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G.K.Chesterton - "The Club of Queer Trades"

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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





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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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



CHAPTER XV - THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL



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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


Stevenson's own verdict on DEACON BRODIE given to a NEW YORK HERALD
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on
the LUDGATE HILL, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece
has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will
please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed
of it. BUT WE WERE BOTH YOUNG MEN WHEN WE DID THAT, AND I THINK WE
HAD AN IDEA THAT BAD-HEARTEDNESS WAS STRENGTH."

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

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


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

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

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

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


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



CHAPTER XVI - STEVENSON'S GLOOM



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

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