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E. W. Hornung - "A Thief in the Night"

Richard M. Stallman - "The Right to Read"

Jerome K. Jerome - "Diary of a Pilgrimage"

William Makepeace Thackeray - "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan"

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

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




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

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


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


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

Mr Baildon says about the EBB-TIDE:


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


Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):


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

"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the DAILY NEWS on
"The Average Reader" has this passage:

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

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


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

Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of
erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb
judgment by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is
pleasant to come on one who bears the balances in his hand, and
will report faithfully as he has seen and felt, neither more nor
less than what he holds is true. Mr Andrew Lang wrote an article
in the MORNING POST of 16th December 1901, under the title
"Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled his part in
midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on
Stevenson.


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



CHAPTER XXVIII - UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS



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


"As God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all,"


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

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

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

Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:


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


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

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


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


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


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


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



CHAPTER XXIX - LOVE OF VAGABONDS



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

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