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

"Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney— But I go for ever and come again no more."



CHAPTER X—A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON

A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of the master. It is in the form of "A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends," by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt Whitman, "I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand and welcome." Mr Osbourne gives a full account of the last hours.

"He wrote hard all that morning of the last day; his half-finished book, Hermiston, he judged the best he had ever written, and the sense of successful effort made him buoyant and happy as nothing else could. In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered—not business correspondence, for this was left till later—but replies to the long, kindly letters of distant friends received but two days since, and still bright in memory. At sunset he came downstairs; rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, 'as he was now so well'; and played a game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy. He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him make a salad for the evening meal; and, to enhance the little feast he brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar. He was helping his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his head and cried out, 'What's that?' Then he asked quickly, 'Do I look strange?' Even as he did so he fell on his knees beside her. He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly as he lay back in the armchair that had once been his grandfather's. Little time was lost in bringing the doctors—Anderson of the man-of-war, and his friend, Dr Funk. They looked at him and shook their heads; they laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone. But he had passed the bounds of human skill. He had grown so well and strong, that his wasted lungs were unable to bear the stress of returning health."

Then 'tis told how the Rev. Mr Clarke came and prayed by him; and how, soon after, the chiefs were summoned, and came, bringing their fine mats, which, laid on the body, almost hid the Union jack in which it had been wrapped. One of the old Mataafa chiefs, who had been in prison, and who had been one of those who worked on the making of the "Road of the Loving Heart" (the road of gratitude which the chiefs had made up to Mr Stevenson's house as a mark of their appreciation of his efforts on their behalf), came and crouched beside the body and said:

"I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant. Others are rich, and can give Tusitala {6} the parting presents of rich, fine mats; I am poor, and can give nothing this last day he receives his friends. Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time in my friend's face, never to see him more till we meet with God. Behold! Tusitala is dead; Mataafa is also dead. These two great friends have been taken by God. When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people, and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love? Our clan was Mataafa's clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was Tusitala also. We mourn them both."

A select company of Samoans would not be deterred, and watched by the body all night, chanting songs, with bits of Catholic prayers; and in the morning the work began of clearing a path through the wood on the hill to the spot on the crown where Mr Stevenson had expressed a wish to be buried. The following prayer, which Mr Stevenson had written and read aloud to his family only the night before, was read by Mr Clarke in the service:

"We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof; weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer—with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavours against evil—suffer us a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest: if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our Sun and Comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts—eager to labour—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

"We thank Thee and praise Thee, and in the words of Him to whom this day is sacred, close our oblations."

Mr Bazzet M. Haggard, H.B.M., Land-Commissioner, tells, by way of reminiscence, the story of "The Road of Good Heart," how it came to be built, and of the great feast Mr Stevenson gave at the close of the work, at which, in the course of his speech, he said:

"You are all aware in some degree of what has happened. You know those chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the term of their confinement I had it in my power to do them certain favours. One thing some of you cannot know, that they were immediately repaid by answering attentions. They were liberated by the new Administration. . . . As soon as they were free men—owing no man anything—instead of going home to their own places and families, they came to me. They offered to do this work (to make this road) for me as a free gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted at first to refuse their offer. I knew the country to be poor; I knew famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised for want of supervision. Yet I accepted, because I thought the lesson of that road might be more useful to Samoa than a thousand bread-fruit trees, and because to myself it was an exquisite pleasure to receive that which was so handsomely offered. It is now done; you have trod it to- day in coming hither. It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement, and in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious. I have seen these chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon the work, and I have set up over it, now that it is finished the name of 'The Road of Gratitude' (the road of loving hearts), and the names of those that built it. 'In perpetuam memoriam,' we say, and speak idly. At least, as long as my own life shall be spared it shall be here perpetuated; partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for others continually to publish the lesson of this road."

And turning to the chiefs, Mr Stevenson said:

"I will tell you, chiefs, that when I saw you working on that road, my heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope. It seemed to me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to me as I looked at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle, fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression. For there is a time to fight and a time to dig. You Samoans may fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be in vain. There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it, before it is too late. It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use your country. If you do not, others will. . . .

"I love Samoa and her people. I love the land. I have chosen it to be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead, and I love the people, and have chosen them to be my people, to live and die with. And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are to pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking, or to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your memory in the land you received of your fathers."

Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of Thanksgiving Day on the 29th November prior to Mr Stevenson's death, and how at great pains he had procured for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson had found a fair substitute for the pudding. In the course of his speech in reply to an unexpected proposal of "The Host," Mr Stevenson said:

"There on my right sits she who has but lately from our own loved native land come back to me—she to whom, with no lessening of affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all the world besides—my mother. From the opposite end of the table, my wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark, looks to-night into my eyes—while we have both grown a bit older—with undiminished and undiminishing affection.

"Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life mirth and beauty. Nor is this all. There sits the bright boy dear to my heart, full of the flow and the spirits of boyhood, so that I can even know that for a time at least we have still the voice of a child in the house."

Mr A. W. Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a description of the burial-place, ending:

"Tofa Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in the distant tavai trees chant their requiem."

The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must give it:

I.

"Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster That befell in the late afternoon; That broke like a wave of the sea Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes. Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow. Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest! Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing. Will he again return? Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting! Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships, 'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?'

II.

"Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither! Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it. Let her Majesty Victoria be told That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

III.

"Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief As I think of the days before us: Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly! Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness, And the men of Vailima, who weep together Their leader—their leader being taken.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

IV.

"Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly When I think of his illness Coming upon him with fatal swiftness. Would that it waited a glance or a word from him, Or some token, some token from us of our love.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

V.

"Grieve, O my heart! I cannot bear to look on All the chiefs who are there now assembling: Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here! I look hither and thither in vain for thee.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc."

And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines:

"REQUIEM.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea; And the hunter home from the hill.'"

Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul and mind intent on the loftiest things; simple, great,

"Like one of the simple great ones gone For ever and ever by.

His character towered after all far above his books; great and beautiful though they were. Ready for friendship; from all meanness free. So, too, the Samoans felt. This, surely, was what Goethe meant when he wrote:

"The clear head and stout heart, However far they roam, Yet in every truth have part, Are everywhere at home."

His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his range of interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to the history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in A Footnote to History and his letters to the Times. He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer, but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events and the characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his discernments. His portraits of certain Germans and others in these writings, and his power of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices called him. His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt on.



CHAPTER XI—MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE

Mrs Strong, in her chapter of Table Talk in Memories of Vailima, tells a story of the natives' love for Stevenson. "The other day the cook was away," she writes, "and Louis, who was busy writing, took his meals in his room. Knowing there was no one to cook his lunch, he told Sosimo to bring him some bread and cheese. To his surprise he was served with an excellent meal—an omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee. 'Who cooked this?' asked Louis in Samoan. 'I did,' said Sosimo. 'Well,' said Louis, 'great is your wisdom.' Sosimo bowed and corrected him—'Great is my love!'"

Miss Stubbs, in her Stevenson's Shrine; the Record of a Pilgrimage, illustrates the same devotion. On the top of Mount Vaea, she writes, is the massive sarcophagus, "not an ideal structure by any means, not even beautiful, and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man and the place."

"The wind sighed softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from out the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the plaintive coo of the wood-pigeon. In and out of the branches of the magnificent 'Fau' tree, which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally against the gray lichened cement. All around was light and life and colour, and I said to myself, 'He is made one with nature'; he is now, body and soul and spirit, commingled with the loveliness around. He who longed in life to scale the height, he who attained his wish only in death, has become in himself a parable of fulfilment. No need now for that heart-sick cry:—

"'Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?'

No need now for the despairing finality of:

"'I have trod the upward and the downward slope, I have endured and done in the days of yore, I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope, And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'

"Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself.

"In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala—the story-teller—'the man with a heart of gold' (as I so often heard him designated in the Islands), will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest, in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and whose hearts he warmed into gratitude."

The chiefs have prohibited the use of firearms or other weapons on Mount Vaea, "in order that the birds may live there undisturbed and unafraid, and build their nests in the trees around Tusitala's grave."

Miss Stubbs has many records of the impression produced on those he came in contact with in Samoa—white men and women as well as natives. She met a certain Austrian Count, who adored Stevenson's memory. Over his camp bed was a framed photograph of R. L. Stevenson.

"So," he said, "I keep him there, for he was my saviour, and I wish 'good-night' and 'good-morning,' every day, both to himself and to his old home." The Count then told us that when he was stopping at Vailima he used to have his bath daily on the verandah below his room. One lovely morning he got up very early, got into the bath, and splashed and sang, feeling very well and very happy, and at last beginning to sing very loudly, he forgot Mr Stevenson altogether. All at once there was Stevenson himself, his hair all ruffled up, his eyes full of anger. "Man," he said, "you and your infernal row have cost me more than two hundred pounds in ideas," and with that he was gone, but he did not address the Count again the whole of that day. Next morning he had forgotten the Count's offence and was just as friendly as ever, but—the noise was never repeated!

Another of the Count's stories greatly amused the visitors:

"An English lord came all the way to Samoa in his yacht to see Mr Stevenson, and found him in his cool Kimino sitting with the ladies, and drinking tea on his verandah; the whole party had their feet bare. The English lord thought that he must have called at the wrong time, and offered to go away, but Mr Stevenson called out to him, and brought him back, and made him stay to dinner. They all went away to dress, and the guest was left sitting alone in the verandah. Soon they came back, Mr Osbourne and Mr Stevenson wearing the form of dress most usual in that hot climate a white mess jacket, and white trousers, but their feet were still bare. The guest put up his eyeglass and stared for a bit, then he looked down upon his own beautifully shod feet, and sighed. They all talked and laughed until the ladies came in, the ladies in silk dresses, befrilled with lace, but still with bare feet, and the guest took a covert look through his eyeglass and gasped, but when he noticed that there were gold bangles on Mrs Strong's ankles and rings upon her toes, he could bear no more and dropped his eyeglass on the ground of the verandah breaking it all to bits."

Miss Stubbs met on the other side of the island a photographer who told her this:

"I had but recently come to Samoa," he said, "and was standing one day in my shop when Mr Stevenson came in and spoke. 'Man,' he said, 'I tak ye to be a Scotsman like mysel'.'

"I would I could have claimed a kinship," deplored the photographer, "but, alas! I am English to the backbone, with never a drop of Scotch blood in my veins, and I told him this, regretting the absence of the blood tie."

"'I could have sworn your back was the back of a Scotsman,' was his comment, 'but,' and he held out his hand, 'you look sick, and there is a fellowship in sickness not to be denied.' I said I was not strong, and had come to the Island on account of my health. 'Well, then,' replied Mr Stevenson, 'it shall be my business to help you to get well; come to Vailima whenever you like, and if I am out, ask for refreshment, and wait until I come in, you will always find a welcome there.'"

At this point my informant turned away, and there was a break in his voice as he exclaimed, "Ah, the years go on, and I don't miss him less, but more; next to my mother he was the best friend I ever had: a man with a heart of gold; his house was a second home to me."

Stevenson's experience shows how easy it is with a certain type of man, to restore the old feudal conditions of service and relationship. Stevenson did this in essentials in Samoa. He tells us how he managed to get good service out of the Samoans (who are accredited with great unwillingness to work); and this he did by firm, but generous, kindly, almost brotherly treatment, reviving, as it were, a kind of clan life—giving a livery of certain colours—symbol of all this. A little fellow of eight, he tells, had been taken into the household, made a pet of by Mrs Strong, his stepdaughter, and had had a dress given to him, like that of the men; and, when one day he had strolled down by himself as far as the hotel, and the master of it, seeing him, called out in Samoan, "Hi, youngster, who are you?" The eight-year-old replied, "Why, don't you see for yourself? I am one of the Vailima men!"

The story of the Road of the Loving Heart was but another fine attestation of it.



CHAPTER XII—HIS GENIUS AND METHODS

To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out swear by everything, and as though by necessity, at the same time, a school of studious detractors, who will suspiciously question everything, or throw out suggestions of disparagement, is at all events, a proof of greatness, the countersign of undoubted genius, and an assurance of lasting fame. R. L. Stevenson has certainly secured this. Time will tell what of virtue there is with either party. For me, who knew Stevenson, and loved him, as finding in the sweet-tempered, brave, and in some things, most generous man, what gave at once tone and elevation to the artist, I would fain indicate here my impressions of him and his genius—impressions that remain almost wholly uninfluenced by the vast mass of matter about him that the press now turns out. Books, not to speak of articles, pour forth about him—about his style, his art, his humour and his characters—aye, and even about his religion.

Miss Simpson follows Mr Bellyse Baildon with the Edinburgh Days, Miss Moyes Black comes on with her picture in the Famous Scots, and Professor Raleigh succeeds her; Mr Graham Balfour follows with his Life; Mr Kelman's volume about his Religion comes next, and that is reinforced by more familiar letters and Table Talk, by Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs Strong, his step-children; Mr J. Hammerton then comes on handily with Stevensoniana—fruit lovingly gathered from many and far fields, and garnered with not a little tact and taste, and catholicity; Miss Laura Stubbs then presents us with her touching Stevenson's Shrine: the Record of a Pilgrimage; and Mr Sidney Colvin is now busily at work on his Life of Stevenson, which must do not a little to enlighten and to settle many questions.

Curiosity and interest grow as time passes; and the places connected with Stevenson, hitherto obscure many of them, are now touched with light if not with romance, and are known, by name at all events, to every reader of books. Yes; every place he lived in, or touched at, is worthy of full description if only on account of its associations with him. If there is not a land of Stevenson, as there is a land of Scott, or of Burns, it is due to the fact that he was far-travelled, and in his works painted many scenes: but there are at home—Edinburgh, and Halkerside and Allermuir, Caerketton, Swanston, and Colinton, and Maw Moss and Rullion Green and Tummel, "the wale of Scotland," as he named it to me, and the Castletown of Braemar—Braemar in his view coming a good second to Tummel, for starting-points to any curious worshipper who would go the round in Scotland and miss nothing. Mr Geddie's work on The Home Country of Stevenson may be found very helpful here.

1. It is impossible to separate Stevenson from his work, because of the imperious personal element in it; and so I shall not now strive to gain the appearance of cleverness by affecting any distinction here. The first thing I would say is, that he was when I knew him—what pretty much to the end he remained—a youth. His outlook on life was boyishly genial and free, despite all his sufferings from ill-health—it was the pride of action, the joy of endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense of victory that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint—a kind of boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed by outer accident or change. If he was sometimes haunted with the thought of changes through changed conditions or circumstances, as my very old friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told even of the College days that he was always supposing things to undergo some sea-change into something else, if not "into something rich and strange," this was but to add to his sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the luxuries of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose. And this always had, with him, an individual reference or return. He was thus constantly, and latterly, half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through all the things which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified—things that especially attracted him and took his fancy. Thus, if it must be confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch—if no more than a touch—of self-consciousness which will not allow him to forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his sweet, gentle, naive humour. There is, therefore, some truth in the criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate, with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself—the genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in Weir of Hermiston, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk—like Miss Grant and Catriona—are studies of himself, and that in all his heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson. Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord Advocate's daughter, there is a good deal of the author himself disguised in petticoats. I have thought of Stevenson in many suits, beside that which included the velvet jacket, but—petticoats!

Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what it likes, and ignores all else—it fondly magnifies its favourites, and, after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and presenting itself to us, if we only watch well. This is the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr I. Zangwill held:

"That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same interest in the elemental. Women are not born, but made. They are a social product of infinite complexity and delicacy. For a like reason Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the end, always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was the natural exponent in literature of the child."

But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here recognises and reinforces. That is just about as correct and true as this other deliverance:

"His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. The best of all, The Master of Ballantrae, ends in a bog; and where the author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs us or himself altogether. We are so long weighing the brothers Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that, scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."

If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey: "Eccovi, that child has been in hell," we may say, "Eccovi, that child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.

The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who had intimacy with him. Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book):

I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts—namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me—his elder by some fifteen months—as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' He of all mortals, who was, in a sense, always still a boy!"

Mr Gosse tells us:

"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or he modelled little groups and figures in clay."

2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he wrote:

"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter Catechist."

Something! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably awakens, was much with him—the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect—the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare- devilries—Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been—the same, or different from what it was with those that were there? His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way—a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in Old Mortality, "I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:

"It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels—packed no doubt with gems and jewellery—are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a week would enable such a man to retire in course of a year. A mask might perhaps be worn for the mere fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real disguise would be needful.'"

I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here:

"Stevenson's enormous capacity for joy flowed directly out of his profoundly religious temperament. He conceived himself as an unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless gratitude. . . . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of the bon vivant. It was the greater gaiety of the mystic. He could enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle. He was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of the image of God, portraits at only two removes."

Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from these—reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured Election with its joys, etc., etc.

3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to dramatic presentation pure and simple. This implies detachment from moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains in life grasped and repeated with emphasis. But towards his leading characters Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality. Attwater is a confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson. If the same thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not because he was any more truly detached or dramatic. "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote Henley in his sonnet. The Hamlet in Stevenson—the self-questioning, egotistic, moralising Hamlet—was, and to the end remained, a something alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom. He is great as an artist, as a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power. "Mother," he said as a mere child, "I've drawed a man. Now, will I draw his soul?" He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the soul, separate and peculiar. All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae conceptions came out of that—and what is more, he always mixed his own soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.

4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wondering why he did not more effectively employ it, I can't agree with him; and this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien to free play of the individualities presented. Like Hawthorne's, like the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical weird or preconception. This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"—the ground for many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him "less symbol and more individuality"—the ground for the Rev. W. J. Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being set with eternity as a background."

Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker, seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such power can only end in lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's own view that, in the dramas, he finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays. In the strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere. David Balfour could never have writ some speeches attributed to him—they are just R. L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected, renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic.



CHAPTER XIII—PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST

In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a sermon—enforcing a moral—as though he could not help it. "He would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables, and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau—the mixture that found coherency in his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is never wanting. I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be brought in to illustrate this here—careful readers who neglect nothing that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.

But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist- casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy:

THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER

Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him, for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act.

The innkeeper got a rope's end.

"Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.

"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."

"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.

"Fact, I assure you," said the devil.

"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.

"Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me."

"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.

And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

"There!" said the innkeeper.

The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired. We could scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John Silver, entitled The Persons of the Tale. After chapter xxxii. of Treasure Island, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the story." After a few preliminaries:

"You're a damned rogue, my man," said the Captain.

"Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other. "There's no call to be angry with me in earnest. I'm on'y a character in a sea story. I don't really exist."

"Well, I don't really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to meet that."

"I wouldn't set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider argument," responded Silver. "But I'm the villain of the tale, I am; and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is, what's the odds?"

"Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain. "Don't you know there's such a thing as an Author?"

"Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively. "And who better'n me? And the p'int is, if the Author made you, he made Long John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry—not that George is up to much, for he's little more'n a name; and he made Flint, what there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and—well, if that's a Author, give me Pew!"

"Don't you believe in a future state?" said Smollett. "Do you think there's nothing but the present sorty-paper?"

" I don't rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don't see what it's got to do with it, anyway. What I know is this: if there is sich a thing as a Author, I'm his favourite chara'ter. He does me fathoms better'n he does you—fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves you measling in the hold, where nobody can't see you, nor wants to, and you may lay to that! If there is a Author, by thunder, but he's on my side, and you may lay to it!"

"I see he's giving you a long rope," said the Captain. . . .

Stevenson's stories—one and all—are too closely the illustrations by characters of which his essays furnish the texts. You shall not read the one wholly apart from the other without losing something—without losing much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of the writer. It is this if fully perceived which would justify one writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don't forget, in saying, as he did say, that Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels. Hence there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation—creation, broad, natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of Cervantes or Fielding. If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful Pall Mall Magazine article had made this clear from the high critical ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so personal and offensive as they are.

Stevenson's bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this. He is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it in his clever sonnet. He is constantly asking himself about moral laws and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. He is often a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not, like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners—his love of the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure. His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self- consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success—he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the very side where wickedness—their natural wickedness—is most available—on the stage. The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight—all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the Ebb-Tide, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect. As to his poems, they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type alien to his own. The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children, will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they would to, say, the Lilliput Levee of my old friend, W. B. Rands. Rands showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.

Even in his greatest works, in The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have secured dramatically is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as in the Treasure Search in the end of The Master of Ballantrae. The powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his denouement is thus completely sacrificed. The essence of the drama for the stage is that the work is for this and this alone—dialogue and everything being only worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy completeness.

In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson himself too clearly behind his characters. The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero referred to trace to the intrusion behind the glass of a part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the glass is moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said already. For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true instinct. Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind Catriona, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like those in her author were attractive. The constant effort to relieve the sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature.

More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative illustration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon. Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had—his novels—the best of them—would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception, penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common- sense commonplaceness—if I may name it so—protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for successful dramatic production. Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation. Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be not, as Shelley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he passed away, was but on the way to attain. As we shall see, he had risen so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him. For the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely this—to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary. True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art with all classes lies here and not elsewhere. Cleverness, refinement, fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere in this sphere without this.



CHAPTER XIV—STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST

In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert that Stevenson's defect in spontaneous dramatic presentation is seen clearly in his novels as well as in his plays proper.

In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh, telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may perhaps be excused quoting the following passages, as they reinforce by a new reference or illustration or two what has just been said:

"Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L. Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides—common sides, after all, of human nature. This was so far largely due to a dreamy, mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and scoundrels; with both of which classes—vagabonds in strictness—he had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy. Mr Pinero was wrong—totally and incomprehensibly wrong—when he told the good folks of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox—and sometimes he realised it—his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, that, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity, be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the stage—more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of malice prepense; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and immediate verdict—an audience not inclined to some kinds of overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique. If The Master of Ballantrae (which has some highly dramatic scenes and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success, would really have—not in details, but in essential conception—to kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes (brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the audience wobble in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does. As for Beau Austin, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ—re- writ especially towards the ending—and the scandalous Beau tarred and feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought, for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the cockney hero and villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the stage—the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and varied, the less would it have stood it—not at all; and his relief of style and fine or finished speeches would not there in the least have told. This is demanded of the drama—that at once it satisfies a certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong—the uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction certain kinds of revenge or retaliation. The one feeling will emerge most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called Providential equity—each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished, roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in the inner torments that so often lead to confessions. There it is—a radical fact of human nature—as radical as any reading of trait or determination of character presented—seen in the Greek drama as well as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the drama-transpontine and others of to-day. R. L. Stevenson was all too casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so he was not dramatic, though Weir of Hermiston promised something like an advance to it, and St Ives did, in my idea, yet more."

The one essential of a dramatic piece is that, by the interaction of character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation of the play, are justified. Where this is wanting the true leading and the definite justification are wanting. Goethe failed in this in his Faust, resourceful and far-seeing though he was—he failed because a certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say, chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L. Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be. And to come to another illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw's very clever and all too ingenious and over-subtle Man and Superman would, in my idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the setting—the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all—tinting it with strange and even outre colours. Much the same has to be said of most of what are problem-plays—several of Ibsen's among the rest.

Those who remember the Fairy opera of Hansel and Gretel on the stage in London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven, having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and baked there, literally brought down the house. She received exactly what she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands. Quaint, naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of all drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been out of place, but hotly resented by that audience. Now, Stevenson, if he could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven, would most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect. He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength. If this is the sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus constituted. "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the Scotsman, to show Stevenson's defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has himself been so successful.

"If Stevenson had ever mastered that art—and I do not question that if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it—he might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too, that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive, half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost. He would have known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days, again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling thing—a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty pages long. It is the height of the author's art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?"

But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the "concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one. Mr Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many playwrights in the past.

The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at any rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task—he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run, created and presented. He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of characters upon each other is a further element against him. In a word no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action. Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient for scientific examination. The healthy and normal must come in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal, and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes.

The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind. Thus care and concentration must be all in all with him—he must never let himself go, or get so interested and taken with his characters that they, in a sense, control or direct him. He is all too conscious a "maker" and must pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and overweighted work. This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices, secure the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to the real interest of a special class—to whom is finally given up what was meant for mankind—and the troublesome and trying task laid on them, to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways and tend to different ends. As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one painter—so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways, and if they seek the same end, it is by opposing processes—the original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.

As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to him impossible. He might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy attainable in this world—whether by deduction from life itself, or from impressions of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable, and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in the universe. Just as Byron had it with patriotism:—

"Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, Tho' baffled oft is ever won."

To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness as strength, is to court failure—the broad, healthy, human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it. If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further. Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held bad-heartedness was strength.



CHAPTER XV—THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL

We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are, of necessity, of a very vital character. We have shown only as yet the effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort. The position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic presentation. That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly, between good and evil—between right and wrong—between the secret consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere strength and force in certain other ways.

Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here—no technical skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches," as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated. This is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley—young men of great talent, failed—utterly failed—they thought they could make a hero out of a shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally—and failed.

The spirit of this is of the clever youth type—all too ready to forego the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth—whose tender mercies are often cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the Ebb- Tide with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it; which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of The Master of Ballantrae "shame, and perhaps degrade, the beginning." He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late to remedy it—he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to put right errors in what was done.

Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:

"Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached him—the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the truth about life—was abundantly made good in his later writings. It is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry James:—'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he. "Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect? Expect to find a gold watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not?' Heavenly, by all means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he 'smiling passed the moral by.' In his enjoyment of the waiter's effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary button. He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based upon just this audacious paralogism."

Many writers have done the same—and not a few critics have hinted at this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine, about the time of Stevenson's death; and the whole is so good and clear that I must quote it—the writer was not thinking of the drama specially; only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage the more effective and apt to my point.

"In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in middle life 'with only half his message delivered.' Such a phrase may have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism. Still it set one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that part of it which we had time given us to hear.

"Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide. To a certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys' books, which yet held captive older people. Now, undoubtedly there was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys. It gratified their yearning for adventure. To too large a number of his readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson's chief charm; though even of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so daintily.

"Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae, tended to foster delusion in this direction. The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts, and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had their titles given more indication of their real scope and tendency.

"All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature' and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we have our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world. He has the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast crimes and the reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without them.

"And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom—the creed that good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the sense that good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil. That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the seed of the Church. We should not have marvelled in the least that a genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against Providence. But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde. The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to Kidnapped shows David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.

"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?

"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.

"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ever come right!'

"Shakespeare has shown us—and never so nobly as in his last great creation of The Tempest—that a man has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the enemy—that citadel of his own conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause there.

"We must remember that The Tempest was Shakespeare's last work. The genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before those later years are reached!"

Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself:

"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners; Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7}

Stevenson's own verdict on Deacon Brodie given to a New York Herald reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the Ludgate Hill, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. But we were both young men when we did that, and I think we had an idea that bad-heartedness was strength."

If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the Pall Mall Magazine about the Edinburgh Edition, etc. Men are mirrors in which they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious Pall Mall Magazine article than he did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking paltry revenges—writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty grievances—they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things.

R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:—certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in Pippa Passes:

"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillsides dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven, All's right with the world.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"All service ranks the same with God, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work—God's puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."

It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him.



CHAPTER XVI—STEVENSON'S GLOOM

The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut- and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.

His text and his sermon—which may be shortly summed in the following sentence—be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self- satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life. Suffering constantly, he still was always kindly. He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has said, this philosophy by every resource open to him. In practical life, all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom. Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in essence. Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge. Always behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here, too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life backward. Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was before him where to choose. This fateful shadow pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to him, to be ungrateful—"Has the man no gratitude?" Two selves thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self- enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating character and inherited influence. When he reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings. Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service. Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort. He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company. At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the waters.

Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson—a gloom which well might have justified something of his father's despondency. He struggles in vain to escape from it—it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do. In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process—all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts—is met, solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting. "The evening brings a 'hame';" so should it be here—should it especially be in a dramatic work. If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph. From this side, too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite attained.

It was well pointed out in Hammerton, by an unanonymous author there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins, in Stevenson himself—in his real life—Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde. This writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie. R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie—it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as expressed in life.

In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of application. Stevenson, at the time he wrote The Foreigner at Home, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier knowledge and observation to England—and by doing so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early associations and knowledge. He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it goes to form character—even national character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with him—the point is that, when he comes to this sort of comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed. It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing—and had I space, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on it, with instances—in which case the Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than it has yet received. But meanwhile just take this little snippet—very characteristic and very suggestive in its own way—and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain limitation in Stevenson: