were affected in the same
way. But in Stevenson’s case the supply of a commodity took a peculiar
form of falseness which proved much to the taste of his readers. It
took the form of a sort of deliberate romanticism with which I have
dealt at length in the next chapter, and to which I have given the more
exactly descriptive term of picturesqueness. I believe this sort of
romanticism gave rise to such a story as _The Pavilion on the Links_;
and if I am right in regarding such picturesqueness as a bastard form
of art, as, in fact, a particularly cunning form of craft, then its
persistence in Stevenson makes all the more wonderful, and all the more
notable, his magnificent performance in the stories singled out for
praise in the present chapter. It also enforces the desirability of
some very close discrimination between the work of Stevenson which is
the genuine product of his indubitable genius and the work which was
produced by his talent, his invention, and his literary skill.
VIII
NOVELS AND ROMANCES
I
In beginning this chapter upon that section of Stevenson’s work which,
whatever may be one’s impression of its intrinsic merit, has at least
the importance of being the section most considerable in bulk, I should
like, as a matter of convenience, to define several terms in the sense
in which they will be used in the course of the chapter. It should be
clearly understood at the outset that the proposed definitions are to
be given, not with any claim for their ultimate value, but as a mere
precaution against misunderstanding. In each case the term is one which
often is very loosely used; and it seems the most honest thing, as
well perhaps as the most wary, to say very simply what one understands
by such and such words. Many writers who do not define terms have the
irritation of finding those terms counter-glossed by other critics
acting in all good faith, and the consequence is that they seem to be
made responsible for meanings divergent from those which they hold.
By the word “imagination,” then, I mean that power of sympathy which
enables a man to understand (i.e. to put himself in the place of) the
invented figure or scene which he is describing either in words or in
thought. I do not mean by the exercise of will, but by the spontaneous
outflowing of full or partial perception. By “imagination” I mean
nothing galvanic or actively creative; but an emotional translation,
as it were, of the creator’s spirit into the object created. Creation,
the act of bodying forth the imaginations in form either symbolic or
conventional, requires “invention.” “Invention,” whether of incident or
of character, is what is generally meant by writers who use the word
“imagination.” Writers often say that work is “imaginative” because it
has a sort of hectic improbability; but they mean that it exhibits a
riotous or even a logical inventiveness, not that it shows any genuine
power of imaginative sympathy. Invention, one may say, is essential to
a work of imagination: it is the fault of much modern novel-writing
that it is poor in invention, a fact which stultifies the writer’s
imagination and gives an unfortunate air of mediocrity to work which is
essentially imaginative. The creation of an atmosphere is founded upon
imagination; but in the absence of invention the modern imaginative
writer too frequently bathes in atmosphere to a point of tedium, and
then attempts to give vitality to his work by mere violence of incident
or of language. The word “imaginative” (defined by all persons so as
to include their own pet limitations) is often used by unimaginative
writers in descriptions of lonely children, a fact which has led those
who have been lonely in childhood to ascribe to themselves an attribute
so much admired; but Stevenson, I think, has a rather good comment
upon this sort of broody dullness when he describes “one October day
when the rusty leaves were falling and scuttling on the boulevard,
and the minds of impressionable men inclined in about an equal degree
towards sadness and conviviality.” That lowness of spirits which makes
a man respond to external influences is well known; but to describe
susceptibility or impressionability as imagination is misleading.
A cat is very impressionable; but a cat’s apparent intuitions in
the matter of food or even of goodwill are not understanding as the
term has been defined. Imagination, therefore, may be said to be
over-claimed, for the word is loosely used in most cases, even by
practised writers, where “invention” or “fancy” would more properly
fit. In particular it is the habit of all minor critics whatsoever
to use the word “imagination” when they ought rather to use the term
“poetic invention.” It is that confusion which renders valueless so
much criticism of modern fiction, in which the authors, being by
tradition under no compulsion to be poetical, are frequently condemned
as unimaginative because they follow the tradition of their craft.
A second distinction which it is desirable to make in view of what
follows is the one between Romance and Realism. The word “romance”
is used in a sort of ecstasy by too many conventional people; the
word “realism” is by such critics applied to one particular technical
method. It has seemed better for the immediate purpose to restrict the
word “romance” to a purely technical meaning, since Romance, to have
any value whatever, must form a part of our conception of reality. It
is the divorce of Romance from Reality which has led to its decay; it
is not that Romance has been cruelly done to death by Realism. Romance
since Stevenson has become sentimental and unbelievable. That is why
Romance has no friends, but only advocates. The word “romance,” then,
is in this chapter used to describe a fiction the chief interest in
which is supported by varied incidents of an uncommon or obsolete
nature. The word “novel” is applied to a fiction in which the chief
interest is less that of incident and more the interest awakened
by character and by a gradual relation of happenings probable in
themselves and growing naturally out of the interplay of character.
The word “realism” is used in relation to the critical interpretation
of actual things. It must not be regarded as describing here an
accumulation of detail or a preference for unpleasant subjects. For
that use of the word one may refer to our leading critical journals
_passim_. The accumulation of detail belongs to a technical method,
and should be treated on its merits as part of a technical method.
Realism, as the word is here used, is applied only to work in which the
author’s invention and imagination have been strictly disciplined by
experience and judgment, and in which his direct aim has been precision
rather than the attainment of broad effects. It is used consciously as
a word of neither praise nor blame; though it is possible that I may
exaggerate the merits of clear perception above some other qualities
which I appreciate less.
II
Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as
a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any
wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply
is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from _Treasure
Island_, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to _Weir of
Hermiston_, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the
age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power.
_Treasure Island_ is an excellent adventure-story; _Weir of Hermiston_
seemed to have the makings of a considerable novel, incomparably
superior to any other novel or romance ever written by Stevenson.
Between the two books lie a host of experiments, from _Prince Otto_
to the rather perfunctory _St. Ives_, through _Kidnapped_ and _The
Master of Ballantrae_, to _The Wrecker_, _Catriona_, and _The Ebb
Tide_. One finds in _The Master of Ballantrae_ the highest point of
the romantic novels, not because as a whole it is a great book, but
because it has very distinguished scenes; and thereafter follows a
perceptible decline in raciness. Stevenson still had the knack, and
could still make the supporters of his convention look as clumsy as
ghouls, but his zest was impaired. He did now with pains what before
had been the easiest part of his work. “Play in its wide sense, as
the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all
arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in
the end he wearies for realities,” said Stevenson in _The Day After
To-morrow_. From the inexperience of real life which in 1882 led him,
by means of a map and some literary inspirations, to make up a tale
such as he thought he would himself have liked as a boy, he turned in
later years to work more profound. His romance six years later than
_Treasure Island_ had, besides its adventures and its pawky narration,
a moral theme; ten years later it had no theme at all, but a faint
dragging sweetness due to the reintroduction of two old friends and
the picture of a conventional heroine; at the end of his life he began
three historical romances, none of which was ever finished, and only
one of which ever proceeded beyond its first chapters. It is true that
the pretty, heavily figured style was still at command; there was no
cessation of skill. There never was any cessation of skill. If skill
were needed Stevenson had it ever ready. “I have been found short of
bread, gold or grace,” says St. Ives; “I was never yet found wanting
an answer.” That is a point to note in Stevenson’s equipment, that he
was always very apt with the pen. Having turned writer in his youth,
he remained a writer to the end. He could not dictate a letter but
what the phrases ran in accustomed grooves, half-way to the tropes
of his Covenanting manner. So it was that themes too slight, as in
_Prince Otto_, and themes very complicated (as in _The Wrecker_), came
readily to be embarked upon. He was not sufficiently critical of a
theme, so long as it seemed superficially to offer some scope for his
skill; which accounts for his abandoned fragments--e.g. _Heathercat_,
_The Great North Road_, _Sophia Scarlet_, _The Young Chevalier_--and
for the inequalities in even his best romances. Whatever theme he
chose he could write upon it with such damnable skill that nothing
truly came amiss or really stretched to the full his genuine talent.
The theme, such as it was, lay to hand; there wanted nothing but his
skill and the labour of composition. That, curiously enough, shadows
out the occupation of the literary hack (a sad person who writes
for money and only more money, and whose days are circumscribed by
the need for continuous work in the field of romance); but although
Stevenson claimed to write for money, “a noble deity” (see a humorous
but truthful passage in the letter of January, 1886, to Mr. Gosse),
he claimed also to write for himself, and in this sense he was, to our
relief, and in spite of any misdirected labours, an artist. There is,
of course, much cant written and spoken about writing for money, both
for and against; but the man who has no preference between the themes
upon which he will write for money must be a very professional writer,
and the hack is only a base virtuoso. That is why it is worth putting
upon record that Stevenson, after saying he wrote, not for the public,
but for money, added: “and most of all for myself, not perhaps any
more noble (i.e. than money), but more intelligent and nearer home.”
He wrote variously from diversity of taste: a more interesting and
tantalising question is that of his object.
III
Mr. Henry James, in criticising a selection of our modern novelists,
describes himself as reading their work with, one imagines, continuous
interest, and then, in face of all the phenomena which have
industriously been gathered for his inspection, asking for something
further. Mr. Henry James, apparently, wants to know “why they do it.”
It would not be in place here to say that the modern novelists are
all to some extent followers of Mr. James; but it is very interesting
to put that same question (amounting to a sort of _cui bono?_) to the
romantic novelists. One would like to know what Stevenson aimed at in
his romances. One does not receive from any one of the romances the
thrill given by a perfect work of art. Their interest is broken and
episodic; they fall apart in strange places, and show gaps, and (as in
the case of works by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Conrad) one or two of them,
including _The Master of Ballantrae_, are patched together by means of
contributory “narratives” and “stories” which can never, whatever the
skill of their interposition, preserve any appearance of vital form,
and which, at the best, can be no more than exhibitions of virtuosity.
They retain their continuity of interest only by means of the
narrator’s continuance; and the use of “narrations” itself is a device
throwing into strong relief the incongruities of the tale and its
invented scribe. They offend our sense of form by all sorts of changes
of scene, lapses of time, discursiveness, and those other faults which
are nowadays so much remarked. And, above all, once the last page is
turned, we remember one or two characters and one or two incidents,
and we wonder about the corollary, or whatever it is that Mr. James
wonders about. We have been entertained, excited, amused, sometimes
enthralled. In reading the books again, as we are soon, because of our
forgetfulness, able to do, we recover something of the first pleasure.
But of Stevenson’s aim we can discover no more than we can discover of
the aim of the hack-writer. We feel that his work is better, that it
has greater skill, that it is graceful, apt, distinguished even. We
feel that, of its kind, it is far superior to anything since written.
Was there any aim beyond that of giving pleasure? Need we look for
another? It is true that the problem-novel is discredited, and it is
true that our most commercially successful novelists are those who can
“tell a story.” It is also true that our so-called artistic stories
are like the needy knife-grinder. I propose to return later to this
point, so we will take another one first. “Vital,” says Stevenson,
“vital--that’s what I am, at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of
life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic
value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind’s eye for ever.”
We may well grant the picturesqueness; and we may grant a nervous
buoyancy of fluctuating high spirits. Through all the novels there
are passages of extreme beauty, to which we may grant the description
“lyrical”; and many of the famous scenes have value which it is open to
anybody to call epical if they wish to do so. It is the word “vital”
that we find difficult to accept, and the “buoyancy of life.” For
if there is one thing to be inferred from the contrivances and the
slacknesses and the other shortcomings of Stevenson’s romances to
which we shall gradually be able to make reference, it is that they
lack vitality. They have a fine brag of words, and they have fine
scenes and incidents; but where is there any one of them in which the
author can sustain the pitch of imagining that will carry us on the
wings of a vital romance? I am referring at this moment to this one
point only. I am saying nothing about the books as pieces of literary
artifice. There is not one of Stevenson’s own original romances that
is not made in two or three or even a hundred flights. There is not
one that is not pieced together by innumerable inventions, so that
it is a sort of patchwork. That is a persistent defect. It is in
_Treasure Island_, it is in _The Master_, it is in _The Wrecker_ and
it is in _Weir_, patent to the most casual glance. And the cause of
that is low vitality--his own and the book’s. Not one of them, not
even _Treasure Island_, not even _The Master of Ballantrae_, which
falls in two, has any powerful inevitability. These romances are, in
fact, the romances of a sick man of tremendous nervous force, but of
neither physical nor intellectual nor even imaginative energy. One may
see it in the flickering of Alan Breck. Alan Breck is the most famous
of all Stevenson’s characters, with the possible exception of Silver:
does he remain vivid all the time? He does not. He loses vitality
several times in the course of _Kidnapped_; he hardly attains it in
_Catriona_. There is no fault there; there is a weakness. Stevenson’s
romances were based upon a survival of boyish interests; they are full
of fantastic whips and those clever manipulations with which writers
sometimes conceal weaknesses; they have a tremendous vain Scots savour
of language and retort; they have exciting, impressive, and splendidly
vivid scenes. But the quality they have not is the fine careless rich
quality of being vital. If we think, in reading them, that they are
vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms
us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as
helpless as boys reading _Treasure Island_. But Stevenson is always
telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but
a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. There are
ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his
old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to
his death up the dreadful stair; and there is the kidnapping of David,
and then the arrival on board of the survivor from a run-down boat,
who proves to be Alan; the fight; and the march after Alan; the Appin
murder; and the flight of David and Alan--all magnificently described,
well invented, well imagined, but all as episodes or incidents, not as
a story. Something else, some other things, all sorts of other things,
might just as well have happened as those things which make the story
as we know it. There is no continuous vitality even in _Kidnapped_; and
yet, on that score, it is the best of the romances. It has a greater
“buoyancy” (though not precisely, perhaps, the “buoyancy of life”)
than any of the other historical romances. It does not compare with
_The Master of Ballantrae_ for dignity or even for the distinction of
isolated scenes; but for vitality it is superior.
IV
Why Stevenson should have adopted in so many instances the curious
and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first
person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator could
never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives, it is
hard to understand. Defoe’s method was simple and laborious; but it
was pure narrative, and as far as one recollects, there was none of
this making up by interpolated passages. The person of the narrator
was maintained all the time. So with the picaresque romances. The
narrative, used by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, does indeed offer some
analogy; but never a very happy example of what is at best a broken and
unbelievable stratagem. Stevenson, of course, used it in a marked way
in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_; and in _Treasure Island_ one cheerfully
accepts the convention (only protesting that the Doctor’s interference
causes a break both irritating and, technically, unscrupulous). With
the exception that the Doctor’s portion is somehow brought in about
the middle of the book, the way the story came to be written is not
allowed to worry us after the first sentence. _Treasure Island_ is
not, therefore, a great offender. _Kidnapped_ starts in a similarly
abrupt way, and this book and _Catriona_ are kept fairly closely to
the convention. But in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and in _The Wrecker_
there are several inter-narratives which, even if in the earlier book
they provide certain keys, do seriously affect the form of the story.
The disadvantage of the narrator is manifest enough. Every step
outside his probable knowledge must be elaborately explained, or he
will become uncomfortably superhuman; he can never be in danger which
deprives him of speech or the power to write, but has often lived to
a green and unromantic old age by the time his marvellous faculty for
remembering things leads him to “take up the pen.” (“They might easily
take it in their heads to give us chase,” says the Chevalier de Burke,
“and had we been overtaken, _I had never written these memoirs_.”) If
he is the hero he risks being a prig or a braggart (in _St. Ives_ he
is, somehow, for all his gentility, not a gentleman); and he often
succeeds in being rather a ninny, albeit a courageous ninny. It is this
fact, possibly, that accounts for Mr. Stanley Weyman’s “gentlemen of
France” and the deplorable “heroes” of many another costume romance
inspired by Stevenson’s examples. If he is the good old retainer,--as
is Mackellar in _The Master_--he must overcome one’s distrust of his
sleek literary craft. These are side issues of the main one--which is
that such narratives are improbable. Their apparent virtue, which in
itself is a snare, lies in the fact that they keep the reader’s eye
focussed upon the narrator, and seem thus to give homogeneity to a
book. They enable the author to refuse detachment and to mingle with
his characters, tapping them upon the arm so that the reader receives
their full glance, or bidding them give some little personal exhibition
for the naturalness of the book. Stevenson saw, perhaps, that such a
method solved some of his difficulties. He loved ease of demeanour. He
could use his Covenanting style at will, with the quaint, shrewd twists
of language which do not fail to strike us impressively as we read; and
he could throw off the task of creating a hero whom we should recognise
as such in spite of all things, as we recognise Don Quixote or Cousin
Pons or Prince Myshkin. Also, the use of the “I” probably made the
tale better fun for himself. It was perhaps part of the make-belief.
It avoided formality; it brought him nearer his canvas; it saved him
the need of focussing the whole picture. That, constructively, was,
as I have suggested earlier in another way, his prime weakness as a
novelist. He could not see a book steadily and see it whole. Partly it
may have been that by putting himself in the frame he made the picture
a panorama--“the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to
sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama” is Stevenson’s
own admission in the case of _The Wrecker_--but most influentially,
I think, it was that he had really not the physical strength and the
physical energy to grasp a book entire, or to keep his invention and
imagination at any extreme heat for any length of time. Whatever may
be the case of this, however, it seems clear that the first person
singular is a difficult and a tricky method to employ, abounding in
risk of accident, and much inclined to make for improbability, unless
the writer is content absolutely to limit the narrator’s knowledge
to things experienced, with details only filled out from hearsay,
and unless he has superhuman powers of detachment. One is inclined
to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the
objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto,
where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly
amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales
are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is
a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of
detachment powerfully appear.
V
Prince Otto, of course, is only one out of the many self-portraits.
He is, as it were, Stevenson’s Hamlet, which is not quite as good as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is nearer to Stevenson than David Balfour,
because David Balfour is an ideal, while Prince Otto is an apology.
All Stevenson’s heroes, in fact, are tinged with the faint complacent
self-depreciation which is capable of being made truly heroic, or
merely weak, or, possessed of that “something that was scarcely pride
or strength, that was perhaps only refinement,” very human. But not
one of these heroes is complete. All, as it were, are misty about the
edges. The vigorous David Balfour falls into the self-distrust, not
of a young man of strength, but of a self-engrossed student; weakness
is paramount in the main character in _The Ebb Tide_; the dandiacal
St. Ives is at the mercy of circumstance, waiting upon the next thing,
reliant only upon Stevenson’s goodwill, horribly unmasculine in his
plans to please. Mackellar is a puritanical coward, but magnificently
suggested; Loudon Dodd, and even young Archie Weir, being both very
moral and, one imagines, very inexperienced in the ways of life,
combine courage with weakness most pitiable. They are all feminine,
brave in desperation, weak in thought. They are all related to Jack
Matcham in _The Black Arrow_. Stevenson admired courage, and he
possessed courage, as women admire and possess courage. He loved a
brave man, and a tale of adventure, as women love these things. He did
not take them for granted, but must hint and nibble at them all the
time, thinking, perhaps, that he was making a portrait, but instead of
that making what represents for us a tortured ideal. “I should have
been a man child,” says Catriona. “In my own thoughts it is so I am
always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall
and that. Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over
me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give
one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that
the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like
you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches
all through, like Mr. David Balfour.” That is why _Prince Otto_, long
the test of the true Stevensonian, seems to us now, increasingly,
a lackadaisical gimcrack, as bloodless as a conceit, losing by its
spinning as a tale all the fantastic effect it might have enjoyed as
one of the _New Arabian Nights_. It has a great deal of beauty, and
a good deal of perception both of character and of situation; but the
beauty droops and sickens among the meshes of delicate writing, and the
perception is all upon the surface of life, and, even so, abstract and
without the impulse of human things.
It is the faint humour of Stevenson that makes the book seem sickly. It
is that faint humour which brings so much of his heroic work sliding
sand-like to our feet. For it must be realised that if one is going
to be romantical one must have either no humour at all (which perhaps
is an ideal state) or a strong, transfiguring humour which is capable
of exuberance and monstrosity as well as of satiric depreciation.
Stevenson’s humour was of that almost imperceptible kind which grows in
Scotland, and which has given rise to the legend that Scotsmen “joke
wi’ deeficulty.” It was dry, it was nonsensical, it was satiric; it was
the humour that depends upon tone, a delicacy of emphasis or pause.
It was the humour of a sick man who had high spirits and very little
morbidity. Now in _Prince Otto_ there is morbidity; it is not a healthy
book. It could not have been written by an active and vigorous man; and
I do not think Stevenson could have written it after he went to Samoa.
Its literary forbear, “Harry Richmond,” although a very cumbrous and
mannered work, has a trenchant vigour which keeps alive our admiration
after our interest has dropped. It is elaborate and pompous; but it
has power. _Prince Otto_ owes its best moments to a purely literary
skit on the English traveller among foreign courts: that skit, it is
true, is priceless. Apart from Sir John Crabtree, however, the book
depends entirely for its charm upon its faint, almost swooning, beauty
of style; and it is indeed surprising that the book should have enjoyed
among Stevenson’s male worshippers so much handsome appreciation. It is
so quizzical, where it is not sentimental or “conventional,” that it
is half the time engaged in self-consumption, which is as though one
should say that it is eaten up with vanity.
VI
By Stevenson’s own account, the first fifteen chapters of _Treasure
Island_ were written in as many days. He explains that he consciously
and intentionally adopted an “easy” style. “I liked the tale myself,”
he says; “it was my kind of picturesque.” Well, it was the simplest
kind of picturesque, a sort of real enjoyment of the thing for its
own sake; and our own enjoyment of it is of the same kind. It is
extraordinarily superior to the imitations which have followed it,
for this reason if for no other, that it was the product of an
enjoying imagination. It is possible to read _Treasure Island_ over
and over again, because it is good fun. There is a constant flow of
checkered incident, there is enough simple character to stand the
treasure-seekers on their legs, and the book is a book in its own
right. It does not need defence or analysis; it sustains its own note,
and it is as natural and jolly an adventure-story as one could wish.
Moreover, the observation throughout is exceedingly good, as well as
unaffected. It is interesting to notice how vividly one catches a
picture from such a brief passage as this (in Chap. XXVII): “As the
water settled I could see him lying huddled together on the clean,
bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides. A fish or two whipped
past his body.” Or again, on the following page, when Jim Hawkins has
thrown overboard another of the mutineers: “He went in with a sounding
plunge; the red cap came off, and remained floating on the surface;
and as soon as the splash subsided I could see him and Israel lying
side by side, both wavering with the tremulous movement of the water.”
Such slight passages really indicate an unusual quality in the book.
They convey a distinct impression of the scene which one may feel
trembling within one’s own vision and hearing. The fact that _Treasure
Island_ has so clear a manner, unaffectedly setting out in simple terms
incidents which have the bare convincingness of real romance, gives
that book a singular position among the romances of Stevenson. The
further fact that the incidents have some more coherence in themselves
than incidents have in some of our author’s romances serves to add
to the book’s effect. Something of this coherence (I except from the
range of this term the doctor’s sudden irruption into authorship,
and the picturesque but arbitrary introduction of the castaway) may
have resulted from the quickness with which the tale was written. For
details of the composition of _Treasure Island_, the reader may see the
essay _My First Book_ in _Essays on the Art of Writing_.
_The Black Arrow_, written later, is a tale of the Wars of the Roses,
and is a much more commonplace piece of work. It is also a less
original kind of story; for serials of a similar character have always
been a feature of boys’ papers, as long as boys’ papers have been
published. There is, indeed, a constant ebb and flow of incident, but
the writing is hardly recognisable as Stevenson’s, and the _dramatis
personæ_ are without character. It might almost, apart from the fact
that the hero and heroine arrange to marry, have been written by the
late G. A. Henty, who perhaps, even if he had made John Matcham really
John Matcham, would have substituted for violent episodes some more
continuous fable.
Next to _Treasure Island_ among the historical romances comes
_Kidnapped_, with its brilliant pictures and its clear, confident
invention. Regarded simply as a tale of adventure, it is exciting,
picturesque, vivid; it has qualities of intensity (that is to say, of
imagination) which make it without question distinguished work. There
are pictures of the country in Chapter XVII which are full of grace and
tenderness; it has a stronger, clearer humour than we find in any of
the novels until we come to those in which Mr. Osbourne collaborated;
the incidents are immediate in their effect. To say so much is to say
little enough; it is to say what must have been said in 1886, at the
time the book was published. The story, however, is incomplete without
_Catriona_, and _Catriona_ in particular has given rise to such a
very bad novel-writing convention that it is difficult to see _The
Adventures of David Balfour_ (which, combined, the two stories relate)
as anything but a malign influence upon the English romantic novel, an
influence which has brought it to a pitch of sterility hard to forgive.
It must be said at once, however, that Stevenson was always better
than his imitators, and so these stories will be found superior to
their imitations. _Catriona_ is manifestly uninspired work, artificial
through and through, a sad sentimental anecdote bringing to chagrin
the reader’s admiration for _Kidnapped_. It is not that _Catriona_ is
unreadable; it is very readable indeed. In fact that is the trouble
about the book, that it has every sort of meretricious attraction, with
so little in it that will honestly bear examination. It is palpable
fake; an obvious attempt to recapture the first fine carelessness of
_Kidnapped_. For _Kidnapped_ is a good book. It has vitality in it, and
it has Alan Breck, who, for all that his vanity has been flattered by
so many adorers, remains on the whole a fine picture of a vain, brave
Scot. Also good is the picture of David’s uncle, which is very dryly
humorous, very shrewd, and exceptionally horrible. These two pieces of
characterisation, as well as some minor ones, are enough to give bones
to a book that is both readable and estimable. It would be enough, I
think, to justify the suggestion that _Kidnapped_ is the best Scottish
historical romance since Scott, and indeed one of the best modern
historical romances written in what we may for the moment call the
English language.
_St. Ives_ belongs to the same order as _Catriona_. It is accomplished
and bad; a fact of which a recently published letter of Stevenson’s
shows that he was fully and contritely aware. Skill marks it; the fable
is poor and irregular; and the narrator is exceedingly unpleasant. It
is worthy of remark that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who completed the
book, is responsible for its most impressive and thrilling moments.
Otherwise it shows the passive acceptance by Stevenson of his own
bad convention, and it is fit only to be popular at the circulating
libraries. It is even tedious, which is a sure passport to the
suffrages of those who benefit by the circulating libraries.
_The Master of Ballantrae_, however, is a different affair. Here we
have a story which, though it is broken and incomplete, has elements
of noble beauty. It loses hold upon the reader in the middle, where
there is a lapse of something like seven years; and the introduction
of Secundra Dass is the ruin of the book as a work of art, although
no doubt, as it supplies a new interest, it may have proved welcome
to those reading for distraction. There are some few pieces of sheer
greatness in the book, drawn with an economy and simplicity which
separates them from the inferior portions as clearly as oil and water
are separated. An instance may be found in the scene where Mr. Henry
strikes the Master. It would be impossible to carry over in a quotation
any hint of the effect which the next sentence, in its due context, has
upon the reader:
“The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I had never
seen the man so beautiful. ‘A blow!’ he cried. ‘I would not take a
blow from God Almighty!’”
In the book that moment seems in some extraordinary way to bring
the scene leaping to the eye. The whole scene of the duel, and
especially of its sequel, is fine. There are other scenes equally
magnificent: even the climax, which is a collapse, does not blind
us to the fact that we had been led, by the remarkable tension of
the preceding narrative, to expect a poignantly tragical, and not
merely a conventionally romantic, conclusion. But the climax throws
up the weakness of the book, its rambling course, its wilful attempts
to follow the wanderings of a central figure so fascinating to Mr.
Mackellar (and to ourselves) as the Master, its lack of framework and
true body of character. The Master is clear; Mr. Mackellar is nicely
touched; the Chevalier de Burke is pleasantly farcical. In one scene,
after the duel, Lord Durrisdeer and Mr. Henry’s wife seem to catch the
infection of life into which the heat of excitement has thrown the
whole book; but they are truly no more than puppets, and relapse before
ever they have stood upright. Even the Master sometimes is no more than
a collection of traits; and if the book were not so finely dressed it
would assuredly cut a poorer figure. Its magnificent passages it is
impossible to forget; its defects are so numerous, and so obvious to
be seized upon, that it seems hard to insist that they are present.
Nevertheless, they are the defects inherent in Stevenson’s romances.
VII
In three novels Stevenson collaborated with his stepson, Mr. Lloyd
Osbourne. The first book, _The Wrong Box_, of which Mr. Osbourne
claims to have written almost the whole, need not long detain us. Its
amusingness is due to repetitions of phrase (e.g. “venal doctor,”
which is the best of them), farcicality of scene, and easy variety of
complication; but it does not succeed in being particularly amusing,
after all, so that we may leave it safely among the novels enjoyably
to be read in railway trains. The other two books, _The Wrecker_ and
_The Ebb Tide_, show much more clearly Stevenson’s hand. The former
touches every now and then a number of his early experiences in France;
and the manipulation is elaborate, wasteful, and ill-considered. But
the book is engrossing. _The Ebb Tide_ is to all seeming a short
story, or rather, two related short stories, since it is under sixty
thousand words in length, and is simplified down to certain swiftly
successive incidents in the lives of four men. Both books are the
result of experience in the South Seas; both seem to show, as far as it
is possible for me to judge, a closer and truer (though a less heroic)
understanding of men than heretofore. In another way, it may be said
that we have been shown previously romantic figures, invented upon
a quite well-recognised and comprehended basis of convention, doing
certain things which were all in the game. Those who prefer this type
of character will possibly say that the Master and Otto and Alan Breck
belong to the grand style in literature, that style which gave us Medea
and Prometheus and Lear. That may be so. It may be that in those novels
which we have yet to consider Stevenson threw aside the grand style,
which, as far as he was concerned, was the style of make-belief, the
style of figure, trope, costume, and the picturesque. But, to me,
Stevenson, in putting aside this grand style, which is an artificial
style if it spring not from the very heart of the writer, came at
last into the field of his experience and tried to show something of
the world he had actually seen. That is why, to me, these last three
novels of his are intrinsically the most interesting, because they
were the most truly personal and original, of all that he wrote. They
are faulty, and they show still at times the glister of picturesque
romance; but _Weir of Hermiston_ is widely recognised as Stevenson’s
finest work, and the other two books have certain substantial merits
which may well be dwelt upon here before we arrive at the general
conclusions of this chapter.
_The Wrecker_, then, after a curious induction, begins with the
education and the artistic career of Loudon Dodd, told with an amiable
spirit, and convincing us by its sketches of various kinds of life.
It then proceeds to San Francisco, where Dodd joins the famous Jim
Pinkerton in wild-cat schemes. At last the story proper, or, if we
may otherwise express it, the story exciting, begins with the sale of
a wrecked ship “The Flying Scud.” Pinkerton and his ally, drawn into
excessive bidding by the thought that only hidden opium can account
for their opponent’s pertinacity, run the price up to fifty thousand
dollars, the raising of which gravely endangers their credit in San
Francisco, and at that price buy “The Flying Scud.” Dodd proceeds to
the wreck. Meanwhile, Pinkerton becomes bankrupt; but Dodd inherits a
small fortune. The “Flying Scud” is a frost. Dodd now plays detective
upon the man who has tried to buy the “Flying Scud,” finds him and
learns the history of the boat in its details. It has been said already
(by Stevenson) that _The Wrecker_ is more of a panorama than a romance,
and “panorama” seems a very good description for the book. This kind of
romance within other romances is written with greater purpose by Mr.
Conrad, who, for all his arbitrary technical clumsinesses, convinces
us more of the integrity of his narrative than Stevenson is able to do
for _The Wrecker_ in his elaborate explanatory epilogue. It reads as
though it had been written with gusto, but with licence, as though the
collaborators had not scrupled to give the tale its head. Its value
to us now, however, is that it gives a good, clear, realistic picture
of the life it describes. The Parisian portion is unexaggerated; the
San Francisco chapters are vivid; the character of Pinkerton, broad
though it is, has organic life; and the voyage in the “Norah Creina,”
if it has not the poignant reality of Mr. Conrad’s descriptions of
the sea, and, if it hardly bears comparison with them, has yet a
bright excitement and rapid motion of great value.[1] Another point
is, that the story was written, as _Treasure Island_ was written, with
simplicity and for the authors’ own delight. Our delight in it partly
reflects their delight. Only partly, however, for our appreciation is
due also to the ease with which experience--of San Francisco and of the
South Seas--is here translated before our eyes into a romance that is
as engrossing as its predecessors, and that retains its hold upon us
without elaboration of pretence.
_The Ebb Tide_, although much slighter, is more firmly handled. It
is in essence an anecdote; but it is closely and penetratingly seen;
its power to transport us (as it were by Herrick’s imagined carpet)
to the South Seas, and above all its quick unobtrusive rendering of a
different moral atmosphere, combine to make it excellent work. If it
is not moving (and very little of Stevenson’s work is moving) it is at
least exciting and convincing within its natural limitations.
It is with _Weir of Hermiston_, however, that Stevenson reached the
height of his powers as a realistic novelist. Excepting in the handling
of Frank Innes, who might almost have been hired out among our dead
writers of fiction as a professional seducer, the precision of _Weir of
Hermiston_, the bite of Stevenson’s continuously vigorous imagination,
is extraordinary. Continuity of narrative there is not: one must not
demand it. But unfailing precision of imagination, a thing of great
rarity, marks almost the whole of that portion of the book which we
have; and is matched by the similar precision of the character drawing.
Kirstie Elliott and the elder Weir are alike in the respect that they
are together, even in the small compass of this fragment, the surest
pieces of character created by Stevenson. The subsequent course of
the fable of _Weir of Hermiston_, as described by Sir Sidney Colvin
in his admirable note to the book, is terrifying to those who admire
the fragment for its intrinsic qualities; but we will not seek too
curiously into plans which might well have been severely modified in
the writing. Certainly the first nine chapters show very few signs
of romantic falsification; and if it were not for Frank Innes, the
novelists’ hireling, we should be disposed to fear nothing for the
future.
VIII
Earlier in this chapter the question was raised of Stevenson’s object
in writing his romances. If we read his _Note on Realism_ we shall
find that he talks of “poignancy of main design,” “the beauty and
significance of the whole,” “the moral or the philosophical design,”
as though that other note to Sir Sidney Colvin was but a partial
exposition of his aim. The one, possibly, was a personal claim; the
essay a public profession; and public confession, we are aware, is apt
to cling to the more desirable aspects of the truth. But the essay has
a relevant value, because it speaks of the author’s rapture at being
able to muster “a dozen or a score” of those essential “facts” of which
“it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven
exclusively.” Thereafter he admits, as most writers would admit, that
any work of art loses its original force as that force is spent in
execution and diverted into channels unforeseen.
Without “facts” the novel cannot be written. Obviously the good novel
is the one that contains significant and primary facts (not to be
perceived by all, but eventually to be acknowledged by all); while
the bad novel is one that contains insignificant and secondary facts
(easily recognisable by all and acceptable to none). It is very easy
indeed to say that. It is more difficult to apply the test; or at
least, if one reads the newspaper criticism of modern novels, one
finds that there seems to exist a difficulty in application. So
it is that what one writer regards as significant, another writer
considers contemptible; and it is very likely that we should get little
satisfaction from an elaborate analysis of Stevenson’s chosen “facts.”
Some of these facts are of the greatest importance; some of them are
useless. What we must rather urge is that Stevenson, for all his talk
of design and the beauty of the whole, had never the physical energy
to carry his conception through on a single plane (or, of course, upon
that inequality of planes which may be dictated by the character of
a book). That is why none of his novels (he said, in speaking of the
difficulty of writing novels, “it is the length that kills”) is on
an ascending plane of interest or on a level plane of performance.
He simply had not the bodily strength to support the continuous
imaginative strain.
Further, it is the mark of the romantic and picturesque novelist that
he is dependent upon that particular form of incident which provides
a prop for his narrative. In a very crude way the writer of serial
stories, who ends an instalment with some ghastly suggestion of coming
crime, is a type of the picturesque novelist in this connection.
Stevenson, in his historical romances, was a picturesque rather than a
romantic novelist; he had an eye, an ear, a nose for an effect; effects
he must have, or his book would stop, since it has rarely a sufficient
impetus to cover the lapse in inventive skill. It was because they
offered no effects that _The Great North Road_, and _Heathercat_, and
_The Young Chevalier_ dried suddenly upon his pen, dead before ever
they were begun. One can see in these fragments the sign of Stevenson’s
weakness. He was “game” enough; but he could not make romance out of
chopped hay, such as _The Young Chevalier_, with its bald, hopeless
attempt to galvanise the Master into life again. It was, again, the
title of _The Great North Road_, the title of _Sophia Scarlet_ that ran
in Stevenson’s head. Titles for stories! Stories to fit such titles!
Is that really the way an artist works? Perhaps it is; perhaps if they
had been written, and had been good stories, we should have found
them appropriate to a degree. But they were never written, save as
fragments; because they never had any life. They never had any _idea_.
And it is in virtue of its unifying idea and its ultimate form, not
its contributive incidents or its more lively occasional properties,
that a novel, as such, is a good novel.
Now the one book of Stevenson’s which has an idea is the one which
may be mistaken for either a tract or a shilling shocker. It is _Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. The other books have ideas, or notions, but
they have behind them no unifying idea. That is why one forgets what
they are about. The idea of _Treasure Island_ is “boy goes on hunt
for pirate’s treasure ... doctor ... wooden-legged boatswain,” and so
on. The idea for _Kidnapped_ may have been “boy kidnapped ... meets
emissary of proscribed Scots ... hides ... Appin murder ... flight
... recovers property.” The genesis of _The Master of Ballantrae_ is
given in a short paper, with those words for title, which is included
in _The Art of Writing_. From this very frank account, we may see
that the book began in a flush of enthusiasm for “The Phantom Ship,”
proceeded to an aged anecdote of resuscitation, and so, piecemeal, and
by the joining together of all sorts of notions old and new, reached
a conception of the Chevalier de Burke. Now this sort of invention,
although it delights us by its resourcefulness and ingenuity, has no
relation to the romance of life as it is lived or as it has ever been
lived. It is picturesque invention pure and simple (the sort of thing
that makes French fairy tales such pretty reading, and that makes
them in the end so empty and so much inferior to the fairy tales of
other nations); and except that men love a lie for its own sake it
can have no importance. Until the lies (or facts) are co-ordinated
and organised to make a whole, to support each other by the new value
gained by their disciplined association, they are nothing but isolated
lies or facts. It is the author’s brooding imagination, which is in
direct relation to, and under the influence of, his own æsthetic and
emotional experience, that supplies that fusion and transfusion which
makes a work of art. Perfect fusion makes a great work of art, such as
we may see in the best of Turgeniev’s work; imperfect fusion makes an
inferior work of art. But there can be no fusion without a basic idea,
a unifying idea. And that unifying idea, without which the invention
and imagination of scenes remains hopelessly episodic, does not arise
in Stevenson’s romances. It shows faintly in _The Ebb Tide_ and _The
Master of Ballantrae_, where both books are tinged with suggestions
of a moral idea; it shows Stevenson struggling in the grip of Jekyll
and Hyde in the book which bears the name of those forces in him. The
one (shall we say Mr. Hyde?) is the tendency to moralise, to preach,
which was inherited from countless Scottish ancestors; the other is
the impulse to invent (an impulse which is too generally lauded by the
great name of imagination). _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, dreamed as a
shocker, and successful as a shocker, became in revision a parable,
a morality. The natural Stevenson dreamed a shocker; and the scribe
said, “Let us be moral!” And that is _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ as we
have it in its bald police-court narratives and letters. Nearer than
a moral idea, Stevenson never approached our philosophical basis.
Adventure blurred his sight; picturesqueness lured him. His object in
writing was not the utterance of piercing thoughts or poignant emotion:
he wrote because of his long Scots tongue, which turned and savoured
all the lively incidents which his brain conjured. Excepting in _The
Master of Ballantrae_, where our hearts are made to leap, and in _Weir
of Hermiston_, which stands alone among all his books, are we ever
moved by Stevenson’s romances? We are stirred by the sense of an open
road, and the inviting hills, and furze and whin that is good cover
for men crawling upon their bellies. We have the sense that a sentry
is round the curve of the hill; but _never that he will discover us
and strike_. There is never any real danger in Stevenson’s books; never
a real broken heart or a real heaven-high splendour of joy. There is
the lure of the road and the heather; but we will be back again in the
bright warm house, by the light of the red fire, with our cigar and
whisky-and-soda (for it seems that is inevitable) before nightfall.
It is true that we shall hear the sea, and the coach’s winding horn,
and some faint combing of the bagpipes; and perhaps we shall see the
lamplighter, and have had scones for tea, and shall read Blackstone
or some old Scots history before we go to bed. But we have not really
been far away; we have been excited and pleased and happily warmed by
the day’s doings in the open air, but we have never seen the naked
soul of man, or heard the haunting music of the syrens, or looked upon
the open face of God. Nor have we truly exercised our energy in some
less conventional rapture of the world’s wonder. The reason may be
traced back to our author: it is not a part of our own shortcomings.
Stevenson, in his romances, played with his inventions; and he played
sometimes splendidly. But he had not the vital assurance, the fierce
trenchant fathoming of adventure that a vigorous man enjoys. “A
certain warmth (tepid enough),” he says, “and a certain dash of the
picturesque are my poor essential qualities.” Well, that is a modest
under-statement; but, as far as the historical romances go, the verdict
is not wholly astray. It is in the latest novels, the realistic novels,
that Stevenson rose to a fuller stature; that was because in the last
years of life he truly for the first time was able to taste the actual
air of physical danger. He had been in genuine physical danger: it
electrified him. It gave him, perhaps, a philosophy that was not made
up of figured casuistries. It enabled him to begin _Weir of Hermiston_
with something of the cold freshness of running water.
IX
CONCLUSION
I
If, in writing such a book as this, one could truly succeed in grasping
the significance of a man’s work, or in appreciating the bent of his
mind; and then, having grasped or appreciated, if one could convey the
results with any precision, the book would have a significance beyond
that of literary criticism. Having “drawed a man,” as Stevenson once
did, one might indeed go on to “draw his soul,” as Stevenson only
offered to do. And the consequence might be that one would throw some
light upon that difficult problem--the psychology of genius. For we
may seek deliberately now, or, if deliberateness seem too dryasdust,
we may seek intuitively, to understand the way in which such a man
as Stevenson grew up to be a successful writer, and the aspects in
which the art of writing appeared to at least one of its exponents. I
have tried here and there in this book to indicate something of the
spirit in which Stevenson approached his art, and I have tried also to
suggest what I regard as the particular strengths and shortcomings of
Stevenson’s talent. But however one may interpret the work of a writer
there must always be the danger that in pursuing an examination such
as this one may be missing the very significance of which one is in
search. At best, one can offer only tentatively the conclusions to be
drawn from the results of such an examination.
Much has been written of Stevenson’s indebtedness in early days to
other writers. He has committed himself to the suggestion that he
coveted the power of writing before he was aware of anything that he
particularly wished to write. For the purpose of learning to write,
he claims to have imitated a dozen different authors, assiduously
practising until he had obtained a mastery over words. My own
impression, which I have given earlier, is that Stevenson’s _sense_ of
style was developed by the histrionic gifts of his nurse. That seems at
least probable. I think that with a sense of style, a habit of spinning
tales (which it appears that he possessed, in common with many people
with no pretensions to literary skill), and a desire to write that was
keen enough to be a hunger, Stevenson is a credible figure of youth.
There must be many youths who get so far and go no further. The point
about Stevenson is that he went on. But he went on as he began--as
a writer, one who was determined to utilise words. Wherever he went
he took the little notebook of which he has given an account; and he
made the attempt to put everything he saw into words which expressed
it exactly. The reader will find in early essays many curiously apt
descriptions of natural phenomena--such, for example, as “the faint
and choking odour of frost”--which show that when once Stevenson began
to write away from the model he began also to observe consciously and
to reproduce his sensations with what would nowadays be called “a
photographic accuracy.” I have already quoted two such accuracies from
_Treasure Island_, where they are very effective; but it would be hard
to stop quoting Stevenson if one wished to record apt phrases, for apt
phrases are as common with Stevenson as leaves on a tree.
What the reader next proceeds to question is the matter which the
writing is used to convey. Until we come to such an essay as _Ordered
South_, I believe there is very little life in this matter. In
_Roads_ there is a little weak vanity, as of fancy paralysed by
self-consciousness, such as one may often see in the work of very young
writers; but there seems no doubt that, by 1874, a year after the
composition of _Roads_, Stevenson had reached a degree of proficiency
which, given a suitable subject, enabled him to escape the flaccidity
which besets a young writer. Poverty of matter, which forces him back
upon incident or upon thin moralising, is, throughout, a defect of
Stevenson’s writing. I suppose that the method by which he worked
was too “near,” too self-conscious, to allow his mind ever to become
rich and fallow. He was using up his experience too immediately and
too continuously as literary material for any very great richness
to mature. He is never, that is to say, a rich writer: whatever
compression there is in his work is the compression that comes of the
excised word and the concentrated phrase rather than the pregnancy of
thought, whether vigorous or abstruse. It must be remembered that,
wherever he went, his journey or his place of residence provided him
almost at once with a practicable background for literary work of some
sort. His travel-books, his stories--these all show immediately the
stage of his life’s journey to which they belong.
That is one thing. Another is that his writing is very clear. It is
a model in its freedom from ambiguities. If clarity is a virtue in
writing, as I believe it to be, then Stevenson deserves praise for
most admirable clarity. There is no difficulty of style. It is easy to
read, because it has so much grace; but it is also easy to understand,
because it is in a high degree explicit. It is essentially a prose
style; as I think Stevenson was essentially a prose-writer. His poems
have this same clearness (though surely he was never a master of poetic
form to the extent to which he was a master of prose), and clearness in
poetry is a less notable virtue than clearness in prose. Unless poetry
expresses something that could not properly be expressed in prose it
clearly has no claim upon our attention. The consequence of this is
that Stevenson, who wrote very capable verses, does not impress us as
a poet. Even in this respect, however, his clearness has its virtue;
because the mark of the ostentatiously minor poet is obscurity of
diction. Stevenson was not obscure in diction, and he was not obscure
in thought, as so many writers with little to say are obscure. He went,
in fact, to the other extreme. His poems are too explicit to be good
poems. They are the poems of a man with all his wits about him; they
are the poems of a man who always had his wits about him. I will go
so far as to say that a man who always, in this common but expressive
phrase, has his wits about him is never within measurable distance of
being a poet.
If Stevenson’s habitual attitude of mind be then examined it will prove
to be directly opposed to the habit of mind of the poet. He was about
as poetic as a robin. But his habit of mind (unlike that of the robin)
was moral as well as practical. It was not philosophical; nor would one
willingly use in this connection the word spiritual. It was moral and
practical; it was fundamentally a prose habit of mind. The highest and
the lowest were alike strange to Stevenson’s mind; it had excellent
equipoise, an admirable sanity. It had not, normally, a very wide range
of sympathy or interest. I have explained this--or rather, I have
tried to explain it--to some extent in earlier chapters; but in this
place an explanation may be more clearly offered. Stevenson, we know,
was an invalid; his vitality was poor, although the poverty of his
vitality was partly concealed by a buoyancy of nervous high spirits.
The tendency of all natures is to adjust the indulgence of emotion
to the power of withstanding the reaction from such emotion. Highly
emotional natures, unless they are morbid, seek instinctively to avoid
the exhaustion which overstrained emotion produces. Delicate persons
instinctively avoid mental exertion--not from lack of courage, or even
from lack of intellectual strength; but purely from lassitude and the
dread of lassitude. They do not essay long or vehement excursions from
their base of common-sense; they must always be able to return the
same night. That is because sustained imaginative effort, as well as
poignant emotion, is instinctively recognised as dangerous. It is not
that they lack the power to imagine or to feel deeply; it is simply
that, as a measure for their own protection, they rely upon the virtues
which are less intense and less exacting. They grow cautious. Stevenson
was cautious. To him God was a kindly, well-intentioned person of
infinite mercy; but He was not a terrible God, nor a God in Whom there
was any mystery. If one had used the word “mystery” to Stevenson he
would have thought inevitably of Gaboriau. I should explain that by
suggesting--not that Stevenson was what is called “unimaginative,” but
that his delicate body provoked the compromise. Otherwise he might have
been a fanatic. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps there was simply nothing of
the mystic in Stevenson, and perhaps there was nothing of the mystic
in Alison Cunningham. It is true that Stevenson’s early wrestlings with
religious difficulties seem to have led him to conclusions strictly
utilitarian, by which Christianity became a “body of doctrine” rather
than a cloud of witnesses. Nevertheless, I am disposed to think that
his apparent failure to apprehend any faith more exacting than a lucid
morality or ethical code was caused throughout by physical weakness.
The point is interesting rather than conclusive; and it may be thought
that Stevenson’s attitude to his art tells strongly against my
hypothesis. He was essentially technical in his attitude to style and
to art in general. He did not regard writing as a means of expressing
truths; he seems to have regarded it as an end in itself. He does not
seem to consider the notion of writing to express an idea; his impulse
is to gather together as many incidents as will make a book. It is
easy, of course, to take an unsophisticated view of art, and pretend
that the artist invariably works with the aid of an inner light. I
do not wish to pretend that the artist is such a mere instrument;
particularly as the writer who claims to be no more than a medium
is generally no less than a charlatan. But I cannot help remarking
how entirely absent from any declaration by Stevenson is the sense
of an artist’s profound disinterested imagining. So far from being
profoundly disinterested, he seems to have followed here the custom he
admits following in childhood, that of reading and watching everything
for the sake of wrinkles subsequently to be used in play. It seems
as though he took imaginative writing at its lowest valuation, as so
much “fake,” as so much invention very ingeniously contrived but never
really, in the last resort, perfectly believed by the creator--as, in
fact, something “pretended.” Now Stevenson’s practice, in that case,
is better than his theory. Scenes in his romances, and some of his
short stories in bulk, are the work of an artist who was working at
the bidding of his inspiration. Stevenson did, at these times, believe
as an artist in the work he was making. I can give no account of the
artist’s state of mind; but it is quite certain that Stevenson did not
“pretend” his best work, and that no artist “pretends” his best work.
An artist can distinguish between that part of his work which is the
result of intense belief and that part which is agnostic. Stevenson
seems not to have been so sure; for his aims, whether they are at
“vitality” or at the death of the optic nerve and the adjective,
suggest that he invariably adopted the attitude of the craftsman, the
professional writer of novels for popular consumption. Even so, he is
to be applauded for his freedom from artistic cant. If he is too intent
upon rattling the bones, at least that is more candid than the habit of
playing the priest.
II
From this question of Stevenson’s conviction, however (the question
of the inevitable as opposed to the practicable), arises a further
question. I have said earlier that in the case of a work of art there
is left with the reader some abiding emotion, an evocation, as it were,
of emotion distinct from all incidental emotions, excitements, dreads,
or anxieties aroused in the course of the book. In that pervading and
prevailing emotion, it seems to me, lies the particular quality which
distinguishes a work of art from a work of merely consummate craft.
If I question whether such abiding emotion is evoked by the longer
stories of Stevenson, I am bound to answer that these do not arouse
in me any emotion greater than that of interest, the consequence of
a succession of pleasant excitements. The romances as a whole have
great ingenuity, many scenes to which all readers must look back with
recollected enjoyment. In no case does the book reappear as a whole.
The recollection is a recollection of “plums.” That they are good plums
does not affect the validity of the argument if once the specific test
suggested above is accepted. In the case of _Weir of Hermiston_ the
recollection is obviously difficult, because the book is a fragment: it
is, however, perfectly clear and level in performance, which leads to
the supposition that _Weir_, as it stands, will actually bear whatever
test is applied to it. For that reason _Weir_ is truly regarded as
Stevenson’s masterpiece among the longer stories.
With the short stories I have already dealt in considerable detail;
to the remaining creative works there is no need to refer on these
grounds, for the plays are admittedly poor. And indeed, I should
not have raised the question about the romances if it had not been
the case that very considerable claims have been made on behalf
of the permanent value of Stevenson’s work by many writers whose
opinions ordinarily command respect. The truth is probably that all
good novels, of whatever kind, whether modern or historical, must
be based upon idea and upon character. To Stevenson, character was
incidental. To Stevenson incident, picturesque or exciting, and the
employment of an atmosphere, or appropriate “style,” were the most
important things in romance. That was perhaps the grave mistake which
made his romances what they are, and which has very considerably
affected the romantic novels published since Stevenson’s time and
written in accordance with his conventions. The use of conventional
characters, easily-recognisable romantic types, has for twenty years
and more been accepted by English romantic novelists as a legitimate
evasion of the need for creating character. Thus it happens that so
few modern romantic novels have at this time any standing. Their
names are forgotten (except, possibly, by their authors, and by some
sections of the public only if the novels have been made into stage
plays). If Stevenson’s romances had enjoyed the strength of definite
themes, and if they had been based upon character, the whole position
of the romantic novel in England at the present day might have been
different. As it is, the romantic novel is a survival. The freshness
of Stevenson’s manipulated convention is stale, and the imitators of
Stevenson have forsaken romance for the writing of detective mystery
stories. They still have popularity; but they have no status.
III
But it may be urged that Stevenson saved his ideas for that more direct
appeal to readers which is the special privilege of the essay. Now the
point in this case is to be reached by the inquiry as to what ideas
Stevenson expressed in his essays. They are very simple. Stevenson’s
essays are either fanciful treatments of pleasant, or attractive, or
ingenious notions; or they are frankly homiletic. Stevenson loved
courage, and he thought that courage should have trappings. To his
mind the bravest actions were the better for a bit of purple. But when
we penetrate beyond this crust of happy truism there is little that
will reward us for the search. There is no thought, and little enough
feeling in the essays: their charm lies in the fact that they dress
prettily, and sometimes beautifully, the rather obvious philosophical
small-change which most people cherish as their private wisdom. The
essays flatter the reader by mirroring his own mind and giving it an
odd twist of grace. They are shrewd mother-wit, dressed for a fairing.
That is what causes the popularity of the essays--that and the air they
have of “looking on the bright side of things.” They do look on the
bright side; they are homely, cheerful, charming; they will continue
to adorn the bookshelf with a pretty, pale, bedside cheerfulness which
will delight all whose culture exceeds their originality. But I believe
that they have ceased to be regarded (it has almost become ridiculous
that they should ever have been regarded) as comparable with the essays
of Montaigne, or Hazlitt, or Lamb; because their day is sinking and
their fragility is seen already to indicate a want of robustness rather
than a delicacy of perception. By this I do not mean to suggest that
already the essays are out of date: they are only out of date in some
instances, and even if they were completely out of date that fact would
not have much ultimate critical significance. What is, however, very
significant, is that they have ceased to stand as essays, and have
become goods for the monger of phrases. Their “aptness,” which of old
was the charm that dignified the trite moralism, has recoiled upon
them: they are seen to be mere aggregations of “happy thoughts,” fit to
be culled and calendared for suburban households. It is not without its
pathos that one warning against too-eager judgment of weaker brethren,
really written by an American woman poet, is widely and steadfastly
attributed to Stevenson by his greatest admirers. For the teaching of
the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals; it is the
doctrine of “that state of life” which finally ends in a good-natured
passivity not unlike the happy innocence of the domesticated cat.
Thus, for all his powerful desire to preach, Stevenson taught nothing
but a bland acquiescence; for the field of battle to which he likened
marriage as well as life was a field in which there was no headstrong
conflict of ideal and practice, but a mere accommodation which a phrase
could embody.
IV
There seems to be a general tendency to protest against such opinions,
not because the opinions are adequately countered, but because in most
readers Stevenson produces a vague doting which is entirely uncritical.
Stevenson in such warm hearts is incomparable; and a question is a
perceptible rebuff to their confidingness. The prevailing feeling
appears to be one of affectionate admiration, a matter of personal
attraction rather than of critical esteem. Such a claim in any man
is very far from being negligible. It is clear that the need of most
people is an object of affection. They must love, or they cannot
appreciate. The modern school of novelists, which tries to be very
stern and almost legally unjust, provides little enough material for
the loving hearts. The modern school says to its readers: “You are
wicked, selfish, diseased, but horribly fascinating, and I’m going
to set you right by diagnosis”; and the reader feels a sting in the
fascination. Stevenson says, “We are all mighty fine fellows; and life
is a field of battle; but it is better to be a fool than to be dead;
and the true success is to labour”; and the reader feels that Stevenson
is One of Us! He is not, that is to say, austere; he does not ask
uncomfortable questions; he makes no claim upon his readers’ judgment,
but only upon their self-esteem and their gratified assent. He even
tells them about himself. He says, “I knew a little boy”; and his
readers say: “It’s himself!” They read with enormous satisfaction.
Well, all that is delightful; but in its way it is a red-herring. It
does not help us to assay the literary value of Stevenson’s work.
It is simply a wide illustration of the fascination which Stevenson
had for his friends. It is an extension of that rare thing, personal
charm. We may say that it ought not to influence readers; and no doubt
it influences some too-critical readers adversely (criticism being
understood by all admirers of Stevenson as the merest corrosion); but
the fact is that it cannot be ignored by anyone who seeks to account
for Stevenson’s continued, and even now barely declining, popularity.
Another very good reason is that Stevenson had extraordinarily good
friends. I think it probable that no writer ever had friends more loyal
and affectionate. They criticised his work privately to its great
improvement, and then sold his work when it was completed, acting as
counsellors and agents. And this was done with the same affectionate
admiration which readers of his work still feel. He had few intimate
friends, says Mrs. Stevenson: if friendship consisted in affection
received (as distinguished from affection exchanged), I think Stevenson
would have been in friends the richest man of his own generation. And
since his death he has found a hundred thousand friends for every one
he had during his lifetime. No man was ever richer in well-wishers. If
he had few intimate friends that was because he was naturally reserved,
or, as Mrs. Strong says, “secretive.” No doubt it was a part of his
charm that his friends were mystified by his reserve: I do not see why
his readers also should be mystified, for his writing is free of any
mystery. I can only assume that a slight air of sentimentalism which
runs through essays and romances alike, and over into such short
stories as _Will o’ the Mill_ and _Markheim_, combines with the thin
optimism of the essays and the picturesque variety of incident of
the romances to give body to this charm. I have stated in an earlier
chapter the features of the romances which seem to me to be merits: it
is not necessary to repeat the merits here. They include occasional
pieces of distinguished imagination, a frequent exuberance of fancy,
and a great freshness of incident which conceals lack of central
or unifying idea and poverty of imagined character. Intrinsically,
although their literary quality is much higher, the romances--with the
possible exception of _Kidnapped_--are inferior to the work of Captain
Marryat.
V
Finally, the fact which all must recognise in connection with
Stevenson’s work is the versatility of talent which is displayed. From
essays personal to essays critical; from short-stories picturesque to
short-stories metaphysical, and stories of bogles to fairy stories of
princes and magic bottles and wondrous enchanted isles; from tales
of treasure to the politics of a principality, from Scottish history
to tales of the South Seas; from travel-books to poems for men and
children; from the thermal influences of forests to a defence of a
Roman Catholic hero-priest; from Samoan politics to the story of the
Justice Clerk; from plays to topographical history and imaginary
war-news and the cutting of wood-blocks (to the satisfaction of Mr.
Joseph Pennell)--that is a dazzling record. Quite obviously one cannot
contemplate it without great admiration. When it is remembered also
that it is the product of a man who was very frequently (though not,
as is generally supposed, continuously) an invalid, the amount of
it, and the variety, seems to be impossible. Yet it is possible, and
this fact it is which finally explains our attitude to Stevenson. We
think it marvellous that he should have been able to write at all,
forgetting, as we do, that “writing his best was very life to him.”
We do forget that; we ought not to forget it. We ought not to forget
that Stevenson was a writer. He meant to be a writer, and a writer
he became. He is known chiefly in these days as a writer; and in the
future he will be still more clearly seen as a writer. The weaknesses
of his work will be realised; to some extent his writing will fall in
popular esteem; but he will be less the brave soul travelling hopefully
and labouring to arrive, and more the deliberate writer. When other
men sing and walk and talk and play chess and loiter, Stevenson wrote.
In his life there is no question that he sang and walked and loitered
and talked and played chess; but when he could do none of these things
he could write. Writing was as the breath of his body; writing was
his health, his friends, his romance. He will go down into literary
history as the man who became a professional writer, who cared greatly
about the form and forms of expression. The fact that he concentrated
upon expression left his mind to some extent undeveloped, so that he
could express very excellently perceptions more suitable to his youth
than to his maturer years. It made his earlier writing too scented
and velvet-coated. But it enabled him, when his feeling was aroused,
as it only could have been in the last years of his life, to write at
great speed, with great clearness, an account of the political troubles
in Samoa and in particular of German diplomacy there, which seems to
us still valuable--not because the facts it records are of extreme
significance, but because at the end of his life Stevenson was at last
to be found basing his work upon principles, really and consciously
grasped, from which the incidental outcome was of less importance
than the main realisation. Where he had hitherto been shuttlecocked
by his impulses, and tethered by his moralism, he became capable of
appreciating ideas as of more importance than their expression. If he
had been less prolific, less versatile, less of a virtuoso, Stevenson
might have been a greater man. He would have been less popular. He
would have been less generally admired and loved. But with all his
writing he took the road of least resistance, the road of limited
horizons; because with all his desire for romance, his desire for the
splendour of the great life of action, he was by physical delicacy made
intellectually timid and spiritually cautious. He was obliged to take
care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked
after. Was not that the greatest misfortune that could have befallen
him? Is the work that is produced by nervous reaction from prudence
ever likely to enjoy an air of real vitality? In the versatility of
Stevenson we may observe his restlessness, the nervous fluttering
of the mind which has no physical health to nourish it. In that, at
least, and the charming and not at all objectionable inclination to
pose. He was a poseur because if he had not pretended he would have
died. It was absolutely essential to him that he should pose and that
he should write, just as it was essential that he should be flattered
and anxiously guarded from chill and harm. But it was necessary for the
same reason, lest the feeble flame should perish and the eager flicker
of nervous exuberance be extinguished. That Stevenson was deliberately
brave in being cheerful and fanciful I do not for one moment believe; I
think such a notion is the result of pure ignorance of nervous persons
and their manifestations. But that Stevenson, beneath all his vanity,
realised his own disabilities, seems to me to be certain and pathetic.
That is what makes so much of the extravagant nonsense written and
thought about Stevenson since his death as horrible to contemplate
as would be any dance of ghouls. The authors of all this posthumous
gloating over Stevenson’s illnesses have been concerned to make him a
horribly piteous figure, to harrow us in order that we should pity. How
much more is Stevenson to be pitied for his self-constituted apostles!
We shall do ill to pity Stevenson, because pity is the obverse of envy,
and is as much a vice. Let us rather praise Stevenson for his real
determination and for that work of his which we can approve as well as
love. To love uncritically is to love ill. To discriminate with mercy
is very humbly to justify one’s privilege as a reader.
VI
It is sufficient here to maintain that Stevenson’s literary reputation,
as distinct from the humanitarian aspect of his fortitude, is seriously
impaired. It is no longer possible for a serious critic to place him
among the great writers, because in no department of letters--excepting
the boy’s book and the short story--has he written work of first-class
importance. His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances--all are
seen nowadays to be consumptive. What remains to us, apart from a
fragment, a handful of tales, and two boy’s books (for _Kidnapped_,
although finely romantic, was addressed to boys, and still appeals
to the boy in us) is a series of fine scenes--what I have called
“plums”--and the charm of Stevenson’s personality. Charm as an adjunct
is very well; charm as an asset is of less significance. We find that
Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England,
created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an
old costume-chest. I am afraid we must admit that Stevenson has become
admittedly a writer of the second class, because his ideals have been
superseded by other ideals and shown to be the ideals of a day, a
season, and not the ideals of an age. In fact, we may even question
whether his ideals were those of a day, whether they were not merely
treated by everybody as so much pastime; whether the revival of the
pernicious notion that literature is only a pastime is not due to his
influence. We may question whether Stevenson did not make the novel a
toy when George Eliot had finished making it a treatise. If that charge
could be upheld, I am afraid we should have another deluge of critical
articles upon Stevenson, written as blindly as the old deluge, but this
time denouncing him as a positive hindrance in the way of the novel’s
progress. However that may be, Stevenson seems very decidedly to have
betrayed the romantics by inducing them to enter a _cul-de-sac_; for
romantic literature in England at the present time seems to show no
inner light, but only a suspicious phosphorescence. And that fact we
may quite clearly trace back to Stevenson, who galvanised romance into
life after Charles Reade had volubly betrayed it to the over-zealous
compositor.
Stevenson, that is to say, was not an innovator. We can find his
originals in Wilkie Collins, in Scott, in Mayne Reid, in Montaigne,
Hazlitt, Defoe, Sterne, and in many others. No need for him to admit
it: the fact is patent. “It is the grown people who make the nursery
stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text.” That
is what Stevenson was doing; that is what Stevenson’s imitators have
been doing ever since. And if romance rests upon no better base than
this, if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring
not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a
pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded
when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead.
And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(The dates within brackets are those of composition or of first
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Lantern-Bearers (1888); A Chapter on Dreams (1888); Beggars (1888);
Letter to a Young Gentleman (1888); Pulvis et Umbra (1888); A
Christmas Sermon (1888).
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_A Footnote to History_, 1892.
_Three Plays_, 1892.
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Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” (1882); [Sketches] The Satirist (?
1870); Nuits Blanches (? 1870); The Wreath of Immortelles (? 1870);
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WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
MARTIN SECKER’S
COMPLETE CATALOGUE OF
BOOKS PUBLISHED BY HIM AT
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI LONDON
AUTUMN
MCMXIV
[Illustration]
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PART I
INDEX OF AUTHORS
ABERCROMBIE, LASCELLES
SPECULATIVE DIALOGUES. _Wide Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
THOMAS HARDY: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THE EPIC (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
AFLALO, F. G.
BEHIND THE RANGES. _Wide Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
REGILDING THE CRESCENT. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
BIRDS IN THE CALENDAR. _Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net._
ALLSHORN, LIONEL
STUPOR MUNDI. _Medium Octavo. 16s. net._
APPERSON, G. L.
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SMOKING. _Post 8vo. 6s. net._
ARMSTRONG, DONALD
THE MARRIAGE OF QUIXOTE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
BARRINGTON, MICHAEL
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE. _Imperial 8vo. 30s. net. Edition de Luxe 63s.
net._
BENNETT, ARNOLD
THOSE UNITED STATES. _Post 8vo. 5s. net._
BLACK, CLEMENTINA
THE LINLEYS OF BATH. _Medium 8vo. 16s. net._
THE CUMBERLAND LETTERS. _Medium 8vo. 16s. net._
BOULGER, D. C.
THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE. _Med. 8vo. 21s. net._
THE IRISH EXILES AT ST. GERMAINS. _Med. 8vo. 21s. net._
BOTTOME, PHYLLIS
THE COMMON CHORD. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
BURROW, C. KENNETT
CARMINA VARIA. _F’cap 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
CALDERON, GEORGE (With St. John Hankin)
THOMPSON: A Comedy. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
CANNAN, GILBERT
ROUND THE CORNER. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
OLD MOLE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
SAMUEL BUTLER: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
SATIRE (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
CHESTERTON, G. K.
MAGIC: A Fantastic Comedy. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
CLAYTON, JOSEPH
THE UNDERMAN. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
LEADERS OF THE PEOPLE. _Demy 8vo. 12s, 6d. net._
ROBERT KETT AND THE NORFOLK RISING. _Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net._
COKE, DESMOND
THE ART OF SILHOUETTE. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
CRAVEN, A. SCOTT
THE FOOL’S TRAGEDY. _F’cap 8vo. 6s._
DE SÉLINCOURT, BASIL
WALT WHITMAN: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
DRINKWATER, JOHN
WILLIAM MORRIS: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
D. G. ROSSETTI: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THE LYRIC (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
DOUGLAS, NORMAN
FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND. _Wide Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
OLD CALABRIA. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
DOUGLAS, THEO
WHITE WEBS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
FEA, ALLAN
OLD ENGLISH HOUSES. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
NOOKS AND CORNERS OF OLD ENGLAND. _Small Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
THE REAL CAPTAIN CLEVELAND. _Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net._
FRANCIS, RENÉ
EGYPTIAN ÆSTHETICS. _Wide Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
FREEMAN, A. M.
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
GRETTON, R. H.
HISTORY (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
HANKIN, ST. JOHN
THE DRAMATIC WORKS, with an Introduction by John Drinkwater. _Small
4to. Definitive Limited Edition in Three Volumes. 25s. net._
THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
THE CASSILIS ENGAGEMENT. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
THE CHARITY THAT BEGAN AT HOME. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
THE CONSTANT LOVER, ETC. _Sq. Cr. 8vo. 2s. net._
HAUPTMANN, GERHART
THE COMPLETE DRAMATIC WORKS. _6 vols. Crown 8vo. 5s. net per volume._
HEWLETT, WILLIAM
TELLING THE TRUTH. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
UNCLE’S ADVICE: A NOVEL IN LETTERS. _Cr. 8vo. 6s._
HORSNELL, HORACE
THE BANKRUPT. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
HOWE, P.P.
THE REPERTORY THEATRE. _Cr. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
DRAMATIC PORTRAITS. _Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
BERNARD SHAW: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
J. M. SYNGE: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
CRITICISM (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
HUEFFER, FORD MADOX
HENRY JAMES: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
IBSEN, HENRIK
PEER GYNT. A New Translation by R. Ellis Roberts. _Wide Crown 8vo.
5s. net._
JACOB, HAROLD
PERFUMES OF ARABY. _Wide Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
LAMONT, L. M.
A CORONAL: AN ANTHOLOGY. _F’cap 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
THOMAS ARMSTRONG, C.B.: A MEMOIR. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
LLUELLYN, RICHARD
THE IMPERFECT BRANCH. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
LOW, IVY
THE QUESTING BEAST. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
MACHEN, ARTHUR
HIEROGLYPHICS: A NOTE UPON ECSTASY IN LITERATURE. _F’cap 8vo. 2s. 6d.
net._
MACKENZIE, COMPTON
CARNIVAL. _Crown 8vo. 6s. and 1s. net._
SINISTER STREET. I. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
SINISTER STREET. II. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT. _Crown 8vo. 6s. and 2s. net._
POEMS. _Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
KENSINGTON RHYMES. _Crown 4to. 5s. net._
MAKOWER, S. V.
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
MAVROGORDATO, JOHN
LETTERS FROM GREECE. _F’cap 8vo. 2s. net._
MELVILLE, LEWIS
SOME ECCENTRICS AND A WOMAN. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
METHLEY, VIOLET
CAMILLE DESMOULINS: A Biography. _Demy 8vo. 15s. net._
MEYNELL, VIOLA
LOT BARROW. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
MODERN LOVERS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
NIVEN, FREDERICK
A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
ABOVE YOUR HEADS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
DEAD MEN’S BELLS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE PORCELAIN LADY. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
HANDS UP! _Crown 8vo. 6s._
NORTH, LAURENCE
IMPATIENT GRISELDA. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE GOLIGHTLYS: FATHER AND SON. _Cr. 8vo. 6s._
ONIONS, OLIVER
WIDDERSHINS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE. _Cr. 8vo. 6s._
THE DEBIT ACCOUNT. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE STORY OF LOUIE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
PAIN, BARRY
ONE KIND AND ANOTHER. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE SHORT STORY (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s.
net._
PALMER, JOHN
COMEDY (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
PERUGINI, MARK
THE ART OF BALLET. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
PRESTON, ANNA
THE RECORD OF A SILENT LIFE. _Cr. 8vo. 6s._
ROBERTS, R. ELLIS
HENRIK IBSEN: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
PEER GYNT: A NEW TRANSLATION. _Wide Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
SAND, MAURICE
THE HISTORY OF THE HARLEQUINADE. _Two Volumes. Med. 8vo. 24s. net._
SCOTT-JAMES, R. A.
PERSONALITY IN LITERATURE. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
SIDGWICK, FRANK
THE BALLAD (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
STONE, CHRISTOPHER
THE BURNT HOUSE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
PARODY (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
STRAUS, RALPH
CARRIAGES AND COACHES. _Med. 8vo. 18s. net._
STREET, G. S.
PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS. _Wide Cr. 8vo. 5s. net._
SWINNERTON, FRANK
GEORGE GISSING: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
R. L. STEVENSON: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
TAYLOR, G. R. STIRLING
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: A STUDY IN ECONOMICS AND ROMANCE. _Demy 8vo. 7s.
6d. net._
TAYLOR, UNA
MAURICE MAETERLINCK: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THOMAS, EDWARD
FEMININE INFLUENCE ON THE POETS. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
A. C. SWINBURNE: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
WALTER PATER: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THE TENTH MUSE. _F’cap 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
VAUGHAN, H. M.
AN AUSTRALASIAN WANDER-YEAR. _Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._
WALPOLE, HUGH
FORTITUDE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
THE DUCHESS OF WREXE. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
WATT, L. M.
THE HOUSE OF SANDS. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
WILLIAMS, ORLO
VIE DE BOHÈME. _Demy 8vo. 15s. net._
GEORGE MEREDITH: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THE ESSAY (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
YOUNG, FILSON
NEW LEAVES. _Wide Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
A CHRISTMAS CARD. _Demy 16mo. 1s. net._
PUNCTUATION (_The Art and Craft of Letters_). _F’cap 8vo. 1s. net._
YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT
DEEP SEA. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
YOUNG, F. & E. BRETT
UNDERGROWTH. _Crown 8vo. 6s._
ROBERT BRIDGES: A CRITICAL STUDY. _Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
PART II
INDEX OF TITLES
_General Literature_
ARMSTRONG, THOMAS, C.B. A Memoir. Reminiscences of Du Maurier and
Whistler. _Edited by L. M. Lamont._
ART OF BALLET, THE. _By Mark Perugini._
ART OF SILHOUETTE, THE. _By Desmond Coke._
AUSTRALASIAN WANDER-YEAR, AN. _By H. M. Vaughan._
BALLAD, THE. _By Frank Sidgwick._
BATTLE OF THE BOYNE, THE. _By D. C. Boulger._
BEHIND THE RANGES. _By F. G. Aflalo._
BIRDS IN THE CALENDAR. _By F. G. Aflalo._
BRIDGES: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By F. E. Brett Young._
BUTLER: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Gilbert Cannan._
CAMILLE DESMOULINS. _By Violet Methley._
CARMINA VARIA. _By C. Kennett Burrow._
CARRIAGES AND COACHES: THEIR HISTORY AND THEIR EVOLUTION. _By Ralph
Straus._
CHRISTMAS CARD, A. _By Filson Young._
COMEDY. _By John Palmer._
CORONAL, A. A New Anthology. _By L. M. Lamont._
CRITICISM. _By P. P. Howe._
CUMBERLAND LETTERS, THE. _By Clementina Black._
D’EON DE BEAUMONT. _Translated by Alfred Rieu._
DRAMATIC PORTRAITS. _By P. P. Howe._
DRAMATIC WORKS OF GERHART HAUPTMANN. _6 vols._
DRAMATIC WORKS OF ST. JOHN HANKIN. _Introduction by John Drinkwater.
3 Vols._
EGYPTIAN ÆSTHETICS. _By René Francis._
EPIC, THE. _By Lascelles Abercrombie._
ESSAY, THE. _By Orlo Williams._
FEMININE INFLUENCE ON THE POETS. _By Edward Thomas._
FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND. _By Norman Douglas._
GISSING: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Frank Swinnerton._
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE. _By Michael Barrington._
HARDY: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Lascelles Abercrombie._
HIEROGLYPHICS. _By Arthur Machen._
HISTORY. _By R. H. Gretton._
HISTORY OF THE HARLEQUINADE, THE. _By Maurice Sand._
IBSEN: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By R. Ellis Roberts._
IRISH EXILES AT ST. GERMAINS, THE. _By D. C. Boulger._
JAMES: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By F. M. Hueffer._
KENSINGTON RHYMES. _By Compton Mackenzie._
LEADERS OF THE PEOPLE. _By Joseph Clayton._
LETTERS FROM GREECE. _By John Mavrogordato._
LINLEYS OF BATH, THE. _By Clementina Black._
LYRIC, THE. _By John Drinkwater._
MAETERLINCK: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Una Taylor._
MAGIC. _By G. K. Chesterton._
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. _By G. R. Stirling Taylor._
MEREDITH: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Orlo Williams._
MORRIS: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By John Drinkwater._
NEW LEAVES. _By Filson Young._
NOOKS AND CORNERS OF OLD ENGLAND. _By Allan Fea._
OLD CALABRIA. _By Norman Douglas._
OLD ENGLISH HOUSES. _By Allan Fea._
PARODY. _By Christopher Stone._
PATER: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Edward Thomas._
PEACOCK: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By A. Martin Freeman._
PEER GYNT. _Translated by R. Ellis Roberts._
PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS. _By G. S. Street._
PERFUMES OF ARABY. _By Harold Jacob._
PERSONALITY IN LITERATURE. _By R. A. Scott-James._
POEMS. _By Compton Mackenzie._
PUNCTUATION. _By Filson Young._
REAL CAPTAIN CLEVELAND, THE. _By Allan Fea._
REGILDING THE CRESCENT. _By F. G. Aflalo._
REPERTORY THEATRE, THE. _By P. P. Howe._
ROBERT KETT AND THE NORFOLK RISING. _By Joseph Clayton._
ROSSETTI: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By John Drinkwater._
SATIRE. _By Gilbert Cannan._
SHAW: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By P. P. Howe._
SHORT STORY, THE. _By Barry Pain._
SOCIAL HISTORY OF SMOKING, THE. _By G. L. Apperson._
SOME ECCENTRICS AND A WOMAN. _By Lewis Melville._
SPECULATIVE DIALOGUES. _By Lascelles Abercrombie._
STEVENSON: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Frank Swinnerton._
STUPOR MUNDI. _By Lionel Allshorn._
SWINBURNE: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Edward Thomas._
SYNGE: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By P. P. Howe._
TENTH MUSE, THE. _By Edward Thomas._
THOSE UNITED STATES. _By Arnold Bennett._
THOMPSON. _By St. John Hankin and G. Calderon._
VIE DE BOHÈME. _By Orlo Williams._
WHITMAN: A CRITICAL STUDY. _By Basil de Sélincourt._
_Fiction_
ABOVE YOUR HEADS. _By Frederick Niven._
BANKRUPT, THE. _By Horace Horsnell._
BURNT HOUSE, THE. _By Christopher Stone._
CARNIVAL. _By Compton Mackenzie._
COMMON CHORD, THE. _By Phyllis Bottome._
DEAD MEN’S BELLS. _By Frederick Niven._
DEBIT ACCOUNT, THE. _By Oliver Onions._
DEEP SEA. _By F. Brett Young._
DUCHESS OF WREXE, THE. _By Hugh Walpole._
FOOL’S TRAGEDY, THE. _By A. Scott Craven._
FORTITUDE. _By Hugh Walpole._
GOLIGHTLYS, THE. _By Laurence North._
HANDS UP! _By Frederick Niven._
HOUSE OF SANDS, THE. _By L. M. Watt._
IMPATIENT GRISELDA. _By Laurence North._
IMPERFECT BRANCH, THE. _By Richard Lluellyn._
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE. _By Oliver Onions._
LOT BARROW. _By Viola Meynell._
MARRIAGE OF QUIXOTE, THE. _By Donald Armstrong._
MODERN LOVERS. _By Viola Meynell._
OLD MOLE. _By Gilbert Cannan._
ONE KIND AND ANOTHER. _By Barry Pain._
OUTWARD APPEARANCE, THE. _By Stanley V. Makower._
PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT, THE. _By Compton Mackenzie._
PORCELAIN LADY, THE. _By Frederick Niven._
QUESTING BEAST, THE. _By Ivy Low._
RECORD OF A SILENT LIFE, THE. _By Anna Preston._
ROUND THE CORNER. _By Gilbert Cannan._
SINISTER STREET. I. _By Compton Mackenzie._
SINISTER STREET. II. _By Compton Mackenzie._
STORY OF LOUIE, THE. _By Oliver Onions._
TELLING THE TRUTH. _By William Hewlett._
UNCLE’S ADVICE. _By William Hewlett._
UNDERGROWTH. _By F. & E. Brett Young._
UNDERMAN, THE. _By Joseph Clayton._
WHITE WEBS. _By Theo Douglas._
WIDDERSHINS. _By Oliver Onions._
WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS, A. _By Frederick Niven._
MARTIN SECKER’S
COMPLETE CATALOGUE OF
BOOKS PUBLISHED BY HIM AT
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI LONDON
AUTUMN
MCMXIV
[Illustration]
BALLANTYNE
PRESS
LONDON
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I am not unaware that some parts of this book were written by Mr.
Osbourne, and that Mr. Osbourne claims responsibility for several of
the passages to which the above may seem directly to refer.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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