Robert Louis Stevenson: a record, an estimate, and a memorial Part 10

Stevenson's toleration and constant sermonising in the essays-his desire to make us yield allowances all round is so far, it may be, there in place; but it will not work out in story or play, and declares the need for correction and limitation the moment that he essays artistic presentation-from the point of view of art he lacks at once artistic clearness and decision, and from the point of view of morality seems utterly loose and confusing. His artistic quality here rests wholly in his style-mere style, and he is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment and reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws. Herein lies the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic work-which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of the theatre, and of dramatic creation.

From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success. He confuses and so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once moral and dramatic.

I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about Beau Austin, and the reason of its failure-complete failure-on the stage:

"I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in the way the author intended. Yet the fact that Beau Austin, in spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success. Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy, a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the most dangerous. Now I maintain that in Beau Austin we have an element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and n.o.ble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman. Richardson, in Clarissa Harlowe, is well aware of this, and is perfectly right in making his denouement tragic. Stevenson, on the other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy. It is even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and enn.o.bled. But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip. He endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had done others. He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be convincingly effected. Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this demand. And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art."

The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences-religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death, or circ.u.mstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and fully justified in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this-even this-is only in appearance.

True, it is not the dramatists part of himself to condemn, or to approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each other. But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation of these relations, and the effect upon each other. Character is vital. And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be made to tell directly also in the drama. There is no escape from this-none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster if he is wholly blind to it-like the poet in In Memoriam, "Without a conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the Pall Mall Magazine, has a remark which I confess astonished me-a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it. What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about morals," nothing else-the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up "remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals" in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic consistency. Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius addresses his son before his going forth on his travels. Mr Henley here only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to relieve Beau Austin and the other plays in which he collaborated with R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness. The two youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower sense. To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self-conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fas.h.i.+oned and yet older new-fas.h.i.+oned laws, which forbid the violation of certain common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will any way make up. So long as this is tried, with whatever concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play, because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and instinct for moral proportion-an ethnic reward and punishment, so to say-is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.

Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality," a kind of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it up with tail-foremost humour in Murder as a Fine Art, etc., etc., but for all such perversions as these the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such perversions, and not "remarks about morals," are most strictly prohibited there. Perverted subtleties of the sort Stevenson in earlier times especially much affected are not only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and what genius itself would maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and rigidly cut away. Final success and triumph come largely by this kind of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off of the indulgence of the egotistical genius, which is human discipline, and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also. This is the straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramatic pathway all the flowers of human pa.s.sion, hope, love, terror, and triumph.

I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon, if he will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain respects on the dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a moral callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which the waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then invasions from the dream-Stevenson-the result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself. So, it must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.

But listen to Mr Baildon:

"In A Chapter on Dreams, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to this still mysterious agency. From a child he had been a great and vivid dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he used to awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.' Later in life his dreams continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in character and more continuous and systematic. 'The Brownies,' as he picturesquely names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the scientist would call it, that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in our dreams, became, as it were, collaborateurs in his work of authors.h.i.+p. He declares that they invented plots and even elaborated whole novels, and that, not in a single night or single dream, but continuously, and from one night to another, like a story in serial parts. Long before this essay was written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal dream-like quality in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to account for, until I read this extraordinary explanation, for explanation it undoubtedly affords. Anything imagined in a dream would have a tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like character, and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be blended beyond recognition. The trouble with the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson was his or their want of moral sense, so that they sometimes presented the waking author with plots which he could not make use of. Of this Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer so scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as Stevenson was. But Stevenson admits that his most famous story, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was not only suggested by a dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised points, such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the dream. It had been extremely instructive and interesting had he gone more into detail and mentioned some of the other stories into which the dream-element entered largely and pointed out its influence, and would have given us a better clue than we have or now ever can have.

"Even in The Suicide Club and the Rajah's Diamond, I seem to feel strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson... . At certain points one feels conscious of a certain moral callousness, such as marks the dream state, as in the murder of Colonel Geraldine's brother, the horror of which never seems to come fully home to us. But let no one suppose these stories are lacking in vividness and in strangely realistic detail; for this is of the very nature of dreaming at its height... . While the dramatis personae play their parts with the utmost spirit while the story proceeds, they do not, as the past creations do, seem to survive this first contact and live in our minds. This is particularly true of the women. They are well drawn, and play the a.s.signed parts well enough, but they do not, as a rule, make a place for themselves either in our hearts or memories. If there is an exception it is Elvira, in Providence and the Guitar; but we remember her chiefly by the one picture of her falling asleep, after the misadventures of the night, at the supper-table, with her head on her husband's shoulder, and her hand locked in his with instinctive, almost unconscious tenderness."

CHAPTER XXVII-MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON AND OTHERS

From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in The Daily Chronicle of 24th April 1897, without amus.e.m.e.nt, if not without laughter-indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr Moore's high position and his a.s.sured self-confidence, we should not trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it. It was a review of The Secret Rose by W. B. Yeats, but it pa.s.sed after one single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson-an abuse that was justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead. Had he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at least, of fable and moral. And when towards the close Mr Moore again quotes from Mr Yeats, it is still "harping on my daughter" to undo Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in Hamlet. "Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's Secret Rose is a survival or a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always something there." No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks with the great literature-unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans Breitmann, he has "nodings on." He is poor, naked, miserable-a mere pretender-and has no share in the makings of great literature. Mr Moore has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid, which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia, after all. This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr Yeats is white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory. Mr Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can fully subscribe to all this.

Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master of the horrifying. [11] He even finds the Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the c.o.c.kney, in it richly ill.u.s.trative and grand. "There never was a more magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little ruffian. His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also, even (!) of regret."

And well it may! Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste and opinion, but the Ebb-Tide and the c.o.c.kney I should be inclined to cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-believe, in which there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors to be quite genuine. The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that simplicity which is of inspiration and una.s.sailable. Here Stevenson, alas! all too often, pace Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of E. A. Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments. And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplis.h.i.+ng upon the reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to be gratified. There is a distinction, very bold and very essential, between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy to which Aristotle was there referring. Stevenson's "horrifying," to my mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more so than in the very forced and unequal Ebb-Tide, which, with its rather doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of what came after. No service is done to an author like Stevenson by fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing.

"Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet. To romance he brought the highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour" (should this not be "essays full of" or "characterised by"?) "and sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so" (should it not be "as"?) "long as our n.o.ble English language."

Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he misses the point. The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject.

Mr Baildon says about the Ebb-Tide:

"I can compare his next book, the Ebb-Tide (in collaboration with Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as it were, unrelieved by dredging among the sc.u.m and dregs of humanity, the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have Stevenson's masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest villainy in the c.o.c.kney, Huish. Stevenson's other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen satanic glory about them, some s.h.i.+ning threads of possible virtue. They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady of not wanting. But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit venom... . He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for the story, and calls it in one pa.s.sage of his Vailima Letters 'the ever-to-be-execrated Ebb-Tide' (pp. 178 and 184)... . He repented of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked. So, after what in one sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height. That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not change the character of the Ebb-Tide as 'the ever-to-be-execrated.'"

Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):

"The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at its worst in books over which he collaborated."

"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the Daily News on "The Average Reader" has this pa.s.sage:

"We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in A Window in Thrums, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson paints Att.w.a.ter alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate. All these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth. The events described must, in the supposed circ.u.mstances, and with the given characters, have happened in the way stated. Only in none of the specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place. We have great pictures by genius of the-to the prosaic eye-invisible realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We behold and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these wonderful pictures disclose to our view. Had we been lookers-on, we, the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for ourselves. But they are there, and genius enables us to see them. Genius makes truth s.h.i.+ne.

"Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something altogether different? I think I know what it is. It is an attempt to describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see something the writer has never seen himself in his mind's eye. He has no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or definite effect. To describe, one must first of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender greening of April meadows.' I, therefore, more than suspect that the brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy. A pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not make a picture."

Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which may exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or even loftily imaginative conception, at once commanding unity and commanding it. There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the former line-the earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses to it. The Master of Ballantrae abounds in picture and incident and dramatic situations and touches; but it lacks true unity, and the reason simply is given by Stevenson himself-that the "ending shames, perhaps degrades, the beginning," as it is in the Ebb-Tide, with the c.o.c.kney Huish, "execrable." "We have great pictures by genius of the-to the prosaic eye-invisible realities, as well as the outward form of the action." True, but the "invisible realities" form that from which true unity is derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole the more incomplete and lop-sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet not too a.s.sertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails, and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not degrading, the beginning-"and without the true sense of pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect in essence." Ah, it is to be feared that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring critics-from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson.

Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb judgment by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is pleasant to come on one who bears the balances in his hand, and will report faithfully as he has seen and felt, neither more nor less than what he holds is true. Mr Andrew Lang wrote an article in the Morning Post of 16th December 1901, under the t.i.tle "Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled his part in midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on Stevenson.

"Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost daily miss, as that character was displayed in circ.u.mstances unknown to me, I think that I ought to speak of him as I found him. Perhaps our sympathy was mainly intellectual. Constantly do those who knew him desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or things in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own by the gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his appreciation. We may say, as Scott said at the grave of John Ballantyne, that he has taken with him half the sunlight out of our lives. That he was sympathetic and interested in the work of others (which I understand has been denied) I have reason to know. His work and mine lay far apart: mine, I think, we never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him. But in a fragmentary ma.n.u.script of his after his death I found the unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness. Again, he once wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine whom he had never met. His remarks were ideally judicious, a model of serviceable criticism. I found him chivalrous as an honest boy; brave, with an indomitable gaiety of courage; on the point of honour, a Sydney or a Bayard (so he seemed to me); that he was open-handed I have reason to believe; he took life 'with a frolic welcome.' That he was self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he was fond of att.i.tude (like his own brave admirals) he himself knew well, and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his habit of 'playing at' things after the fas.h.i.+on of childhood. Genius is the survival into maturity of the inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson is not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more than its inspiration. Other examples readily occur to the memory-in one way Byron, in another Tennyson. None of us is perfect: I do not want to erect an immaculate clay-cold image of a man, in marble or in sugar-candy. But I will say that I do not remember ever to have heard Mr Stevenson utter a word against any mortal, friend or foe. Even in a case where he had, or believed himself to have, received some wrong, his comment was merely humorous. Especially when very young, his dislike of respectability and of the bourgeois (a literary tradition) led him to show a kind of contempt for virtues which, though certainly respectable, are no less certainly virtuous. He was then more or less seduced by the Bohemian legend, but he was intolerant of the fudge about the rights and privileges of genius. A man's first business, he thought, was 'keep his end up' by his work. If, what he reckoned his inspired work would not serve, then by something else. Of many virtues he was an ensample and an inspiring force. One foible I admit: the tendency to inopportune benevolence. Mr Graham Balfour says that if he fell into ill terms with a man he would try to do him good by stealth. Though he had seen much of the world and of men, this practice showed an invincible ignorance of mankind. It is improbable, on the doctrine of chances, that he was always in the wrong; and it is probable, as he was human, that he always thought himself in the right. But as the other party to the misunderstanding, being also human, would necessarily think himself in the right, such secret benefits would be, as Sophocles says, 'the gifts of foeman and unprofitable.' The secret would leak out, the benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be embittered. This reminds me of an anecdote which is not given in Mr Graham Balfour's biography. As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh, Mr Stevenson read a book called Ministering Children. I have a faint recollection of this work concerning a small Lord and Lady Bountiful. Children, we know, like to 'play at' the events and characters they have read about, and the boy wanted to play at being a ministering child. He 'scanned his whole horizon' for somebody to play with, and thought he had found his playmate. From the window he observed street boys (in Scots 'keelies') enjoying themselves. But one child was out of the sports, a little lame fellow, the son of a baker. Here was a chance! After some misgivings Louis hardened his heart, put on his cap, walked out-a refined little figure-approached the object of his sympathy, and said, 'Will you let me play with you?' 'Go to h.e.l.l!' said the democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile disposition was, it seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be misconstrued."

CHAPTER XXVIII-UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS

The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man who "perceives only the visible world"-he should not engage himself with problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the Palace of Art:

"As G.o.d holding no form of creed, But contemplating all,"

because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and pa.s.sion, and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.

All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid appeal to heart and emotion-in the measure that they may, in his hands, be made to tell for sympathy and general effect. He creates an atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name. Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all high creative art. Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it-an over-elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far alien to the very highest-he was too often like a man magnetised and moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to his own freewill and as he would.

Action in creative literary art is a sine qua non; keeping all the characters and parts in unison, that a true denouement, determined by their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it. Egotistical predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the full result, the unity which is finally craved: Stevenson fails, when he does fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has said, in the French sense, too personnel, and cannot escape from it. And though these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are, and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested revelation of life and reality. Instead, therefore, of "the visible world," as the only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that between it and him lies a cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which dims the lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in fact melting them into each other; and in his sympathetic regards, causing them all to become too much alike. Scott had more of the power of healthy self-withdrawal, creating more of a free atmosphere, in which his characters could freely move-though in this, it must be confessed, he failed far more with women than with men. The very defects poor Carlyle found in Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with him, as sounding no depth, are really the basis of his strength, precisely as the absence of them were the defects of Goethe, who invariably ran his characters finally into the mere moods of his own mind and the mould of his errant philosophy, so that they became merely erratic symbols without hold in the common sympathy. Whether Walverwandschaften, Wilhelm Meister, or Faust, it is still the same-the company before all is done are translated into misty shapes that he actually needs to label for our identification and for his own. Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could not help declaring his own lack of interest in the latter parts of Goethe's greatest efforts. Stevenson, too, tends to run his characters into symbols-his moralist-fabulist determinations are too much for him-he would translate them into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on a board. The essence of romance strictly is, that as the characters will not submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer may consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the magic wand of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere fanciful invention it is enough. Tieck's Phantasus and George MacDonald's Phantastes are ready instances ill.u.s.trative of this. But it is very different with the story of real life, where there is a definite check in the common-sense and knowledge of the reader, and where the highest victory always lies in drawing from the reader the admission-"that is life-life exactly as I have seen and known it. Though I could never have put it so, still it only realises my own conception and observation. That is something lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me lovingly remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce with such vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him, exactly as though I had been looking on real men and women playing their part or their game in the great world."

Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:

"He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to bring out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed character he was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure books, but a modified creature... . It is his essays and his personality, rather than his novels, that will count with posterity. On the whole, a great provincial writer. Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a man's provinciality the very source of his strength ... only the centuries can show.

The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson-he could not, wholly or at once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to his first love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist, and the mystic-Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the Mill, insisted on his acknowledging them in his work up to the end. The modified creature at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the egotistic element as well as through the romantic action, and this point missed the great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in generals.

M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart looked when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance of John Ford's Annabella and Giovanni, and how at the next performance the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say significantly:

"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des fantomes de la verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez en pa.s.sant que les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."

Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father-a circ.u.mstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh-something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote:

"Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life-what he calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten. Mr Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to Virginibus Puerisque dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at twenty-five.' In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Sat.u.r.day and Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa."

Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact. It will be the business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere-the purely egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long whiles content to work.

CHAPTER XXIX-LOVE OF VAGABONDS

What is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams-the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human action-moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and weakening forms of ill-health-should have been so full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human life and character, what is called the rougher and coa.r.s.er being by no means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover-seeking daily adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive confreres. His voyage as a steerage pa.s.senger across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes or the Inland Voyage. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental Journeys" that have sometimes been the fas.h.i.+on-that was truly of a prosaic and risky order. The appeal thus made to an element deep in the English nature will do much to keep his memory green in the hearts that could not rise to appreciation of his style and literary gifts at all. He loves the roadways and the by-ways, and those to be met with there-like him in this, though unlike him in most else. The love of the roadsides and the greenwood-and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and ever changing-a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification-the longing for novelty and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel. You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the surface coatings of culture and artificiality, in Stevenson. He anew, without pretence, enlivens it-makes it first a part of himself, and then a part of literature once more. Listen to him, as he sincerely sings this pa.s.sion for the pilgrimage-or the modern phase of it-innocent vagabond roving:

"Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me; Give the jolly heaven above, And the by-way nigh me: Bed in the bush, with stars to see; Bread I dip in the river- Here's the life for a man like me, Here's the life for ever... .

"Let the blow fall soon or late; Let what will be o'er me; Give the face of earth around And the road before me.

Health I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me: All I ask the heaven above, And the road below me."

True; this is put in the mouth of another, but Stevenson could not have so voiced it, had he not been the born rover that he was, with longing for the roadside, the high hills, and forests and newcomers and varied miscellaneous company. Here he does more directly speak in his own person and quite to the same effect:

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird song at morning, and star s.h.i.+ne at night, I will make a palace fit for you and me, Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

"I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, Where white flows the river, and bright blows the broom, And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white, In rainfall at morning and dew-fall at night.

"And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!

That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside fire."