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Robert Louis Stevenson, A Record, An Estimate, A Memorial

A >> A. H. Japp >> Robert Louis Stevenson, A Record, An Estimate, A Memorial




"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.

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