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Martin Ward. - "At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald"

Jerome K. Jerome - "Malvina of Brittany"

Lucretius - "Of The Nature of Things"

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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






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."



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



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

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