"But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like a cold plunge." {8}

As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" {9} in the little dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for him.



CHAPTER XVII—PROOFS OF GROWTH

Once again I quote Goethe:

"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it follows no youth can be a master."

It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment—artistic and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses it. The Sedulous Ape sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not be so. And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved. If the story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it? More than once in Catriona we must own we had this experience, directly warring against full possession by the story, and certain passages about Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara Grant, of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever, indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere deus ex machina, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson's own power of persiflage, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass, for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit better fate than that.

But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at the very close. Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth to the last. To a true critic then, the problem is, having already attained so much—a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters, with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,—what would Stevenson have attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him? It has over and over again been said that, for long he shied presenting women altogether. This is not quite true: Thrawn Janet was an earlier effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real. Here also he was on the right road—the advance road. The sex-question was coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in any broad and true picture. This element was effectively revived in Weir of Hermiston, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it does not go deeper than Denis Duval or Edwin Drood. We know what Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson would have done. "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it. It shows the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the cross-roads—the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.

Yes; there was growth—undoubted growth. The questioning and severely moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism—the tendency to casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection—which had so coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of The Master of Ballantrae, and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured insight into life itself. The art would gradually have been transformed also. The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur, pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.



CHAPTER XVIII—EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS

Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted moralities—"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named them—that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his genealogy on both sides of the house. The strong Celtic strain is now amply attested by many researches. Such phantasies as The House of Eld, The Touchstone, The Poor Thing, and The Song of the Morrow, published along with some fables at the end of an edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Longman's, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol—no phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient—blind to certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or the literature of phantasy, more properly.

This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tendencies in characters. The little early sketch written in June 1875, titled Good Content, well illustrates this:

"Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek Content follows them on a snow-white ass. Here, the broad sunlight falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage, pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign- poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompass them about; from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and walks with her slim hand upon my arm?

"Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand. And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on his white ass, follows simpering Content.

"Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. Virtue is all a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache. Sore besmirched, on his jackass, follows Content."

The record, entitled Sunday Thoughts, which is dated some five days earlier is naive and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises to the fine climax in this respect at the close.

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the church bells ring up the sleeping past! I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves. Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent solitary voice of the preacher. To and fro I wander among the graves, and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air. Oh, the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage! Oh, to have wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree's green heart!

. . . . . . . .

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping past! Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain. To the door, to the door, with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my favour wrought for it on my bed at night. Can you see the device on the badge? I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess—'bad ware nicht'—is not that the humour of it?

. . . . . . . . .

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet dead in the kirkyard—some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts, among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me, thin and solitary, through the open windows; if I were what I was yesterday, and what, before God, I shall be again to-morrow, how should I outface these brazen memories, how live down this unclean resurrection of dead hopes!"

Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is assertive. Take here the cunning sentences on Selfishness and Egotism, very Hawthornian yet quite original:

"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish. But egotism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."

If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the Pall Mall Magazine article. He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently apt to the purpose.

In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic. Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of selfishness. Here is another very characteristic bit:

"You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son. It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in the same case. I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem; and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good spirits. I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits."

Again:

"It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about."

The moral to The House of Eld is incisive writ out of true experience—phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce, tragic:—

"Old is the tree and the fruit good, Very old and thick the wood. Woodman, is your courage stout? Beware! the root is wrapped about Your mother's heart, your father's bones; And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."

The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of Moral Emblems.

"Reader, your soul upraise to see, In yon fair cut designed by me, The pauper by the highwayside Vainly soliciting from pride. Mark how the Beau with easy air Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer And casting a disdainful eye Goes gaily gallivanting by. He from the poor averts his head . . . He will regret it when he's dead."

Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than has yet been done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his temperament and genius. Few men who have by force of native genius gone into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and enchanted region. They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it and kept there as by a spell—the more they struggle for freedom the more surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them—they are but like the fly in amber. It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot disguise what they really are—the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came.

Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement—had he lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its tragic laws and wondrous compensations—he would have shown how to make the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or their confreres, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given to it.

The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.

Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Wrecker—a something which suffices decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially they might be classed.



CHAPTER XIX—EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE

It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over forty—the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the Waverley Novels; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had A Tale of Two Cities; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written Retaliation, or tasted the bitter-sweet first night of She Stoops to Conquer. At the age of forty-four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But what a man has already done at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain.

This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in the New York Tribune:

"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone out. A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life—and now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews

"'The Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,'

that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than wonted grief.

"Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson had his limitations. But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly long career. As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save that of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in a shroud. Thinking of what his art seemed leading to—for things that would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice-work in his case—it was not safe to bound his limitations. And now it is as if Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four, with the Waverley Novels just begun! In originality, in the conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic, are seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his Fancyland; in the union of bracing and heroic character and adventure; in all that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple, his gift was exhaustless. No other such charmer, in this wise, has appeared in his generation. We thought the stories, the fairy tales, had all been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive. Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell out everything as it befell.'

"I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my surprise he opened a conversation—you know there could be nothing more unexpected than that in London—and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New-Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins—that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris—as I learned afterwards when they reappeared in the New Arabian Nights—I would not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'

"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt—nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the last—he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay in his careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no less than in his work. He trusted to the impulse which possessed him—that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and too late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to circumstances.

"But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of all this—some of them with the interest of their personal remembrance—with the strength of their affection for the man beloved by young and old. In the strange and sudden intimacy with an author's record which death makes sure, we realise how notable the list of Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a score of books—not fiction alone, but also essays, criticism, biography, drama, even history, and, as I need not remind you, that spontaneous poetry which comes only from a true poet. None can have failed to observe that, having recreated the story of adventure, he seemed in his later fiction to interfuse a subtler purpose—the search for character, the analysis of mind and soul. Just here his summons came. Between the sunrise of one day and the sunset of the next he exchanged the forest study for the mountain grave. There, as he had sung his own wish, he lies 'under the wide and starry sky.' If there was something of his own romance, so exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, so, also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death, and in the choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala. As for the splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be fulfilled on sea or land, I say—as once before, when the great New- England romancer passed in the stillness of the night:

"'What though his work unfinished lies? Half bent The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air, The shining cataract half-way down the height Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell On listeners unaware, Ends incomplete, but through the starry night The ear still waits for what it did not tell.'"

Dr Edward Eggleston finely sounded the personal note, and told of having met Stevenson at a hotel in New York. Stevenson was ill when the landlord came to Dr Eggleston and asked him if he should like to meet him. Continuing, he said:

"He was flat on his back when I entered, but I think I never saw anybody grow well in so short a time. It was a soul rather than a body that lay there, ablaze with spiritual fire, good will shining through everywhere. He did not pay me any compliment about my work, and I didn't pay him any about his. We did not burn any of the incense before each other which authors so often think it necessary to do, but we were friends instantly. I am not given to speedy intimacies, but I could not help my heart going out to him. It was a wonderfully invested soul, no hedges or fences across his fields, no concealment. He was a romanticist; I was—well, I don't know exactly what. But he let me into the springs of his romanticism then and there.

"'You go in your boat every day?' he asked. 'You sail? Oh! to write a novel a man must take his life in his hands. He must not live in the town.' And so he spoke, in his broad way, of course, according to the enthusiasm of the moment.

"I can't sound any note of pathos here to-night. Some lives are so brave and sweet and joyous and well-rounded, with such a completeness about them that death does not leave imperfection. He never had the air of sitting up with his own reputation. He let his books toss in the waves of criticism and make their ports if they deserve to. He had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the disease of pruriency which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. He simply told his story, with no condescension, taking the readers into his heart and his confidence."



CHAPTER XX—EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS

From these sources now traced out by us—his youthfulness of spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to dream—symbolisms leading to disregard of common feelings—flows too often the indeterminateness of Stevenson's work, at the very points where for direct interest there should be decision. In The Master of Ballantrae this leads him to try to bring the balances even as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far justifying from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation we have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of the Studies of a Biographer:

"The younger brother in The Master of Ballantrae, who is black-mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged. In the later adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that his brain has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed throughout to the interests of the story [or more strictly for the working out of the problem as originally conceived by the author]. The curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish stories, since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of life. When in Catriona Stevenson introduces a love story, it is still unsatisfactory, because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped animal that his passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible. I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these stories I am really among living human beings with whom, apart from their adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy."

In the Ebb-Tide it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three heroes choke each other off all too literally.

In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines that would give the attraction of true individuality to his characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his liberal, and even over- sympathetic views of them and allowances for them. But instead of thus furthering his object, he sacrifices the whole—and his story becomes, instead of a broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant egotism of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind.

Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly this defect—a serious defect in view of interest—arises.

"That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend, if only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).

Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or unable to do for ourselves. Interest in two characters in fiction can never, in this artificial way, and if they are real characters truly conceived, be made equal, nor can one element of claim be balanced against another, even at the beck of the greatest artist. The common sentiment, as we have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere. After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart, if not according to any conventional notion or opinion. Stevenson's pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy for the one, and then for the other in The Master of Ballantrae, admits us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human interest. It is the same in Catriona in much of the treatment of James Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of Weir of Hermiston and his son, though there, happily for him and for us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.

Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago—"a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him—victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency—he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way, do not succeed—the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.

Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect. Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air—in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson do his very best—let him adopt all the artificial disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in Kidnapped and Catriona, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly called off to the man who is actually writing the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below. This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work, not in its essential being—the spirit does not so to us go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks.

This is essentially the character of the mystic; and hence the justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr Chesterton and others.

"The inner life like rings of light Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."

The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something which tells of childish influences—of boyish perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism—any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the outside—see him merely in dress and outer oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in this—the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a penchant—and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain things in that Address to the Scottish Clergy written when Stevenson was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did. It starts in the Edinburgh Edition without any note, comment, or explanation whatever, but in that respect the Edinburgh Edition is not quite so complete as it might have been made. In view of the point now before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels brought out and illustrated. Were this adequately done, only new ground would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said, "seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world. The mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art. You see in Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes—how it lays a disturbing check on real presentation—hindering the action, and is not favourable to the loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her natural element. So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in Doctor Dolliver, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the Marble Faun. "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the visible world.

Mr Baildon says:

"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality. Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is. He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness. But Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae. In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet breadth of Scott."

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he criticises Stevenson for the faux pas artistically of resorting to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of The Master of Ballantrae, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few cases—certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in Catriona and in not a few in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The fault of that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am." That too mars the Merry Men, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and Prince Otto would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L. Stevenson. If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, Prince Otto remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the piracy, and treasure-hunting of The Master of Ballantrae.

"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a firmer grip on his reader." And that is exactly what I, wishing to do all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see. His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't—never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped style of thing and do something new." But there are things in life and human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are. No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away. That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.



CHAPTER XXI—UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES

The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal courage, audacity, and doggedness, and, in the second place, to his theory of life, his philosophy, his moral view. He produces an artificial atmosphere. Everything then has to be worked up to this—kept really in accordance with it, and he shows great art in the doing of this. Hence, though, a quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere—at once really a lack of spontaneity and of freedom. He is freest when he pretends to nothing but adventure—when he aims professedly at nothing save to let his characters develop themselves by action. In this respect the most successful of his stories is yet Treasure Island, and the least successful perhaps Catriona, when just as the ambitious aim compels him to pause in incident, the first-person form creates a cold stiffness and artificiality alien to the full impression he would produce upon the reader. The two stories he left unfinished promised far greater things in this respect than he ever accomplished. For it is an indisputable fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary types of men and women have little or no attraction for Stevenson, nor their commonplace passions either. Yet precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of this very interest. Nothing else will supply the place. The ordinary passion of love to the end he shies, and must invent no end of expedients to supply the want. The devotion of the ordinary type, as Thomas Hardy has over and over exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson wants, to impart to his novels the full sense of reality. The secret of morals, says Shelley, is a going out of self. Stevenson was only on the way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive. His characters, in a way, are all already like himself, romantic, but the highest is when the ordinary and commonplace is so apprehended that it becomes romantic, and may even, through the artist's deeper perception and unconscious grasp and vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing. The very atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien to this; and, so far as he went, his most successful revelations were but records of his own limitations. It is something that he was to the end so much the youth, with fine impulses, if sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and that, too, in such a way as to render his work cold and artificial, else he might have turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or Fielding. Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause mainly complete failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,—a farce, felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human being too icily perfect whom he had met.

On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final, that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:

"From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard, affection, and esteem of his wife. He goes eavesdropping among the peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coarsely impugned. After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails. . . . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject. The music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this genteel comedy Princess. A touch of Offenbach would seem more appropriate. Then even in comedy the hero must not be the butt." And it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest—it is to make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style and mere external technical art.



CHAPTER XXII—PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM

Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson, who, like a youth, was all for Heiterkeit, cheerfulness, taking and giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a story like The Master of Ballantrae—all in a grave, grey, sombre tone, not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is conceived to aim at—the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence." A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth. This is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone which can exult in its power of accumulating shadows and dwelling on the dark side—it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure passion—the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of their tendency to pass into this other and apparently opposite. But here, too, there is nothing single or separate. The device of piracy, etc., at close of Ballantrae, is one of the poorest expedients for relief in all fiction.

Will in Will o' the Mill presents another. When at the last moment he decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then rather incontinent philosophy—which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act on—spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr Gwynn thus writing:

"The love scenes in Weir of Hermiston are almost unsurpassable; but the central interest of the story lies elsewhere—in the relations between father and son. Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life. Before this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled family group, the result was what we see in The Master of Ballantrae."

In a word, between this work and Weir of Hermiston we have the passage from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and workable. He was less the egotist now and more the realist. He was not so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated; concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme was a wee out of ordinary nature. Enough is left to prove that Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create characters not unworthy of his greatest predecessors. The blind stroke of fate had nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward—the triumph of successful execution.



CHAPTER XXIII—EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK

From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the autobiographic vein—the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the quaint, genial, yet really child-like egotistic and even dreamy element that lies like an amalgam, behind all Stevenson's work. Some have even said, that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not by his stories. That is extreme, and is not critically based or justified, because, however true it may be up to a certain point, it is not true of Stevenson's quite latest fictions where we see a decided breaking through of the old limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader sphere of interest and character altogether. But these ideas set down truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a certain date, are wrong and falsely directed in view of Stevenson's latest work and what it promised. For instance, what a discerning and able writer in the Edinburgh Review of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly inapplicable to the whole of the work of the last years, for in it there was grasp, wide and deep, of new possibilities—promise of clear insight, discrimination, and contrast of character, as well as firm hold of new and great human interest under which the egotistic or autobiographic vein was submerged or weakened. The Edinburgh Reviewer wrote:

"There was irresistible fascination in what it would be unfair to characterise as egotism, for it came natural to him to talk frankly and easily of himself. . . . He could never have dreamed, like Pepys, of locking up his confidence in a diary. From first to last, in inconsecutive essays, in the records of sentimental touring, in fiction and in verse, he has embodied the outer and the inner autobiography. He discourses—he prattles—he almost babbles about himself. He seems to have taken minute and habitual introspection for the chief study in his analysis of human nature, as a subject which was immediately in his reach, and would most surely serve his purpose. We suspect much of the success of his novels was due to the fact that as he seized for a substructure on the scenery and situations which had impressed him forcibly, so in the characters of the most different types, there was always more or less of self-portraiture. The subtle touch, eminently and unmistakably realistic, gave life to what might otherwise have seemed a lay-figure. . . . He hesitated again and again as to his destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted his chances, as a story-writer, even after Treasure Island had enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all. But there comes in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty workmanship. Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that seemed to come without an effort. Even when racked with pains, and groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at a high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible instinct. Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that inspiriting afflatus. He did his painstaking work conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased, he revised, and he was hard to satisfy. In short, it was his weird—and he could not resist it—to set style and form before fire and spirit."



CHAPTER XXIV—MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS

More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane and true and disinterested view of Stevenson's claims, was that article of his erewhile "friend," Mr W. E. Henley, published on the appearance of the Memoir by Mr Graham Balfour, in the Pall Mall Magazine. It was well that Mr Henley there acknowledged frankly that he wrote under a keen sense of "grievance"—a most dangerous mood for the most soberly critical and self-restrained of men to write in, and that most certainly Mr W. E. Henley was not—and that he owned to having lost contact with, and recognition of the R. L. Stevenson who went to America in 1887, as he says, and never came back again. To do bare justice to Stevenson it is clear that knowledge of that later Stevenson was essential—essential whether it was calculated to deepen sympathy or the reverse. It goes without saying that the Louis he knew and hobnobbed with, and nursed near by the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh could not be the same exactly as the Louis of Samoa and later years—to suppose so, or to expect so, would simply be to deny all room for growth and expansion. It is clear that the W. E. Henley of those days was not the same as the W. E. Henley who indited that article, and if growth and further insight are to be allowed to Mr Henley and be pleaded as his justification cum spite born of sense of grievance for such an onslaught, then clearly some allowance in the same direction must be made for Stevenson. One can hardly think that in his case old affection and friendship had been so completely submerged, under feelings of grievance and paltry pique, almost always bred of grievances dwelt on and nursed, which it is especially bad for men of genius to acknowledge, and to make a basis, as it were, for clearer knowledge, insight, and judgment. In other cases the pleading would simply amount to an immediate and complete arrest of judgment. Mr Henley throughout writes as though whilst he had changed, and changed in points most essential, his erewhile friend remained exactly where he was as to literary position and product—the Louis who went away in 1887 and never returned, had, as Mr W. E. Henley, most unfortunately for himself, would imply, retained the mastery, and the Louis who never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained in statu quo, and was so only to be judged. It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely celebrated—only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only sympathy can secure. If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to the Louis who went away in 1887 and never came back.

"At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself. Withal, if he wanted a thing, he went after it with an entire contempt of consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechism was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful."

Notice here, how undiscerning the mentor becomes. The words put in "italics," unqualified as they are, would fit and admirably cover the character of the greatest criminal. They would do as they stand, for Wainwright, for Dr Dodd, for Deeming, for Neil Cream, for Canham Read, or for Dougal of Moat Farm fame. And then the touch that, in the Shorter Catechism, Stevenson would have found a cover or justification for it somehow! This comes of writing under a keen sense of grievance; and how could this be truly said of one who was "at bottom an excellent fellow." W. Henley's ethics are about as clear-obscure as is his reading of character. Listen to him once again—more directly on the literary point.

"To tell the truth, his books are none of mine; I mean that if I wanted reading, I do not go for it to the Edinburgh Edition. I am not interested in remarks about morals; in and out of letters. I have lived a full and varied life, and my opinions are my own. So, if I crave the enchantment of romance, I ask it of bigger men than he, and of bigger books than his: of Esmond (say) and Great Expectations, of Redgauntlet and Old Mortality, of La Reine Margot and Bragelonne, of David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities; while if good writing and some other things be in my appetite, are there not always Hazlitt and Lamb—to say nothing of that globe of miraculous continents; which is known to us as Shakespeare? There is his style, you will say, and it is a fact that it is rare, and in the last times better, because much simpler than in the first. But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved that the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets obvious, is it not by way of becoming uninteresting? And is there not something to be said for the person who wrote that Stevenson always reminded him of a young man dressed the best he ever saw for the Burlington Arcade? {10} Stevenson's work in letters does not now take me much, and I decline to enter on the question of his immortality; since that, despite what any can say, will get itself settled soon or late, for all time. No—when I care to think of Stevenson it is not of R. L. Stevenson—R. L. Stevenson, the renowned, the accomplished—executing his difficult solo, but of the Lewis that I knew and loved, and wrought for, and worked with for so long. The successful man of letters does not greatly interest me. I read his careful prayers and pass on, with the certainty that, well as they read, they were not written for print. I learn of his nameless prodigalities, and recall some instances of conduct in another vein. I remember, rather, the unmarried and irresponsible Lewis; the friend, the comrade, the charmeur. Truly, that last word, French as it is, is the only one that is worthy of him. I shall ever remember him as that. The impression of his writings disappears; the impression of himself and his talk is ever a possession. . . . Forasmuch as he was primarily a talker, his printed works, like these of others after his kind, are but a sop for posterity. A last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day."

Just a month or two before Mr Henley's self-revealing article appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine, Mr Chesterton, in the Daily News, with almost prophetic forecast, had said:

"Mr Henley might write an excellent study of Stevenson, but it would only be of the Henleyish part of Stevenson, and it would show a distinct divergence from the finished portrait of Stevenson, which would be given by Professor Colvin."

And it were indeed hard to reconcile some things here with what Mr Henley set down of individual works many times in the Scots and National Observer, and elsewhere, and in literary judgments as in some other things there should, at least, be general consistency, else the search for an honest man in the late years would be yet harder than it was when Diogenes looked out from his tub!

Mr James Douglas, in the Star, in his half-playful and suggestive way, chose to put it as though he regarded the article in the Pall Mall Magazine as a hoax, perpetrated by some clever, unscrupulous writer, intent on provoking both Mr Henley and his friends, and Stevenson's friends and admirers. This called forth a letter from one signing himself "A Lover of R. L. Stevenson," which is so good that we must give it here.

A LITERARY HOAX. TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR.

SIR—I fear that, despite the charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas, there is no doubt that Mr Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening Depreciation of Stevenson which has been published over his name.

What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley's conscience tell him; but permit me to remind him of two or three things which R. L. Stevenson has written concerning W. E. Henley.

First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh:

"(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him."

Secondly, this passage from Stevenson's dedication of Virginibus Puerisque to "My dear William Ernest Henley":

"These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive these little revolutions, undiminished, and, with God's help, unite us to the end."

Thirdly, two scraps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to show that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L. Stevenson's work:

"1. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had. . . . To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans—sich is my aspiration.

"2. Dear lad,—If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think—(the editor who had pruned down Mr Henley's review of Stevenson's Prince Otto) has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. . . . Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself."

And, lastly, this extract from the very last of Stevenson's letters to Henley, published in the two volumes of Letters:

"It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.'s Joy of Earth volume, and Love in a Valley; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. . . . I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S."

It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary friendship lies the true modesty and magnanimity? I had rather be the author of the last message of R. L. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, than of the last words of W. E. Henley concerning R. L. Stevenson.



CHAPTER XXV—MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS

MR CHRISTIE MURRAY, writing as "Merlin" in our handbook in the Referee at the time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by us:

"Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is conceived. 'If he wanted a thing he went after it with an entire contempt for consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful.' Now if Mr Henley does not mean that for the very express picture of a rascal without a conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in his choice of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a profession of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take him au pied de la lettre. A man who goes after whatever he wants with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel, and the man who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and cheerful, whatever his conduct may have been, and justifies himself on the principles of the Shorter Catechism, is a hypocrite to boot. This is not the report we have of Robert Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him. It is a most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr Henley's acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow. We all know the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in debate. In Victor Hugo's tremendous indictment of Napoleon le Petit we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship. It spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo's pages. It is meant to do that. An insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and even with a touch of reluctance.

"Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of ''Tis' and 'it were,' is a fairly competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to make a plain man's plain meaning an evident thing if he chose to do it. But if for the friend for whom 'first and last he did share' he can only show us the figure of one 'who was at bottom an excellent fellow,' and who had 'an entire contempt' for the consequences of his own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be obscured. . . .

"All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned from his books, and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he wrote to me years ago in friendly recognition of my own work. I add the testimonies of friends who may have been of less actual service to him than Mr Henley, but who surely loved him better and more lastingly. These do not represent him as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter Catechism. The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues. . . .

"To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling to mere existence. The basest of us can do that. But it is a heroism to maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness in the face of death. For my own part, I never bowed at the literary shrine Mr Henley and his friends were at so great pains to rear. I am not disposed to think more loftily than I ever thought of their idol. But the Man—the Man was made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will keep him alive when his detractors are dead and buried."

As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was christened Robert Lewis—the Lewis being after his maternal grandfather—Dr Lewis Balfour. Some attempt has been made to show that the Louis was adopted because so many cousins and relatives had also been so christened; but the most likely explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the name to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any notion of association with a very prominent noisy person of the name of Lewis, in Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt dislike, if not positive animosity. Anyhow, it is clear from the entries in the register of pupils at the Edinburgh Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was there, that in early youth he was called Robert only; for in the school list for 1862 the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis, while in the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson. Clearly if in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and elsewhere, called Robert, there could have then arisen no risk of confusion with any of his relatives who bore the name of Lewis; and all this goes to support the view which I have given above. Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert at home, and ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list, and became Lewis Robert. Whether my view is right or not, he was thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name uniformly spelt Louis. What blame on Stevenson's part could be attached to this family determination it is hard to see—people are absolutely free to spell their names as they please, and the matter would not be worth a moment's attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley chosen to be very nasty about the name, and in the Pall Mall Magazine article persisted in printing it Lewis as though that were worthy of him and of it. That was not quite the unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as it was trumpery. Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery spite of this in the following passage:

"Stevenson, it appears, according to his friend's judgment, was 'incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson,' but most of us are incessantly and passionately interested in ourselves. 'He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it.' I remember that George Sala, who was certainly under no illusion as to his own personal aspect, made public confession of an identical foible. Mr Henley may not have an equal affection for the looking-glass, but he is a very poor and unimaginative reader who does not see him gloating over the god-like proportions of the shadow he sends sprawling over his own page. I make free to say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does not live. 'The best and most interesting part of Stevenson's life will never get written—even by me,' says Mr Henley.

"There is one curious little mark of animus, or one equally curious affectation—I do not profess to know which, and it is most probably a compound of the two—in Mr Henley's guardedly spiteful essay which asks for notice. The dead novelist signed his second name on his title-pages and his private correspondence 'Louis.' Mr Henley spells it 'Lewis.' Is this intended to say that Stevenson took an ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal appellation? If so, why not say the thing and have done with it? Or is it one of Mr Henley's wilful ridiculosities? It seems to stand for some sort of meaning, and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small spitefulness which might go for nothing if it were not so well borne out by the general tone of Mr Henley's article. It is a small matter enough, God knows, but it is precisely because it is so very small that it irritates."



CHAPTER XXVI—HERO-VILLAINS

In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason he himself gave about Deacon Brodie utterly fails in that healthy hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently dilated. Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply. Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional. Admitting that such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the Ebb-Tide on the one side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely demanded that they should not stand alone, but have their due complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to tell on them in the action. If "a knave or villain," as George Eliot aptly said, is but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and effective sense. It is here that Stevenson fails—fails absolutely in most of his work, save the very latest—fails, as has been shown, in The Master of Ballantrae, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his sympathy with them or for them. Thus he fails to give his readers the proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given. The highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely, outwardly, and inwardly defeated. It is here the same in the melodrama of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare. "The evening brings a' 'hame'" and the end ought to show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of elevated impression, acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true denouement and the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.

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 noble-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 ennobled. 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 circumstance 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-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned 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 passion, 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 authorship. 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 assigned 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."