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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




His text and his sermon - which may be shortly summed in the
following sentence - be kind, for in kindness to others lies the
only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the
point of egotistic self-satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only
is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service
possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of
his creative work, though he illustrated this in his life, as few
men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give
pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an
unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed
to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as
he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a
vein of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life.
Suffering constantly, he still was always kindly. He encouraged,
as Mr Gosse has said, this philosophy by every resource open to
him. In practical life, all who knew him declared that he was
brightness, naive fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could
not help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a pronounced,
and sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom. Even in his own case
they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in essence. Some
wise critic has said that no man can ever write well creatively of
that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge. Always
behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an
unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never
refined away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here,
too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the
victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from
behind and draws us into life backward. Here was Stevenson, with
his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure,
of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever
one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was
before him where to choose. This fateful shadow pursued him to the
end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for
his own father's despondency and gloom, which the son rather too
decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a
stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his mother,
which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to
him, to be ungrateful - "HAS THE MAN NO GRATITUDE?" Two selves
thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was
from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the
buoyant, self-enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at
the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of
the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point
of view of dominating character and inherited influence. When he
reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and
behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out,
and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his
endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings.
Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that
feed the deeper will and bend it to their service. Individuality
itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things
to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort. He,
like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then
through accident, which kept him long from youthful company. At a
time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had
to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly
mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He
that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of
bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later
years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand,
when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if
not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to
make him a mournful witness of having once been touched by the
Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its
bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the
waters.

Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson - a gloom which well
might have justified something of his father's despondency. He
struggles in vain to escape from it - it narrows, it fatefully
hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a
strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true
dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity,
invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and
inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often
speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the
beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do. In
the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process -
all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts - is met,
solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general,
or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and
sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may
lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they
shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case
there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting
sense of something wanting. "The evening brings a 'hame';" so
should it be here - should it especially be in a dramatic work. If
not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then
the last halo of the soul's serene triumph. From this side, too,
there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the
stricter sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all,
distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck
of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and
irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous
grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as
said already, not quite attained.

It was well pointed out in HAMMERTON, by an unanonymous author
there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse
one, wins, in Stevenson himself - in his real life - Jekyll won,
and not Mr Hyde. This writer, too, might have added that the
Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon
Brodie. R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art and a good deal of his
fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie -
it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as
expressed in life.

In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of
application. Stevenson, at the time he wrote THE FOREIGNER AT
HOME, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had
experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism
and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard
of his earlier knowledge and observation to England - and by doing
so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always
with an almost provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to
his early associations and knowledge. He cannot help paying an
excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so
far as, according to him, it goes to form character - even national
character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never
in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold
called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way
radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman,
well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with
rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily
agree with him - the point is that, when he comes to this sort of
comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or
might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the
tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the
Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed. It is, in its way, a
very peculiar thing - and had I space, and did I believe it would
prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on
it, with instances - in which case the Address to the Scottish
Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than
it has yet received. But meanwhile just take this little snippet -
very characteristic and very suggestive in its own way - and tell
me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now
said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain
limitation in Stevenson:


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


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



CHAPTER XVII - PROOFS OF GROWTH



Once again I quote Goethe:

"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
follows no youth can be a master." It has to be confessed that
seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm
for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he
often attained the counterfeit presentment - artistic and graceful
euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of
phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We often love
Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in
spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather
misses it. THE SEDULOUS APE sometimes disenchants as well as
charms; for occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too
directly in search of the model; and this operates against the
interest as introducing a new and alien series of associations,
where, for full effect, it should not be so. And this distraction
will be the more insistent, the more knowledge the reader has and
the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's first appeal, both by
his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and well read,
rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the more
directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting
impression; where he should be most simple, natural and
spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved. If the
story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by his
matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped that we
shall be possessed in the reading of it? More than once in
CATRIONA we must own we had this experience, directly warring
against full possession by the story, and certain passages about
Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first
introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara
Grant, of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is
decidedly clever, indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to
be a mere DEUS EX MACHINA, and never do more than just pay a little
tribute to Stevenson's own power of PERSIFLAGE, or, if you like, to
pay a penalty, poor lass, for the too perfect doing of hat, and
really, really, I could not help saying this much, though, I do
believe that she deserved just a wee bit better fate than that.

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

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



CHAPTER XVIII - EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS



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

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


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

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

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


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


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

. . . . . . . .

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

. . . . . . . . .

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the
sleeping past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous
chestnuts, where the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I
were a sheep and lay on the field there under my comely fleece; if
I were one of the quiet dead in the kirkyard - some homespun farmer
dead for a long age, some dull hind who followed the plough and
handled the sickle for threescore years and ten in the distant
past; if I were anything but what I am out here, under the sultry
noon, between the deep chestnuts, among the graves, where the
fervent voice of the preacher comes to me, thin and solitary,
through the open windows; IF I WERE WHAT I WAS YESTERDAY, AND WHAT,
BEFORE GOD, I SHALL BE AGAIN TO-MORROW, HOW SHOULD I OUTFACE THESE
BRAZEN MEMORIES, HOW LIVE DOWN THIS UNCLEAN RESURRECTION OF DEAD
HOPES!"


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


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


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

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


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


Again:


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


The moral to THE HOUSE OF ELD is incisive writ out of true
experience - phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce,
tragic:-


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


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


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


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

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

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