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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 parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for
paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as DR JEKYLL
AND MR HYDE. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality
to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of
deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even
when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure
merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of
universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the
reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or
aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly
unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled
and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.

Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in TREASURE
ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and THE WRECKER - a something which suffices
decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which
superficially they might be classed.



CHAPTER XIX - EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE



It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little
over forty - the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth
in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when
Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the
WAVERLEY NOVELS; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should
not have had A TALE OF TWO CITIES; and under a similar stroke,
Goldsmith could not have written RETALIATION, or tasted the bitter-
sweet first night of SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. At the age of forty-
four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of TESS OF THE
D'URBERVILLES. But what a man has already done at forty years is
likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he
will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to
expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a
measurable dynamic gain.

This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of
years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by
emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the
auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning
of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the
great romancer, as reported in the NEW YORK TRIBUNE:


"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of
the death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a
romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be
said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through
fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even
more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought,
has suddenly gone out. A radiant invention shines no more; the
voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining
in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so
original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and
various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift
made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which
Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so
picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life - and now,
at last, so pathetic a loss which renews

"'The Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things,'

that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute
to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of
that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than
wonted grief.

"Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson had his
limitations. But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly
long career. As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save
that of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in
a shroud. Thinking of what his art seemed leading to - for things
that would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice-
work in his case - it was not safe to bound his limitations. And
now it is as if Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four,
with the WAVERLEY NOVELS just begun! In originality, in the
conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic, are
seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his Fancyland;
in the union of bracing and heroic character and adventure; in all
that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple, his gift was
exhaustless. No other such charmer, in this wise, has appeared in
his generation. We thought the stories, the fairy tales, had all
been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and
the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny
France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive.
Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since
Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I
determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell
out everything as it befell.'

"I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the
time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper
from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the
distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr
Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where
we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my
surprise he opened a conversation - you know there could be nothing
more unexpected than that in London - and thereby I guessed that he
was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many
questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few
months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was
drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New-
Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from
Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have
thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have
Scandinavian blood in his veins - that he was of the heroic,
restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that
day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told
me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the
Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from
the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two
stories of sixteenth-century Paris - as I learned afterwards when
they reappeared in the NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS - I would not have bidden
him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished
indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'

"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had
the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and
not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the
courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could
not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation
stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient
mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom
of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he
felt - nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the
last - he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his
own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith,
kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural
but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he
went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it,
and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the
Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the
South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to
him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an
additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay in his
careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no
less than in his work. He trusted to the impulse which possessed
him - that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and
too late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to
circumstances.

"But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of
all this - some of them with the interest of their personal
remembrance - with the strength of their affection for the man
beloved by young and old. In the strange and sudden intimacy with
an author's record which death makes sure, we realise how notable
the list of Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a
score of books - not fiction alone, but also essays, criticism,
biography, drama, even history, and, as I need not remind you, that
spontaneous poetry which comes only from a true poet. None can
have failed to observe that, having recreated the story of
adventure, he seemed in his later fiction to interfuse a subtler
purpose - the search for character, the analysis of mind and soul.
Just here his summons came. Between the sunrise of one day and the
sunset of the next he exchanged the forest study for the mountain
grave. There, as he had sung his own wish, he lies 'under the wide
and starry sky.' If there was something of his own romance, so
exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, so,
also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death, and in the
choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala. As for the
splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be
fulfilled on sea or land, I say - as once before, when the great
New-England romancer passed in the stillness of the night:


"'What though his work unfinished lies? Half bent
The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air,
The shining cataract half-way down the height
Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell
On listeners unaware,
Ends incomplete, but through the starry night
The ear still waits for what it did not tell.'"


Dr Edward Eggleston finely sounded the personal note, and told of
having met Stevenson at a hotel in New York. Stevenson was ill
when the landlord came to Dr Eggleston and asked him if he should
like to meet him. Continuing, he said:


"He was flat on his back when I entered, but I think I never saw
anybody grow well in so short a time. It was a soul rather than a
body that lay there, ablaze with spiritual fire, good will shining
through everywhere. He did not pay me any compliment about my
work, and I didn't pay him any about his. We did not burn any of
the incense before each other which authors so often think it
necessary to do, but we were friends instantly. I am not given to
speedy intimacies, but I could not help my heart going out to him.
It was a wonderfully invested soul, no hedges or fences across his
fields, no concealment. He was a romanticist; I was - well, I
don't know exactly what. But he let me into the springs of his
romanticism then and there.

"'You go in your boat every day?' he asked. 'You sail? Oh! to
write a novel a man must take his life in his hands. He must not
live in the town.' And so he spoke, in his broad way, of course,
according to the enthusiasm of the moment.

"I can't sound any note of pathos here to-night. Some lives are so
brave and sweet and joyous and well-rounded, with such a
completeness about them that death does not leave imperfection. He
never had the air of sitting up with his own reputation. He let
his books toss in the waves of criticism and make their ports if
they deserve to. He had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the
disease of pruriency which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy
de Maupassant. He simply told his story, with no condescension,
taking the readers into his heart and his confidence."



CHAPTER XX - EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS



FROM these sources now traced out by us - his youthfulness of
spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to dream - symbolisms
leading to disregard of common feelings - flows too often the
indeterminateness of Stevenson's work, at the very points where for
direct interest there should be decision. In THE MASTER OF
BALLANTRAE this leads him to try to bring the balances even as
regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far justifying from
one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation we have
given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of the
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER:


"The younger brother in THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, who is black-
mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be
interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged. In the
later adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that
his brain has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he
is sacrificed throughout to the interests of the story [or more
strictly for the working out of the problem as originally conceived
by the author]. The curious exclusion of women is natural in the
purely boyish stories, since to a boy woman is simply an
incumbrance upon reasonable modes of life. When in CATRIONA
Stevenson introduces a love story, it is still unsatisfactory,
because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped animal that his
passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible. I
cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these stories I am
really among living human beings with whom, apart from their
adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy."


In the EBB-TIDE it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three
heroes choke each other off all too literally.

In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines
that would give the attraction of true individuality to his
characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his
liberal, and even over-sympathetic views of them and allowances for
them. But instead of thus furthering his object, he sacrifices the
whole - and his story becomes, instead of a broad and faithful
human record, really a curiosity of autobiographic perversion, and
of overweening, if not extravagant egotism of the more refined, but
yet over-obtrusive kind.

Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly
this defect - a serious defect in view of interest - arises.


"That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend,
if only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of
his fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).


Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or
unable to do for ourselves. Interest in two characters in fiction
can never, in this artificial way, and if they are real characters
truly conceived, be made equal, nor can one element of claim be
balanced against another, even at the beck of the greatest artist.
The common sentiment, as we have seen, resents it even as it
resents lack of guidance elsewhere. After all, the novelist is
bound to give guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where
he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases,
even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he
abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him
from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the
heart, if not according to any conventional notion or opinion.
Stevenson's pause in individual presentation in the desire now to
raise our sympathy for the one, and then for the other in THE
MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, admits us too far into Stevenson's secret or
trick of affected self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and
to signify his theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his
aims from the point of common dramatic and human interest. It is
the same in CATRIONA in much of the treatment of James Mohr or
More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of WEIR
OF HERMISTON and his son, though there, happily for him and for us,
there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and
clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception
unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.

Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say,
emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true
dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though
Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about
Iago - "a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to
be said for him - victim of inheritance, this, that and the other;
and considering everything how could you really expect anything
else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency - he
meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these
grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters;
but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way,
do not succeed - the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes
along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the
"healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full
play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and
all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.

Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of
another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or
there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the
subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect.
Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his
characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and
action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The
sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all
and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air
of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not
somewhat artificial, autobiographical air - in the very midst of
action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all
contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic
interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let
Stevenson do his very best - let him adopt all the artificial
disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc.,
as in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA, nevertheless, the attentive reader's
mind is constantly called off to the man who is actually writing
the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or
artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray
represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to
show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below.
This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though
under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work,
not in its essential being - the spirit does not so to us go clean
forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and
shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it
looks.

This is essentially the character of the MYSTIC; and hence the
justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr
Chesterton and others.


"The inner life like rings of light
Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."


The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the
questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with
Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar
something which tells of childish influences - of boyish
perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism
- any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would
view him only from the outside - see him merely in dress and outer
oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he
differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in
this - the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early
excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with
religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint kind of
self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or
indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real
case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be
interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has always
had a PENCHANT - and so much is this the case that I could wish
Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing
of certain things in that ADDRESS TO THE SCOTTISH CLERGY written
when Stevenson was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards
said and did. It starts in the EDINBURGH EDITION without any note,
comment, or explanation whatever, but in that respect the EDINBURGH
EDITION is not quite so complete as it might have been made. In
view of the point now before us, it is far more important than many
of the other trifles there given, and wants explanation and its
relation to much in the novels brought out and illustrated. Were
this adequately done, only new ground would be got for holding that
Stevenson, instead of, as has been said, "seeing only the visible
world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once and always, whose
thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and who,
indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when
writing of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be
wholly outside that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that
militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral
problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it
were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not
that he saw only the visible world. The mystical element is not
directly favourable to creative art. You see in Tolstoy how it
arrests and perplexes - how it lays a disturbing check on real
presentation - hindering the action, and is not favourable to the
loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true
and high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same
thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's
preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power;
his healthy characters who would never have been influenced as he
describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to
him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN
GABLES, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is herself
never merry again, though joyousness was her natural element. So,
doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in DOCTOR DOLLIVER, as
indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the MARBLE FAUN.
"We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution
to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable
person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards
Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the
asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for
individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This
is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man
who sees only the visible world.

Mr Baildon says:


"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in
Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a
moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily
calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality.
Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is
also much more of the conscious artist, questionable advantage as
that sometimes is. He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than
Scott, also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater
enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than
to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness. But
Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and
it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical
ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae. In one
sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but
rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims
more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet
breadth of Scott."


If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's
theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free
creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when
he criticises Stevenson for the FAUX PAS artistically of resorting
to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close
of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, he only tells and tells plainly how
cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not
a few cases - certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in
CATRIONA and in not a few in DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. The fault of
that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling
to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am."
That too mars the MERRY MEN, whoever wrote them or part wrote them,
and PRINCE OTTO would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-
conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and
artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another
proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L. Stevenson. If, as Mr
Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of being put in
fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, PRINCE OTTO
remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine
clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the
piracy, and treasure-hunting of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.

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