Robert Louis Stevenson
By Gilbert
Keith Chesterton
In this brief study of Stevenson I propose to follow a somewhat unusual
course; or to sketch what may be considered a rather eccentric outline. It can
only be justified in practice; and I have a healthy fear that my practice will
not justify it. Nevertheless, I have not adopted it without considerable
thought, and even doubt, about the best way of dealing with a real and practical
problem. So before it collapses completely in practice, I will give myself the
triumph and the joy of justifying it in principle.
The difficulty arises thus. In the great days of Stevenson critics had
begun to be ashamed of being critics, and of giving to their ancient function
the name of criticism. It was the fashion to publish a book that was a bundle
of reviews and to call it "Appreciations." But the world advances;
and if that sort of book is published now, it might well bear the general title
of "Depreciations." Stevenson has suffered more than most from this
new fashion of minimising and finding fault; and some energetic and successful
writers have thrown themselves into the business almost with the eagerness of
stockbrokers, bent on making a slump instead of a boom in Stevenson Stock. It
may be questioned whether we need welcome the bear any more than the bull in
the china-shop of elegant English letters. Others seem to make quite a hobby of
proving a particular writer to be overrated. They write long and laborious
articles, full of biographical detail and bitter commentary, in order to show
that the subject is unworthy of attention; and write pages upon Stevenson to
prove that he is not worth writing about. Neither their motives nor their methods
are very clear or satisfactory. If it be true that all swans are geese to the
discriminating eye of the scientific ornithologist, it hardly suffices to
explain so long or so fatiguing a wild-goose chase.
But it is true that, in a sense more general than that of these rather
irritable individuals, such a reaction does exist. And it is a reaction against
Stevenson, or at least against Stevensonians. Perhaps it would be most correct
to call it a reaction against Stevensoniana. And let me say at this early stage
that I heartily agree that there has been far too much Stevensoniana. In one
sense, indeed, everything about anybody so interesting as Stevenson is
interesting. In one sense, everything about everybody is interesting. But not
everybody can interest everybody else: and it is well to know an author is
loved, but not to publish all the love-letters. Sometimes we only had to endure
that most awful and appalling tragedy: a truth told once too often. Sometimes
we heard Stevensonian sentiments repeated in violation of all Stevensonian
rules. For of all things he hated dilution: and loved to take language neat,
like a liqueur. In short, it was overdone; it was too noisy and yet all on one
note; above all, it was too incessant and too prolonged. As I say, there were a
variety of causes, which it would be unnecessary and sometimes unamiable to
discuss. There was perhaps something in it of the very virtue of Stevenson; he
was tolerant of many societies and interested in many men; and there was
nothing to ward off the direst results of the men being interested in him.
Especially after he was dead, one person after another turned up and wrote a
book about meeting Stevenson on a steamboat or in a restaurant; and it is not
surprising that such book-makers began to look as vulgar as bookies. There was
perhaps something in it of the old joke of Johnson: that the Scots are in a
conspiracy to praise each other. It was often because the Scots are secret
sentimentalists and cannot always keep the secret. Their interest in a story so
brilliant and in some ways so pathetic was perfectly natural and human; but for
all that, their interest was overdone. It was sometimes, I regret to say,
because the interest might fairly be called a vested interest. Anyhow, any
number of things happened to combine to vulgarise the thing; but vulgarising a
thing does not really make it vulgar.
Now Stevenson's life was really what we call picturesque; partly because he
saw everything in pictures; and partly because a chapter of accidents did really
attach him to very picturesque places. He was born on the high terraces of the
noblest of northern cities: in the family mansion in
This book makes no pretence of being even an outline of the life of
Stevenson. In his particular case I deliberately omit such an outline, because
I find that it has cut across and confused the very sharp and lucid outline of
his art. But indeed in any case it would be very difficult to tell the tale
with truth without telling it in detail, and in rather bewildering detail. The
first thing that strikes us, on a rapid survey of his life and letters, is his
innumerable changes of domicile, especially in his early days. If his friends
followed the example he professes to set, in the matter of Mr. Michael
Finsbury, and refused to learn more than one address for one friend, he must
have left his correspondence very far behind indeed. His wanderings in Western
Europe would appear on the map as much wilder as well as wider than the
"probable course of David Balfour's wanderings" in
Broadly speaking, therefore, his biography would consist of journeys hither
and thither, with a donkey in the
The one real break, I suspect, in this curious double process of protection
and risk, was his break-away to America, which arose partly at least in
connection with the matter of his marriage. It seemed to his friends and
family, not so much like the conduct of an invalid who had done a bolt from the
hospital, as the conduct of a lunatic unaccountably loose from the asylum. In
truth, the voyage struck them as less mad than the marriage. As this is not a
biographical study, I need not go deeply into the delicate disputes about that
business; but it was admittedly at least unconventional. All that matters to
the argument here is that, while there was much in it that was even noble, it
was not normal. It was not love as it should come to youth: it is no disrespect
to either to say that in both, psychologically speaking, there was an element
of patching up as well as of binding together. Stevenson had met, first in
That is the main outline of the actual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson;
and from the time when he clambered as a boy among the crags and castellations
of the Painted Hill, looking across the islets of the Forth, to the time when
tall brown barbarians, crowned with red flowers, bore him on their spears to
the peak of their sacred mountain, the spirit of this artist had been permitted
to inhabit, and as it were to haunt, the beautiful places of the earth. To the
last he had tasted that beauty with a burning sensibility; and it is no joke,
in his case, to say that he would have enjoyed coming to his own funeral. Of
course, even this generalisation is too much of a simplification. He was not,
as we shall later have occasion to note, unacquainted with sombre nor, alas,
with sordid surroundings. Oscar Wilde said with some truth that Stevenson might
have produced yet richer and more purple romances if he had always lived in
Now if I were to follow here the natural course of such a volume as this, I
should have to begin by telling slowly and systematically the tale that I have
just told rapidly and briefly. I should have to give a chapter to his
childhood, to his favourite aunt and his yet more beloved nurse, and to all the
things much more clearly recorded in _A Child's Garden of Verses._ I should
have to give a chapter to his youth, his differences with his father, his
struggles with his malady, his greater struggles about his marriage; working up
slowly through the whole length of the book to the familiar picture of so many
magazines and memoirs; the slender semi-tropical Tusitala with his long brown
hair and long olive face and long strange slits of eyes, sitting clad in white
or crowned with garlands and telling tales to all the tribes of men. Now the
misfortune of all this would be that it would amount to saying, through a slow
series of chapters, that there is nothing more to be said about Stevenson
except what has been said a thousand times. It would be to suggest that
Stevenson's serious fame does still really depend on this string of picturesque
accidents; and that there is really nothing to be told of him, except that he
wore long hair in the Savile Club or light clothes in the Samoan mountains. His
life really was romantic; but to repeat that romance is like reprinting the
_Scarlet Pimpernel_ or offering the world an entirely new portrait of Rudolph
Valentino. It is against this repetition that the reaction has set in; perhaps
wrongly but certainly strongly. And to spin it out through the whole of this
book would be to give the impression (which I should mildly resent) that this
book is only the thousandth unnecessary volume of Stevensoniana. However I told
his story in detail, though it were with all the sympathy I feel, I could not
avoid that suggestion of a sort of jaded journalism. Stevenson's picturesque attitude
and career are rather in his way at this moment; not for me, because I like the
picturesque, but for this new pose which may be called the pose of the prosaic.
To these unfortunate realists, to say that there were all these romantic things
about him is only another way of saying that there was nothing in him. And
there was a very great deal in him. I am driven to adopt some other method of
bringing it out.
When I come to describing it, I find it is perhaps even more difficult to
describe it than to do it. But something of this sort is what I propose to do.
Loudon Dodd, in whom there is much of Louis Stevenson, says very truly in _The
Wrecker,_ that for the artist the external result is always a fizzle: his eyes
are turned inward: "he lives for a state of mind." I mean to attempt
the conjectural description of certain states of mind, with the books that were
the "external expression" of them. If for the artist his art is a
fizzle, his life is often far more of a fizzle: it is even far more of a
fiction. It is the one of his works in which he tells least of the truth.
Stevenson's was more real than most, because more romantic than most. But I
prefer the romances, which were still more real. I mean that I think the
wanderings of Balfour more Stevensonian than the wanderings of Stevenson: that
the duel of Jekyll and Hyde is more illuminating than the quarrel of Stevenson
and Henley: and that the true private life is to be sought not in Samoa but in
Treasure Island; for where the treasure is, there is the heart also.
In short, I propose to review his books with illustrations from his life;
rather than to write his life with illustrations from his books. And I do it
deliberately, not because his life was not as interesting as any book; but
because the habit of talking too much about his life has already actually led
to thinking far too little of his literature. His ideas are being underrated,
precisely because they are not being studied separately and seriously as ideas.
His art is being underrated, precisely because he is not accorded even the fair
advantages of Art for Art's Sake. There is indeed a queer irony about the fate
of the men of that age, who delighted in that axiom. They claimed judgement as
artists, not men; and they are really remembered as men much more than they are
remembered as artists. More men know the Whistlerian anecdotes than the
Whistlerian etchings; and poor Wilde will live in history as immoral rather
than unmoral. But there is a real reason for studying intrinsic intellectual
values in the case of Stevenson; and it need not be said that exactly where the
modern maxim would be useful, it is never used. The new criticism of Stevenson
is still a criticism of Stevenson rather than of Stevenson's work; it is always
a personal criticism, and often, I think, rather a spiteful criticism. It is
simply nonsense, for instance, for a distinguished living novelist to suggest
that Stevenson's correspondence is a thin stream of selfish soliloquy devoid of
feeling for anybody but himself. It teems with lively expressions of longing
for particular people and places; it breaks out everywhere with delight into
that broad Scots idiom which, as Stevenson truly said elsewhere, gives a
special freedom to all the terms of affection. Stevenson might be lying, of course,
though I know not why a busy author should lie at such length for nothing. But
I cannot see how any man could say any more to suggest his dependence on the
society of friends. These are positive facts of personality that can never be
proved or disproved. I never knew Stevenson; but I knew very many of his
favourite friends and correspondents. I knew Henry James and William Archer; I
have still the honour of knowing Sir James Barrie and Sir Edmund Gosse. And
anybody who knows them, even most slightly and superficially, must know they
are not the men to be in confidential correspondence for years with a silly,
greedy and exacting egoist without seeing through him; or to be bombarded with
boring autobiographies without being bored. But it seems rather a pity that
such critics should still be called upon to hunt up Stevenson's letter-bag,
when they might well think it time to form some conclusions about Stevenson's
place in letters. Anyhow, I propose on the present occasion to be so perverse
as to interest myself in literature when dealing with a literary man; and to be
especially interested not only in the literature left by the man but in the
philosophy inhering in the literature. And I am especially interested in a
certain story, which was indeed the story of his life, but not exactly the
story in his biography. It was an internal and spiritual story; and the stages
of it are to be found rather in his stories than in his external acts. It is
told much better in the difference between _Treasure Island_ and _The Story of
a Lie,_ or in the difference between _A Child's
Nevertheless, at this stage of the attempt I will say one thing. I have, in
a sense, a sort of theory about Stevenson; a view of him which, right or wrong,
concerns his life and work as a whole. But it is perhaps less exclusively
personal than much of the interest that has been naturally taken in his
personality. It is certainly the very contrary of the attacks which have
commonly, and especially recently, been made on that personality. Thus the
critics are fond of suggesting that he was nothing if not self-conscious; that
the whole of his significance came from self-consciousness. I believe that the
one really great and important work which he did for the world was done quite
unconsciously. Many have blamed him for posing; some have blamed him for
preaching. The matter which mainly interests me is not merely his pose, if it
was a pose, but the large landscape or background against which he was posing;
which he himself only partly realised, but which goes to make up a rather
important historical picture. And though it is true that he sometimes preached,
and preached very well, I am by no means certain that the thing which he
preached was the same as the thing which he taught. Or, to put it another way,
the thing which he could teach was not quite so large as the thing which we can
learn. Or again, many of them declare that he was only a nine days' wonder, a
passing figure that happened to catch the eye and even affect the fashion; and
that with that fashion he will be forgotten. I believe that the lesson of his
life will only be seen after time has revealed the full meaning of all our
present tendencies; I believe it will be seen from afar off like a vast plan or
maze traced out on a hillside; perhaps traced by one who did not even see the
plan while he was making the tracks. I believe that his travels and doublings
and returns reveal an idea, and even a doctrine. Yet it was perhaps a doctrine
in which he did not believe, or at any rate did not believe that he believed.
In other words, I think his significance will stand out more strongly in
relation to larger problems which are beginning to press once more upon the
mind of man; but of which many men are still largely unaware in our time, and
were almost entirely unaware in his. But any contribution to the solution of
those problems will be remembered; and he made a very great contribution,
probably greater than he knew. Lastly, these same critics do not hesitate, in
many cases, to accuse him flatly of being insincere. I should say that nobody,
so openly fond of play-acting as he was, could possibly be insincere. But it is
more to my purpose now to say that his relation to the huge half-truth that he
carried was in its very simplicity a mark of truthfulness. For he had the
splendid and ringing sincerity to testify, in a voice like a trumpet, to a
truth that he did not understand.
Chapter II. In the Country of Skelt'
Every now and then the eye is riveted, in reading current criticism, by some
statement so astonishingly untrue, or even contrary to the fact, that it seems
as if a man walking down the street were suddenly standing on his head. It is
all the more noticeable when the critic really has a strong head to stand on.
One of the ablest of the younger critics, whose studies in other subjects I
have warmly admired, wrote in our invaluable London Mercury a study of
Stevenson; or what purported to be a study of Stevenson. And the chief thing he
said, indeed almost the only thing he said, was that the thought of Stevenson
instantly throws us back to the greater example of Edgar Allan Poe; that both
were pallid and graceful figures "making wax flowers," as somebody
said; and of course the earlier and greater had the advantage of the later and the
less. In fact, the critic treated Stevenson as the shadow of Poe; which may not
unfairly be called the shadow of a shade. He almost hinted that, for those who
had read Poe, it was hardly worth while to read Stevenson. And indeed I could
almost suspect he had taken his own advice; and never read a line of Stevenson
in his life.
If a man were to say that Maeterlinck derives so directly from Dickens that
it is difficult to draw the line between them, I should be momentarily at a
loss to catch his meaning. If he were to say that Walt Whitman was so close a
copyist of Pope that it is hardly worth while to read the copy, I should not at
once seize the clue. But I should think these comparisons rather more close, if
anything, than the comparison between Stevenson and Poe. Dickens did not
confine himself to comic subjects so much as Poe did to tragic ones; and an
Essay on Optimism might couple the names of Pope and Whitman. It might also
include the name of Stevenson; but it would hardly beam and sparkle with the
name of Poe. The contrast, however, is much deeper than labels or the
commonplaces of controversy. It is much deeper than formal divisions between
what is funny and what is serious. It is concerned with something which it is
now fashionable in drawing-rooms to call psychological; but which those who
would as soon talk Latin as Greek still prefer to call spiritual. It is not
necessarily what the newspapers would call moral; but that is only because it
is more moral than most modern morality.
When Stevenson was known as Stennis, by Parisian art students struggling
with his name, it was the hour of Art for Art's Sake. Painting was to be
impersonal, though painters (like Whistler) were sometimes perhaps a little
personal. But they all insisted that every picture is as impersonal as a
pattern. They ought to have insisted that every pattern is as personal as a
picture. Whether or no we see faces in the carpet, we ought to see a mind in
the carpet; and in fact there is a mind in every scheme of ornament. There is
as emphatically a morality expressed in Babylonian architecture or Baroque
architecture as if it were plastered all over with Biblical texts. Now in the
same manner there is at the back of every artist's mind something like a
pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of
imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the
sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the
strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the _sort_ of thing that he
likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of
growth, governs all his creations however varied; and because he can in this
sense create a world, he is in this sense a creator; the image of God. Now
everybody knows what was in this sense the atmosphere and architecture of Poe.
Dark wine, dying lamps, drugging odours, a sense of being stifled in curtains
of black velvet, a substance which is at once utterly black and unfathomably
soft, all carried with them a sense of indefinite and infinite decay. The word
infinite is not itself used indefinitely. The point of Poe is that we feel that
_everything_ is decaying, including ourselves; faces are already growing
featureless like those of lepers; roof-trees are rotting from root to roof; one
great grey fungus as vast as a forest is sucking up life rather than giving it
forth; mirrored in stagnant pools like lakes of poison which yet fade without
line or frontier into the swamp. The stars are not clean in his sight; but are
rather more worlds made for worms. And this corruption is increased, by an
intense imaginative genius, with the addition of a satin surface of luxury and
even a terrible sort of comfort. "Purple cushions that the lamplight
gloated o'er" is in the spirit of his brother Baudelaire who wrote of
_divans profonds commes les tombeaux._ This dark luxury has something almost
liquid about it. Its laxity seems to be betraying more vividly how all these
things are being sucked away from us, down a slow whirlpool more like a moving
swamp. That is the atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; a sort of rich rottenness of
decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air. It is idle to
describe what so darkly and magnificently describes itself. But perhaps the shortest
and best way of describing that artistic talent is to say that Stevenson's is
exactly the opposite.
The first fact about the imagery of Stevenson is that all his images stand
out in very sharp outline; and are, as it were, all edges. It is something in
him that afterwards attracted him to the abrupt and angular black and white of
woodcuts. It is to be seen from the first, in the way in which his
eighteenth-century figures stand up against the skyline, with their cutlasses
and cocked hats. The very words carry the sound and the significance. It is as
if they were cut out with cutlasses; as was that unforgettable chip or wedge
that was hacked by the blade of Billy Bones out of the wooden sign of the
"Admiral Benbow." That sharp indentation of the wooden square remains
as a sort of symbolic shape expressing Stevenson's type of literary attack; and
if all the colours should fade from me and the scene of all that romance grow
dark, I think that black wooden sign with a piece bitten out of it would be the
last shape that I should see. It is no mere pun to say that it is the best of
his woodcuts. Normally, anyhow, the scene is the very reverse of dark, and
certainly the very reverse of indefinite. Just as all the form can best be
described as clean-cut, so all the colour is conspicuously clear and bright.
That is why such figures are so often seen standing against the sea. Everybody
who has been at the seaside has noted how sharp and highly coloured, like
painted caricatures, appear even the most ordinary figures as they pass in
profile to and fro against the blue dado of the sea. There is something also of
that hard light that falls full and pale upon ships and open shores; and even
more, it need not be said, of a certain salt and acrid clearness in the air. But
it is notably the case in the outlines of these maritime figures. They are all
edges and they stand by the sea, that is the edge of the world.
This is but a rough experimental method; but it will be found useful to
make the experiment, of calling up all the Stevensonian scenes that recur most
readily to the memory; and noting this bright hard quality in shape and hue. It
will make it seem all the stranger that any ornithologist could have confused
the raven of Poe with the parrot of Long John Silver. The parrot was scarce
more reputable; but he was a bird from the lands of bright plumage and blue
skies, where the other bird was a mere shadow making darkness more dark. It is
even worth noting that when the more modern pirates of _The Wrecker_ carried
away with them a caged bird, it had to be a canary. It is specially observed
when Stevenson is dealing with things which many of his contemporaries made
merely shadowy or unfathomably mysterious; such as the
These images are not fancies or accidents: their spirit runs through the
whole scene. The same incident, for instance, shows all the author's love of
sharp edges and cutting or piercing action. It is supremely typical that he
made Mrs. Durie thrust the sword up to the hilt into the frozen ground. It is
true that afterwards (perhaps under the sad eye of Mr. Archer and the sensitive
realists) he consented to withdraw this as "an exaggeration to stagger
Hugo." But it is much more significant that it did not originally stagger
Stevenson. It was the very vital gesture of all his works that that sharp blade
should cleave that stiff clay. It was true in many other senses, touching
mortal clay and the sword of the spirit. But I am speaking now of the gesture
of the craftsman, like that of a man cutting wood. This man had an appetite for
cutting it clean. He never committed a murder without making a clean job of it.
Whence did that spirit come; and how did the story of it begin? That is the
right and real way of beginning the story of Stevenson. If I say that it began
with cutting figures out of cardboard, it might sound like a parody of the
pedantic fancies about juvenile psychology and early education. But perhaps it
will be better even to run the horrid risk of being mistaken for a modern
educationist, rather than to repeat the too familiar phrases by which the
admirer of Stevenson has got himself described as a sentimentalist. Too much
has been talked in this connection about the Soul of the Child or the Peter Pan
of
If therefore we ask, "Where does the story of Stevenson really start;
where does his special style or spirit begin and where do they come from; how
did he get, or begin to get, the thing that made him different from the man
next-door?" I have no doubt about the answer. He got them from the
mysterious Mr. Skelt of the Juvenile Drama, otherwise the toy theatre, which of
all toys has most of the effect of magic on the mind. Or rather, of course, he got
it from the way in which his own individual temper and talent grasped the
nature of the game. He has written it all in an excellent essay and at least in
one very real sentence of autobiography. "What is the world, what is man
and life but what my Skelt has made them?" The psychological interest is
rather more special than is conveyed by the common generalisation about the
imagination of infancy. It is not merely a question of children's toys; it is a
question of a particular kind of toy, as of a particular kind of talent. It was
not quite the same thing, for instance, to buy toy theatres in
It was because he loved to see on those lines, and to think in those terms,
that all his instinctive images are clear and not cloudy; that he liked a gay
patch-work of colour combined with a zigzag energy of action, as quick as the
crooked lightning. He loved things to stand out; we might say he loved them to
stick out; as does the hilt of a sabre or the feather in a cap. He loved the
pattern of crossed swords; he almost loved the pattern of the gallows because
it is a clear shape like the cross. And the point is that this pattern still
runs through or underneath all his more mature or complex writing; and is never
lost even at the moments when he is really tragic or, what is worse, realistic.
Even when he mourns as a man, he still rejoices as a child. The men in divers'
helmets like monsters, in the sordid misery of _The Ebb-Tide,_ are still like
masks of pantomime goblins against the glowing azure. And James Durie is quite
as clear, we might say quite as bright, in his black coat as Alan Breck in his
blue one.
Taking such a toy as a type or symbol, we may well say that Stevenson lived
inside his toy theatre. It is certain that he lived in an exceptional sense
inside his own home; and often, I imagine, inside his own bedroom. It is here
that there appears, thus early in his life, that other element that was
destined to darken it, often with something like the shadow of death. I know
not how far that shadow could sometimes be traced upon the nursery wall. But it
is certain that he was at least relatively a delicate or sickly child; and was
therefore more thrown back upon that inner imaginative life than if he had been
more robust in boyhood. The world inside that home was largely a world of his
own; yes, even a world of his own imagining, a thing not so much of firelight
as of pictures in the fire. The world outside his home was very different, even
for those who shared his home life; and that is a contrast that I shall have
occasion to emphasise, when we come to the crisis of his youth. It is enough to
note here the paradox that he was to some extent protected by family life even
from the heavier traditions of his family. As it did not build lighthouses in
the garden pond, so it did not always bring the Kirk into the nursery. He has
described how his stern Calvinistic grandfather tolerated in the nursery the
wild Arabian fables that he might well have denounced in the pulpit. As even
that
In this matter of what has been called the Child in R. L. S., I have
admitted that there has been far too much talking; but there has been far too
little thinking. The thing is a reality; and it does remain as a very
considerable problem for the reason, as yet quite unsolved by the modern world,
even when most is said about it. We have a mass of testimony from men of every
description, from Treherne to Hazlitt, or from Wordsworth to Thackeray, to the
psychological fact that the child experiences joys which glow like jewels even
in retrospect. None of the normal naturalistic explanations explain that
natural fact; and some have suggested that it is indeed a supernatural fact. In
the ordinary sense of mental growth, there is no more reason for the child
being better than the man than for the tadpole being better than the frog. And
the attempts to explain it by physical growth are even weaker. There is a good
example of the weakness in one of the essays of Stevenson, who found himself,
of course, at the particular modern moment to catch the first fashion and
excitement of Darwinism. Speaking of the old Calvinist minister who confessed
the gorgeous spell of the _Arabian Nights,_ he suggests that in the brain of
the theologian there is still the gambolling ape; the ancestor of man;
"probably arboreal." It marks the security of such science, I may
remark, that anthropologists are now saying that he was probably not arboreal.
But anyhow, it is a little difficult to see why a man should love the
complexity of labyrinthine cities, or wish to ride with the jewelled cohorts of
the high princes of
The connection between the expanding energy of the young monkey and the
secret daydreams of the young child is equally close. As a matter of fact, the
time when the boy is most full of the energy of a monkey is emphatically not
the time when the child is most full of the imaginative pleasures of a poet.
These always come at a less vigorous period; they very often come to a less
vigorous person. They especially and notably did so in the case of Stevenson;
and it is absurd to explain the intensity of an infant who is an invalid by the
bodily exuberance of a lad at the time when he is often rather a lout.
Stevenson, with all the advantage of his disadvantages, may have lived through
the period when everybody has a touch of loutishness. But that uncomfortable
period of youth was not the period when the coloured pictures in his mind were
most clear; they were much clearer later in the age of self-control and earlier
in the age of innocence. The main point to be seized here is that they were
coloured pictures of a particular kind. The colours faded, but in a certain
sense the forms remained fixed; that is, that though they were slowly
discoloured by the light of common day, yet when the lantern was again lit from
within, the same magic-lantern slides glowed upon the blank screen. They were
still pictures of pirates and red gold and bright blue sea, as they were in his
childhood. And this fact is very important in the story of his mind; as we shall
see when his mind reverted to them. For the time was to come when he was truly,
like Jim Hawkins, to be rescued by a leering criminal with crutch and cutlass
from destiny worse than death and men worse than Long John Silver-- from the
last phase of the enlightened nineteenth century and the leading thinkers of
the age.
Chapter
III. Youth and Edinburgh
It is the suggestion of this chapter that when
Stevenson first stepped out of his early
It is an obvious truth that Stevenson was born of
a Puritan tradition, in a Presbyterian country, where still rolled the echoes,
at least, of the theological thunders of Knox; and where the Sabbath was
sometimes more like a day of death than a day of rest. It is easy, only too
easy, to apply this by representing Stevenson's father as a stern old
Covenanter who frowned down the gay talents of his son; and such a
simplification stands out boldly in black and white. But like many other black
and white statements, it is not true; it is not even fair. Old Mr. Stevenson
was a Presbyterian and presumably a Puritan, but he was not a Pharisee; and he
certainly did not need to be a Pharisee in order to condemn some parts of the
conduct of his son. It is probably true that almost any other son might have
offended equally; but it is also true that almost any other father would have
been equally offended. The son would have been the last to pretend that the
faults were all on one side; the only thing that can concern posterity in the
matter is certain social conditions which gave to those faults a particular
savour, which counted for something even when the faults themselves have been
long left behind. And while people have written rather too much about the
shadow of the Kirk and the restrictions of a Puritan society, there is
something that has not been seen about what may be called the underside of such
a Puritan city. There is something strangely ugly and ungracious not merely
about the virtues but about the vices, and especially the pleasures, of such a
place. It can be felt, as I say, in Stevenson's own stories and in many other
stories about
What was the matter with Stevenson, I fancy, in so
far as there was ever anything much the matter with him, was that there was too
sharp a contrast between the shelter and delicate fancies of his childhood and
the sort of world which met him like the wind on the front door-step. It was
not merely the contrast between poetry and Puritanism; it was also the contrast
between poetry and prose; and prose that was almost repulsively prosaic. He did
not believe enough in Puritanism to cling to it; but he did believe very much
in a potential poetry of life, and he was bewildered by its apparently
impossible position in the world of real living. And his national religion,
even if he had believed in his religion as ardently as he believed in his
nation, would never have met that particular point at issue.
Puritanism had no idea of purity. We might almost
say that there is every other virtue in Puritanism except purity; often
including continence, which is quite a different thing from purity. But it has
not many images of positive innocence; of the things that are at once white and
solid, like the white chalk or white wood which children love. This does not
detract at all from the noble Puritan qualities: the republican simplicity, the
fighting spirit, the thrift, the logic, the renunciation of luxuries, the
resistance to tyrants, the energy and enterprise which have helped to give the
Scot his adventurous advantage all over the world. But it is none the less true
that there has been in his creed, at best, negative rather than positive
purity: the difference between the blank white window and the ivory tower. I
know that a Victorian prejudice still regards this interpretation of history by
theology as a piece of most distressing bad taste. I also know that this taboo
on the main topic of mankind is becoming an intolerable nuisance; and
preventing anybody, from the Papist to the atheist, from saying what he really
thinks about the most real themes in the world. And I will take the liberty of
stating, in spite of the taboo, that it is really relevant here to remember
this Puritan defect. It is as much a fact that the Kirk of Stevenson's country
had no cult of the Holy Child, no feast of the Holy Innocents, no tradition of
the Little Brothers of St. Francis, nothing that could in any way carry on
the childish enthusiasm for simple things, and link it up with a lifelong rule
of life-- this is as much a fact as that the Quakers are not a good military
school or the good Moslem a good wine-taster. Hence it followed that when
Stevenson left his home, he shut the door on a house lined with fairy gold, but
he came out on a frightful contrast; on temptations at once attractive and
repulsive, and terrors that were still depressing even when they were
disregarded. The boy in such surroundings is torn by something worse than the
dilemma of Tannhäuser. He wonders why he is attracted by repellent things.
I will here make what is a mere guess in the dark;
and in a very dark matter of the mind. But I suspect that it was originally out
of this chasm of ugly division that there rose that two-headed monster, the
mystery of Jekyll and Hyde. There is indeed one peculiarity about that grim
grotesque which I have never seen noted anywhere; though I dare say it may have
been noted more than once. It will be realised that I am not, alas, so close a
student of Stevensoniana as many who seem to think much less of Stevenson. But
it seems to me that the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which is presumably presented
as happening in
I do not mean to imply that the morality of the
story itself has anything of weakness or morbidity; my opinion is very much the
other way. Though the fable may seem mad, the moral is very sane; indeed, the
moral is strictly orthodox. The trouble is that most of those who mention it do
not know the moral, possibly because they have never read the fable. From time
to time those anonymous authorities in the newspapers, who dismiss Stevenson
with such languid grace, will say that there is something quite cheap and obvious
about the idea that one man is really two men and can be divided into the evil
and the good. Unfortunately for them, that does not happen to be the idea. The
real stab of the story is not in the discovery that the one man is two men; but
in the discovery that the two men are one man. After all the diverse wandering
and warring of those two incompatible beings, there was still one man born and
only one man buried. Jekyll and Hyde have become a proverb and a joke; only it
is a proverb read backwards and a joke that nobody really sees. But it might
have occurred to the languid critics, as a part of the joke, that the tale is a
tragedy; and that this is only another way of saying that the experiment was a
failure. The point of the story is not that a man _can_ cut himself off from
his conscience, but that he cannot. The surgical operation is fatal in the
story. It is an amputation of which both the parts die. Jekyll, even in dying,
declares the conclusion of the matter; that the load of man's moral struggle is
bound upon him and cannot be thus escaped. The reason is that there can never
be equality between the evil and the good. Jekyll and Hyde are not twin
brothers. They are rather, as one of them truly remarks, like father and son.
After all, Jekyll created Hyde; Hyde would never have created Jekyll; he only
destroyed Jekyll. The notion is not so hackneyed as the critics find it, after
Stevenson has found it for them thirty years ago. But Jekyll's claim is not
that it is the first of such experiments in duality; but rather that it must be
the last.
Nor do I necessarily admit the technical
clumsiness which some have alleged against the tale, merely because I believe
that many of its emotions were first experienced in the crude pain of youth.
Some have gone into particular detail in order to pick it to pieces; and Mr. E.
F. Benson has made the (to me) strange remark that the structure of the story
breaks down when Jekyll discovers that his chemical combination was partly
accidental and is therefore unrecoverable. The critic says scornfully that it
would have done just as well if Jekyll had taken a blue pill. It seems to me
odd that any one who seems to know so much about the devil as the author of Colin
should fail to recognise the cloven hoof in the cloven spirit called up by the
Jekyll experiment. That moment in which Jekyll finds his own formula fail him,
through an accident he had never foreseen, is simply the supreme moment in
every story of a man buying power from hell; the moment when he finds the flaw
in the deed. Such a moment comes to Macbeth and Faustus and a hundred others;
and the whole point of it is that nothing is really secure, least of all a
Satanist security. The moral is that the devil is a liar, and more especially a
traitor; that he is more dangerous to his friends than his foes; and, with all
deference to Mr. Benson, it is not a shallow or unimportant moral. But although
the story ultimately emerged as a gargoyle very carefully graven by a mature
master-craftsman, and was moreover a gargoyle of the greatest spiritual
edification, eminently suited to be stuck on to the most sacred edifice, my
point for the moment is that the stone of which it was made was originally
found, I think, by Stevenson as a boy, kicking about the street, not to mention
the gutter. In other words, he did not need to leave the respectable metropolis
of the north to find the weaknesses of Jekyll and the crimes of Hyde.
I deal with these things in general terms, not
merely out of delicacy, but partly out of something that I might almost call
impatience or contempt. For the quarrels between the Victorian whitewashers and
the Post-Victorian mudslingers seem to me deficient in the ordinary decent
comprehension of the difficulties of human nature. Both the scandalised and the
scandalmonger seem to me to look very silly beside the sensible person in the
Bible, who confined himself to saying that there are things that no man knows,
such as the way of a bird in the air and the way of a man in his youth. That
Stevenson was in the mature and sane sense a good man is certain, without any
Victorian apologetics; that he never did anything that he thought wrong is
improbable, even without any elaborate cloacan researches; and the whole thing
is further falsified by the fact that, outside a certain religious tradition,
very few either of the whitewashers or the mudslingers really believe in the
morality involved. The former seek to save nothing better than respectability;
the latter even when they slander can hardly condemn. Stevenson was not a
Catholic: he did not pretend to have remained a Puritan; but he was a highly
honourable, responsible and chivalrous Pagan, in a world of Pagans who were
most of them considerably less conspicuous for chivalry and honour. I for one,
if I may say so, am ready to defend my own standards or to judge other men by
theirs. But the Victorian pretence that every well-dressed hero of romance with
over five hundred a year is born immune from the temptations which the
mightiest saints have rolled themselves in brambles to control-- that does not
concern me and I shall not discuss it again.
But what does concern me, at this particular stage
of the story, is not the question of what Stevenson thought right or wrong when
he had become consciously and consistently a Pagan, but the particular way in
which right and wrong appeared to him at this crude and groping age when he was
still by tradition a Puritan. And I do think there was something tail-foremost,
to use one of his own favourite words, in the way in which evil crept into his
existence, as it does into everybody else's. He saw the tail of the devil
before he saw his horns. Puritanism gave him the key rather to the cellars than
the halls of
Anyhow, he found no foothold on those steep
streets of his beautiful and precipitous city; and as he looked forth over the
litter of little islands in the large and shining estuary, he may have had some
foreshadowing of that almost vagabond destiny which ended in the ends of the
earth. There seemed in one sense no social reason why it should not end in
I think it was partly the pains of youth that afterwards
made so vivid to him the pleasures of childhood. The break in his life was of
course partly due to the break in his health. But it was also due, I think, to
something ragged and unseemly in the edge of life he laid hold of when he
touched the hem of her garment; to something unsatisfactory in all that side of
existence as it appears accidentally to the child of Puritan conventions. The
effect on him was that, during those years, he grew up too much out of touch
with his domestic and civic, if not his national traditions; knowing at once
too much and too little. He was never denationalised; for he was a Scotsman;
and a Scotsman never is, even when he is in theory internationalised. But he
did begin to become internationalised, in the sense that he gained a sort of
indiscriminate intimacy with the culture of the world, especially the rather
cynical sort of culture which was then current. The local and domestic
conventions, which were in many ways wrong, lost their power to control him
even when they were right. And in all that retrospect nothing remained so real
as the unreal romances of the first days. In the Puritan creeds there was
nothing that he could believe, even as much as he had believed in make-believe.
There was nothing to call him back half so clearly as the call of that childish
rhyme of which he afterwards wrote, in the touching dedication that has the
burden, "How far is it to
I say there was nothing to call him back; and very
little to restrain him; and to any one who really understands the psychology
and philosophy of that time of transition, it is really rather a wonder that he
was so restrained. All his after adventures will be misunderstood if we do not
realise that he left behind him a dead religion. Men are misled by the fact
that he often used the old national creed as a subject; which really means
rather that it had become an object. It was a subject that had ceased to be
subjective; he worked upon it and not with it. He and the inheritors of his
admirable tradition, like Barrie and Buchan, treated that national secret genially
and even tenderly; but their very tenderness was the first soft signal that the
thing was dead. At least they would never have so fondled the tiger-cat of
Calvinism until, for them, its teeth were drawn. Indeed this was the irony and
the pathos of the position of Scottish Calvinism: to be rammed down people's
throats for three hundred years as an unanswerable argument and then to be
inherited at the last as an almost indefensible affection; to be expounded to
boys with a scowl and remembered by men with a smile; to crush down all human
sentiments and to linger at last in the sentimental comedy of Thrums. All that
long agony of lucidity and masterful logic ended at last suddenly with a laugh;
and the laugh was Robert Louis Stevenson. With him the break had come; and it
follows that something in himself was broken. The whaups were crying round the
graves of the martyrs, and his heart remembered, but not his mind; great Knox
blew thrice upon the trumpet, and what thrilled him were no words but a noise;
Old Mortality seemed still to be tinkering on his eternal round to preserve the
memorials of the Covenant, but a bell had already tolled to announce that even
Old Mortality was mortal. When Stevenson stepped into the wider world of the
Continent, with its more graceful logic and even its more graceful vice, he
went as one emptied of all the ethics and metaphysics of his home, and open to
all the views and vices of a rationalistic civilisation. All the deeper lessons
of his early life must have seemed to him to be dead within him; nor did he
himself know what thing within him was yet alive.
Chapter
IV. The Reaction to Romance
When a man walks down the street with a very long
feather stuck in his hat and streaming behind him, or carrying a gold-hilted
rapier cocked at a gallant angle, there are some among the typists and clerks
of Clapham Junction shrewd enough to perceive that there is something faintly
ostentatious about him. And when a man walks down Piccadilly or the parade at
Bournemouth with long hair streaming behind him and surmounted by an
embroidered smoking-cap, there are not wanting critics so acute as to deduce
(with all the detailed shrewdness of Sherlock Holmes) that such a man is not
entirely averse from being looked at. Many long and laborious studies of
Stevenson have been published lately, to fortify and establish this remarkable
result; and I need not devote myself to proving it further. Let us record with
all due solemnity that Robert Louis Stevenson has been convicted by the court
of being very vain, if "dressing up" in the manner of a child, and
not resenting the consequent conspicuous position, be the marks of vanity. But
there is one aspect of this truth which seems to me to have been strangely and
even astonishingly overlooked. Everybody talks as if Stevenson had been not
only conspicuous but quite unique in this sort of vanity. Everybody seems to
assume that among the artists of his time he was entirely alone in his
affectation. Contrasting in this respect with the humdrum respectability of Oscar
Wilde, notable as the very reverse of the evangelical meekness of Jimmy
Whistler, standing out as he does against the stodgy chapel-going piety of Max
Beerbohm, having none of the cheery commonplaces of Aubrey Beardsley or the
prosaic self-effacement of Richard Le Gallienne, he naturally aroused attention
by the slightest deviation into oddity or dandyism; things notoriously so
unpopular among the decadents of the 'nineties. Among other things, everybody
seems to have forgotten that Stevenson lived for some time among the Parisian
art students; who have never been remarkable for the bourgeois regularity of
their coats and hats. Yet he actually mentions the offensive smoking-cap
himself as originating in the Bohemian masquerade of the Quartier Latin. There
he was not so much being eccentric as being conventional; for the convention
was unconventionality. A mob of men in that place and at that age, would have
played the same sort of tricks and worn the same kind of clothes; nor was
Stevenson, as I have said, the only one of them who carried these attitudes and
antics through life. Any one of them might have worn a smoking-cap; none of
them would have objected to any variety of fool's cap, though they hardly
wished it identified with a dunce's cap. Many of them, still alive, would
cheerfully admit that the cap fits. But poor Stevenson is to be remembered as a
fool, because all the fools are forgotten except Stevenson.
It was not that sort of oddity that was really
odd. The costume for which he is now conspicuous was really part of a carnival.
The attitude in which he stands, to the astonishment and grief of the critics,
was really the fashion of a crowd. But what was really individual and
interesting about him was the way in which he did actually react against the
surroundings; the point at which he refused to run with the crowd or follow the
fashion. No insanity in that cheerful lunatic asylum is so interesting to the
psychologist as the shock of Stevenson going sane. No romantic ruffianism in
which he may or may not have indulged is so curious as the real spirit of his
revolt into respectability.
This was the spirit that was behind all that
levity; a levity that was like fireworks in more ways than one. We talk of some
Whistlerian satire as a squib; but squibs can only shine in the dark. It is all
the difference between the colours of fireworks that have their back to the
vault of night and the colours of church windows that have their backs to the
sun. For these people all the light of life was in the foreground; there was
nothing in the background but an abyss. They were rather nihilists than
atheists; for there is a difference between worshipping Nothing and not
worshipping anything. Now the interest of the next stage of Stevenson is that
he stood up suddenly amid all these things and shook himself with a sort of
impatient sanity; a shrug of scepticism about scepticism. His real distinction
is that he had the sense to see that there is nothing to be done with Nothing.
He saw that in that staggering universe it was absolutely necessary to stand
somehow on something; and instead of falling about anyhow with all the other
lunatics, he did seek for a ledge on which he could really stand. He did
definitely and even dramatically refuse to go mad; or, what is very much worse,
to remain futile. But the whole turning-point of the tale is now missed; partly
by the too concentrated idolatry of the sentimentalists, and partly by the too
concentrated spite of the iconoclasts. They miss the historic relation
of the man to his time and school. It was one of the crowd of artists who
showed mutinous signs of deserting art for life. It was even one of the
decadents who refused to decay.
Now what really remains interesting in this story
of Stevenson, in spite of all the vain repetitions, is the authority to which
he appealed. It was rather an odd one; and many would have said that his sanity
was madder than madness. He did not appeal to any ideal of the sort usually
pursued by idealists; he did not try to construct an optimist philosophy like
Spinoza or Emerson; he did not preach a good time coming like William Morris or
Wells; he did not appeal to Imperialism or Socialism or
Familiarity had dulled the divine paradox that we
should learn morality from little children. He advanced the more disturbing
paradox that we should learn morality from little boys. The young child who
should lead us was the common (or garden) little boy: the boy of the catapult
and the toy pistol--and the toy theatre. Stevenson seemed to say to the
semi-suicides drooping round him at the café tables; drinking absinthe and
discussing atheism: "Hang it all, the hero of a penny-dreadful play was a
better man than you are! A
Thus, Skelt and his puppets seemed made for a
repartee to the favourite phrases of the pessimists. All that world was haunted
as with melody by the hedonist despair of Fitzgerald's Omar: one of the great
historical documents of this history. No image could make them bow their heads
with more hopelessness and helplessness of despair than that famous one:
"We are none other than a moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go
Around the sun-illumined lantern held
At midnight by the Master of the show."
And no image could make the infant Stevenson kick
his little legs with keener joy. His answer, in effect, to the philosophy of
the magic shadow-shapes, was that the shadow-shapes really were magic. At any
rate, they really did seem to the children to be magic: and it was not false
but true psychology to call the thing a magic lantern. He was capable of feeling
passionate delight in being such a Lantern-Bearer. He was capable even of
feeling passionate delight in being such a shadow. And any one who has seen a
shadow pantomime as a child, as I have, and who has retained any living link
with his own childhood, will realise that Omar was as unlucky in his commentary
on the lantern-show as the delightful curate in Voces Populi who talked
about Valentine and Orson. He was teaching optimism as an illustration to
pessimism. Later we may make a guess at the nature of this glamour about such
tricks or toys; the point for the moment is that they were associated with
gloom in philosophy, while they were associated with pleasure in psychology.
The same applies to more common examples of the fancies of the fatalist. When
the sage said that men are "only puppets," it must have seemed to the
young Louis almost like the blasphemy of saying they were "only
pirates." It might well seem to any child like saying that they were only
fairies. There was something weak about bewailing drearily the fate of the
puppets of destiny, to an audience that was eagerly awaiting the joyful
apocalypse of a puppet-show. The Stevensonian reaction might be roughly
represented by the suggestion--if we are as futile as puppets, is there
anything particular to prevent our being as entertaining, as Punch? And there
is, as I say, a real spiritual mystery behind this mystical ecstasy of mimicry.
If living dolls were so dull and dead, why in the world were dead dolls so very
much alive? And if being a puppet is so depressing, how is it that the puppet
of a puppet can be so enthralling?
It is to be noted that this sort of romanticism,
as compared with realism, is not more superficial, but on the contrary
more fundamental. It is an appeal from what is experienced to what is felt.
When people are avowedly talking about happiness and unhappiness, as the
pessimists were, it is futile to say that shadows and sham pasteboard figures ought
not to make people happy. It was futile to tell the young Stevenson that the
toy-theatre shop was a dingy booth stocked with dusty rolls of paper, covered
with ill-drawn and ungainly figures; and to insist that these were the only
facts. He naturally answered: "My facts were my feelings; and what do you
make of those facts? Either there is something in Skelt; which you do not
admit. Or else there is something in Life; which you also do not admit."
Hence arose that answer to the realists which is best expressed in the essay
called The Lantern-Bearers. The realists, who overlook so many details,
have never quite noticed where lay the falsity of their method; it lay in the
fact that so long as it was materialistic, it could not really be realistic.
For it could not be psychological. If toys and trifles can make people happy,
that happiness is not a trifle and certainly cannot be a trick.
This is the point that has been missed in all the
talk about posing. Those who repeat for the hundredth time that he posed have
not got as far as the obvious question, "Posed as what?" All the
other poets and artists posed; but they posed as the members of the Suicide
Club. He posed as Prince Florizel with a sword, challenging the President of
the Suicide Club. He was, if you will, the foolish masker I have imagined,
tricked out with a feather and a sword or dagger; but not tricked out more
extravagantly than those who appeared as fantastic figures at their own
funeral. If he had a feather, it was not a white feather; if he had a dagger,
it was not a poisoned dagger or the pessimist dagger that is turned inwards; in
short, if he had a posture it was a posture of defence and even of defiance.
And it was, after all, the fashionable posture of his time which he set himself
to defy. And it is here that it is really relevant to remember that he was not
altogether posturing when he said he was defying death. Death was much nearer
to him than it was to the pessimists; and he knew it whenever he coughed and
found blood on his handkerchief. He was not pretending to defy it half so much
as they were pretending to seek it. It is no very unreasonable claim for him
that he made a better use of his bad health than Oscar Wilde made of his good
health; and nothing affected in the externals of either can alter the contrast.
The dagger may have been theatrical; but the blood was real. As Cyrano said of
his friend, "Le sang, c'est le sien." And it really was the absence
of courage in the current culture that awoke his protest or pose. In any case,
the intellectual fine shades were morally more than a little shady. But he hated
chiefly the loss of what soldiers call morale rather than what parsons call
morality. All that world cowered under the shadow of death. All alike were
travelling under the flag of the skull and crossbones. But he alone could call
it the Jolly Roger.
What is really not appreciated about Stevenson is
the abruptness of this breakaway. We talk of looking back with gratitude to
innovators or the introducers of new ideas; but in fact nothing is more
difficult to do, since for us they are now necessarily old ideas. There is only
one moment, at most, of triumph for the original thinker; while his thought is
an originality and before it becomes merely an origin. News spreads quickly;
that is, it grows stale quickly; and though we may call a work wonderful, we cannot
easily put ourselves in the position of those for whom it was a cause of
wonder, in the sense of surprise. Between the first fashion of talking too much
in praise of Stevenson, and the newer fashion of talking nonsense in
disparagement of Stevenson, we have become quite familiar with the association
of certain ideas; of extreme stylistic polish applied to rough schoolboy
adventure, of the
Thus, there is one of those phrases quoted too
much, as against so many quoted too little, that he and his artistic friends
bore with them bulky yellow volumes "quite impudently French." But,
by the tests of that artistic world,
In other words, he appealed to his own childhood.
A tale is told of it: that when some one chaffed him about a toy sword he
replied solemnly, "The hilt is of gold and the scabbard of silver and the
child is well content." It was to that moment that he suddenly returned.
Groping for something that would satisfy, he found nothing so solid as that
fancy. That had not been Nothing; that had not been pessimistic; that was not a
life over which Lazarus could do nothing but weep. That was as positive as the
paints in the paint-box and the difference between vermilion and chrome yellow.
Its pleasures had been as solid as the taste of sweets; and it was nonsense to
say that there had been nothing in them worth living for. Play at least is
always serious. So long as we can say, "Let us pretend," we must be
sincere. Therefore he appealed across the void or valley of his somewhat
sterile youth to that garden of childhood, which he had once known and which
was his nearest notion of paradise. There were no shrines in the faith or in
the city of his fathers; there were no channels of consecration or confession;
there was no imagery save in the faceless images left behind by the
image-breakers. A man in his mood of reaction towards happiness, might almost
as well have prayed to the Black Man who figured as the Scottish provincial
devil as to the God behind the black cloud that sent out such stiff horrific
rays in the Calvinist family Bible. But in all that waste of Scottish moorland,
the sun still glowed on that square of garden like a patch of gold. The lessons
were lost, but the toys were eternal; the men had been harsh, but the child had
been well content; if there were nothing better, he would return.
In the elementary philosophy of the thing, of
course, what moved Stevenson was what moved Wordsworth; the unanswerable fact
of that first vividness in the vision of life. But he had it in his own quaint
way; and it was hardly the vision of meadow, grove and stream. It was rather
the vision of coffin, gallows and gory sabre that were apparelled in celestial
light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. But he was appealing to a sort
of sanguinary innocence against a sort of silent and secretive perversion.
Here, as everywhere in this rude outline, I am taking a thing like
But whatever be the case with most boys, there was
certainly one boy who enjoyed
Chapter V. The Scottish Stories
Proverbs are generally true, when they are the proverbs of the people; so
long as they are not proverbs about another people. It was unwise to search
There is an aspect of a Scottish hill or moor, which for the moment will
look grey and at the least change of light look purple; which is in itself an
image of
The two novels about David Balfour are very notable examples of what I have
mentioned generally as the Stevensonian note; the brisk and bright treatment,
the short speeches, the sharp gestures and the pointed profile of energy, as of
a man following his nose very rapidly along the open road. The great scenes in Kidnapped,
the defence of the Round House or the confrontation of Uncle Ebenezer and Alan
Breck, are full of those snapping phrases that seem to pick things off like
pistol shots. A whole essay on the style of Stevenson, such as I shall attempt
forlornly and ineffectually on another page, might be written by a real critic
on the phrase, "His sword flashed like quicksilver into the huddle of our
fleeing enemies." The fact that the name of a certain metal happens to
combine the word "silver" with the word "quick" is simply a
rather recondite accident; but the art of Stevenson consisted in taking
advantage of such accidents. To those who say that such tricks are easy to play
or such words easy to find, the only answer is, "Go and find them."
An author cannot create words, unless he be the happy author of Jaberwocky
or The Land Where the Jumblies Live; but the nearest he can come to
creating them is finding them in such a fashion and for such a use. The
characters in the story are excellent, though perhaps there are really only two
of them. There are more in the sequel called Catriona; and the study of
the Lord Advocate Prestongrange is a highly interesting attempt to do a very
difficult thing; to describe a politician who has not altogether ceased to be a
man. The dialogue is spirited and full of fine Scottish humours, but all these
things are almost as secondary in Kidnapped and Catriona as they
are in
But though the thing is to be criticised (and admired) strictly as an
adventure story, there are side-lights of interest about it considered as a
historical novel. It carries on a rather curiously balanced critical attitude,
partly inherited from the attitude of Sir Walter Scott; the paradox of being
intellectually on the side of the Whigs and morally on the side of the
Jacobites. There is enough moral material, in the story of the long legal
murder of James of the Glens, to raise a whole clan of Jacobites and roll them
red-hot down the pass of Killiecrankie. But there still stands over against it
the large legal assumption that in some sort of way all these things will be
for the best, which is the inheritance of the providential view of the
Presbyterian settlement. Similarly, it is obvious in the earlier story that
David Balfour does not really differ very much from Alan Breck, in his view of
the oppression of the
But this curious and sometimes inconsistent mingling of the grey Whiggery
with the purple Jacobite romance, in the traditional sentiment of such Scots as
Stevenson, is connected with much deeper things touching the hold that their
history had upon them. It is necessary to state at this stage that there is
really and seriously an influence of Scottish Puritanism upon Stevenson; though
I think it rather a philosophy partially accepted by his intellect than the
special ideal that was the secret of his heart. But every philosopher is affected
by philosophy; even if, as in the immortal instance in Boswell, cheerfulness is
always breaking out. And there was a part of Stevenson's mind that was not
cheerful; which I think, in some manifestations, was not even healthy. And yet
the tribute of truth is due to that special Scottish element; that even when we
say it was not healthy, we can hardly venture to say it was not strong. It was
the shadow of that ancient heathen fatalism, which in the seventeenth century
had taken the hardly less heathen form of Calvinism; and which had sounded in
so many Scottish tragedies with a note of doom. We appreciate it sharply when
we turn from his two Scottish comedies of adventure to his third Scottish
romance, which is a tragedy of character. It is true, as may be noted later,
that even into this concentrated drama of sin and sorrow there enters a curious
and rather incongruous element of the adventure story; like a fragment of the
former adventures of David or Jim. But leaving that aside for the moment, we must
do justice to the dignity which is given to the story itself by its more sombre
scenery and its sterner creed. Stevenson showed his perfect instinct when he
called it A Winter's Tale. It is his one story in black and white, and I
cannot recall one word that is a patch of colour.
In touching on the rather neglected point of the nastier side of Puritan
sociology, the raw and barbarous flavour about its evil and excess, I may have
seemed to underrate the higher though harsher aspects of Scottish Puritanism. I
do not mean to do so; and certainly nobody can afford to do so in attempting an
adequate study of Stevenson. He remained to the day of his death in some ways
particularly loyal to the Presbyterian tradition; I might say to the
Presbyterian prejudices; and at least in one or two cases to the Presbyterian
antipathies. But I think it was mostly rather a case of the modern religion of
patriotism, as against the larger patriotism of religion. Like many other men
of frank, tart and humorous prejudices (which are the sort of prejudices that
need never prejudice us against a man) he was apt to see in some foreign things
the evils to which he had grown accustomed in native things; and to start again
the great international dispute of the pot and the kettle. It is amusing, for
instance, to find the young Scotsman in Olalla gravely disapproving of
the grim Spanish crucifix, with its tortured and grimacing art; and presumably
leaving that land of religious gloom, to go back and enjoy the charm and gaiety
of Thrawn Janet. If there was ever grim and grimacing art, one would think it
was in that twisted figure; and even Stevenson admitted that Olalla got more
comfort from the crucifix than Janet from the minister; or, I will add, the
minister from the ministry. Indeed, stories of this kind are told by Stevenson
with a deliberate darkening of the Scottish landscape and exultation in the
ferocity of the Scottish creed. But it would be quite a mistake to miss in this
a certain genuine national pride running through all the abnormal artistry; and
a sense that the strength of the tribal tragedy testifies in a manner to the
strength of the tribe.
It might be maintained that the best effect of the Scotsman's religious
training was teaching him to do without his religion. It enabled him to survive
as a certain sort of freethinker; one who, unlike his more familiar fellows, is
not so intoxicated with freedom as to forget to think. It might be said that
among the Scots, so far from a sentimental religiosity taking the place of dogmatic
religion (as is generally the case among the English), something like the very
opposite had occurred. When the religion was dead, the theology remained: at
any rate, the taste for theology remained. It remained because, whatever else
it is, theology is at least a form of thought. Stevenson certainly retained
this turn of mind long after his beliefs, like those of most of his generation,
had been simplified to vanishing point. He was, as
From time to time I have insensibly and inevitably fallen into a tone of
defending Stevenson, as if he needed defence. And indeed I do think that he
needs some defence; though not upon the points in which it is now considered
necessary to defend him. I do feel a certain impatience with the petty
depreciation of our own time, which seems much more frivolous and far less
generous than the boom of a best-seller. I do feel a certain contempt for those
who call every phrase affected that happens to be effective; or who charge a
man with talking for effect, as if there were anything else to talk for. But I
should think it very unfair to revile the revilers of Stevenson, without taking
the risk of saying where I think he is, if not to be reviled, at least to be
rebuked. There was, I think, a weaker strain in Stevenson; but it is the very
opposite of the weakness now generally alleged by critics; indeed it is the
very opposite of what they would probably regard as weak. The excuse for it, in
so far as it existed to be excused, was in the very direction of that sharp
turn which he took in early life, when he turned his back upon the decadents. I
have already said, and it can hardly be said too often, that the story of Stevenson
was a reaction against an age of pessimism. Now the real objection to being a
reactionary is that a reactionary, as such, hardly ever avoids reacting into
evil and exaggeration. The opposite of the heresy of pessimism was the twin
heresy of optimism. Stevenson was not at all attracted to a placid and pacific
optimism. But he did begin to be too much attracted to a sort of insolent and
oppressive optimism. The reaction from the idea that what is good is always
unsuccessful is the idea that what is good is always victorious. And from that
many slide into the worse delusion; that what is victorious is always good.
In the days when Stevenson's ancestors the Covenanters were fighting with
the Cavaliers, a fine old Cavalier of the Episcopalian persuasion made a rather
interesting remark; that the change he really hated was represented by saying
"The Lord" instead of "Our Lord." The latter implied
affection, the former only fear; indeed he described the former succinctly as
the talk of devils. And this is so far true that the very eloquent language in
which the name of "The Lord" has figured has generally been the
language of might and majesty and even terror. And there really was implied in
it in varying degrees the idea of glorifying God for His greatness rather than
His goodness. And again there occurred the natural inversion of ideas. Since
the Puritan was content to cry with the Moslem: "God is great," so
the descendant of the Puritan is always a little inclined to cry with the Nietzschean:
"Greatness is God." In some of the really evil extremes, this
sentiment shaded darkly into a sort of diabolism. In Stevenson it was very
faintly present; but it is occasionally felt; and by me (I must confess) felt
as a fault. It is faintly felt, for instance, in the next great Scottish
romance, The Master of Ballantrae; it is felt more definitely, I
think, in the last Scottish romance of Weir of Hermiston. In the
first case, Stevenson said in his correspondence, in a tone that was humorous
and healthy enough, that The Master was all he knew of The Devil. I do not in
the least object to The Master being The Devil. But I do object to a subtle
subconscious something, which every now and then seems almost to suggest that
he is The Lord. I mean The Lord in the vague sense of a certain authority in
aristocracy, or even in mere mastery. Perhaps I even dimly feel that there is
the distant thunder of The Lord in the very title of The Master.
This thing, however we define it and in whatever degree we admit it, had
advanced in several degrees when he wrote the later story. Perhaps it was
partly the influence of
For I am not blaming him for having any such evil, in the sense of having any
excess of it. I blame him, being what he was, for having even a touch of it.
But I think it is unfortunately certain that he did have a touch of it. There
is something almost cruel in thus tracing the innocent springs of cruelty. But,
as has been said so often and so foolishly and so truly, Robert Louis Stevenson
was a child. It is the moral of these chapters about his nation, his city and
his home, that he was also something more than a child. He was a lost child.
There was nothing to guide him in the mad movements and reactions of modernity;
neither his nation nor his religion nor his irreligion were equal to the task.
He had no chart for that gallant voyage; he was hardly to blame if he thought
he had to choose between the savage rock of the pride of Scylla and the
suicidal whirlpool of the despair of Charybdis. Only, like Ulysses, for all his
adventurousness, he was always trying to get home. To vary the metaphor, his
face was for ever turning like the sunflower towards the sun, even if it were
behind a cloud; and perhaps after all there is nothing truer than the too
familiar phrase from the diary of the doctor or the nurse; that he was a sick
child,
who passed his life in trying to get well.
Chapter VI. The Style of Stevenson
Before writing this chapter I ought to explain that I am quite incapable of
writing it; at least as many serious literary authorities think it ought to be
written. I am one of those humble characters for whom the main matter of style
is concerned with making a statement; and generally, in the case of Stevenson,
with telling a story. Style takes its own most living and therefore most
fitting form from within; as the narrative quickens and leaps, or the statement
becomes warm or weighty, by being either authoritative or argumentative. The
sentence takes its shape from motion; as it takes its motion from motive. And
the motive (for us outcasts) is what the man has to say. But there is a
technical treatment of style for which I have a profound respect, but it is a
respect for the unknown, not to say the unintelligible. I will not say it is
Greek to me, for I know the Greek alphabet and I do not know the alphabet of
these grammars of cadence and sequence; I can still even read the Greek
Testament, but the gospel of pure and abstract English brings me no news. I
salute it, from afar as I do musical harmony or the higher mathematics; but I
shall not introduce into this book a chapter on any of these three topics. When
I speak of the style of Stevenson I mean the manner in which he could express
himself in plain English, even if it were in some ways peculiar English; and I
have nothing but the most elementary English with which to criticise it. I
cannot use the terms of any science of language, or even any science of
literature.
Mr. Max Beerbohm, whose fine and classic criticism is full of those shining
depths that many mistake for shallowness, has remarked truly enough on the
rather wearisome repetitions in the newspapers, which did great harm to the
Stevensonian fame at the time of the Stevensonian fashion. He noticed
especially that a certain phrase used by Stevenson about his early experiments
in writing, that he has "played the sedulous ape" to Hazlitt or to
Lamb, must be permanently kept in type in the journalistic offices, so
frequently do the journalists quote it. There are about a thousand things in
Stevenson much more worth quoting, and much more really enlightening about his
education in letters. Every young writer, however original, does begin by
imitating other people, consciously or unconsciously, and nearly every old
writer would be quite as willing to admit it. The real irony in the incident
seems never to have been noticed. The real reason why this confession of
plagiarism, out of a hundred such confessions, is always quoted, is because the
confession itself has the stamp not of plagiarism but of personal originality.
In the very act of claiming to have copied other styles, Stevenson writes most
unmistakably in his own style. I think I could have guessed amid a hundred
authors who had used the expression "played the sedulous ape." I do
not think that Hazlitt would have added that word "sedulous." Some
might say he was the better because the simpler without it; some would say that
the word is in the strict sense too recherché;; some might say it can be
recognised because it is strained or affected. All that is matter for argument;
but it is rather a joke when so individual a trick is made a proof of being
merely imitative. Anyhow, that sort of trick, the rather curious combination of
two such words, is the thing I mean by the style of Stevenson.
In the case of Stevenson, criticism has always tended to be hypercriticism.
It is as if the critic were strung up to be as strict with the artist as the
artist was with himself. But they are not very consistent or considerate in the
matter. They blame him for being fastidious; and so become more fastidious
themselves. They condemn him for wasting time in trying to find the right word;
and then waste more time in not very successful attempts to prove it is the
wrong word. I remember that Mr. George Moore (who at least led the attack when
Stevenson was alive and at the height of his popularity) professed in a
somewhat mysterious manner to have exposed or exploded the whole trick of
Stevenson, by dwelling at length on the word "interjected": in the
passage which describes a man stopping a clock with interjected finger. There
seemed to be some notion that because the word is unusual in that use, it
showed that there was nothing but artificial verbalism in the whole tragedy of Jekyll
and Hyde or the fun of The Wrong Box. I think it is time that this
sort of fastidiousness about fastidiousness should be corrected with a little
common sense. The obvious question to ask Mr. Moore, if he objects to the word
"interjected," is, "What word would you use?" He would
immediately discover that any other word would be much weaker and even much
less exact. To say "interposed finger" would suggest by its very
sound a much clumsier and less precise action; "interjected" suggests
by its very sound a sort of jerk of neatness; a mechanical neatness correcting
mechanism. In other words, it suggests what it was meant to suggest. Stevenson
used the word because it was the right word. Nobody else used it, because nobody
else thought of it. And that is the whole story of Stevensonian style.
Literature is but language; it is only a rare and amazing miracle by which
a man really says what he means. It is inevitable that most conversation should
be convention; as when we cover a myriad beautiful contrasts or comedies of
opposites by calling any number of different people "nice." Some
writers, including Stevenson, desired (in the old and proper sense) to be more
nice in their discrimination of niceness. Now whether we like such fastidious
felicities or no, whether we are individually soothed or irritated by a style
like that of Stevenson, whether we have any personal or impersonal reason for
impatience with the style or the man, we ought really to have enough critical
impartiality and justice to see what is the literary test. The test is whether
the words are well or ill chosen, not for the purpose of fitting our own taste
in words, but for the purpose of satisfying everybody's sense of the realities
of things. Now it is nonsense for anybody who pretends to like literature not
to see the excellence of Stevenson's expression in this way. He does pick the
words that make the picture that he particularly wants to make. They do fix a
particular thing, and not some general thing of the same sort; yet the thing is
often one very difficult to distinguish from other things of the same sort.
That is the craft of letters; and the craftsman made a vast multitude of such
images in all sorts of materials. In this matter we may say of Stevenson very
much what he said of Burns. He remarked that Burns surprised the polite world,
with its aesthetes and antiquarians, by never writing poems on waterfalls,
ruined castles or other recognised places of interest; the very fact, of
course, which showed Burns to be a poet and not a tourist. It is always the
prosaic person who demands poetic subjects. They are the only subjects about
which he can possibly be poetic. But Burns, as Stevenson said, had a natural
gift of lively and flexible comment that could play as easily upon one thing as
another; a kirk or a tavern or a group going to market or a pair of dogs in the
street. This gift must be judged by its aptness, its vividness and its range;
and anybody who suggests that Stevenson's talent was only one piece of thin
silver polished perpetually in its napkin does not, in the most exact and
emphatic sense, know what he is talking about. Stevenson had exactly the talent
he attributes to Burns of touching nothing that he did not animate. And so far
from hiding one talent in one napkin, it would be truer to say that he became
ruler over ten cities; set in the ends of the earth. Indeed the last phrase
alone suggests an example or a text.
I will take the case of one of his books; I deliberately refrain from
taking one of his best books. I will take _The Wrecker,_ a book which many
would call a failure and which nobody would call a faultless artistic success,
least of all the artist. The picture breaks out of the frame; indeed it is
rather a panorama than a picture. The story sprawls over three continents; and
the climax has too much the air of being only the last of a long string of
disconnected passages. It has the look of a scrap-book; indeed it is very
exactly a sketch-book. It is merely the sketch-book of Loudon Dodd, the
wandering art student never allowed to be fully an artist; just as his story is
never allowed to be fully a work of art. He sketches people with the pen as he
does with the pencil, in four or five incongruous societies, in the commercial
school of Muskegon or the art school of Paris, in the east wind of Edinburgh or
the black squall of the South Seas; just as he sketched the four fugitive
murderers gesticulating and lying in the Californian saloon. The point is (on
the strict principles of _l'art pour l'art,_ so dear to Mr. Dodd) that he
sketched devilish well. We can take the portraits of twenty social types in
turn, taken from six social worlds utterly shut out from each other, and find
in every case that the strokes are at once few and final; that is, that the
word is well chosen out of a hundred words and that one word does the work of
twenty. The story starts: "The beginning of this yarn is my poor father's
character"; and the character is compact in one paragraph. When Jim
Pinkerton first strides into the story and is described as a young man
"with cordial, agitated manners," we walk through the rest of the
narrative with a living man; and listen not merely to words, but to a voice. No
other two adjectives could have done the trick. When the shabby and shady
lawyer, with his cockney culture and underbred refinement, is first introduced
as handling a big piece of business beyond his _metier,_ he bears himself
"with a sort of shrinking assumption." The reader, especially if he
is not a writer, may imagine that such words matter little; but if he supposes
that it might just as well have been "flinching pride" or
"quailing arrogance" he knows nothing about writing and perhaps not
much about reading. The whole point is in that hitting of the right nail on the
head; and rather more so when the nail is such a very battered little tintack
as Mr. Henry D. Bellairs of
This was the genius of Stevenson; and it is simply silly to complain of it
because it was Stevensonian. I do not blame either of the other two novelists
for not being somebody else. But I do venture to blame them a little for
grumbling because Stevenson was himself. I do not quite see why he should be
covered with cold depreciation merely because he could put into a line what
other men put into a page; why he should be regarded as superficial because he
saw more in a man's walk or profile than the moderns can dig out of his
complexes and his subconsciousness; why he should be called artificial because
he sought (and found) the right word for a real object; why he should be
thought shallow because he went straight for what was significant, without
wading towards it through wordy seas of insignificance; or why he should be
treated as a liar because he was not ashamed to be a story-teller.
Of course there are many other vivid marks of Stevenson's style, besides
this particular element of picked and pointed phrase, or rather especially the
combination of picked and pointed phrases. I might make much more than I have
made out of something in his rapidly stepping sentences, especially in
narrative, which corresponds to his philosophy of the militant attitude and the
active virtues. That word angular, which I have been driven to use too often,
belongs to the sharpness of his verbal gestures as much as to the cutlasses and
choppers of his paste-board pirates. Those early theatrical figures, from the
sketch-book of Skelt, were all of them in their nature like snapshots of people
in swift action. Three-Fingered Jack could not have remained permanently with
the cudgel or the sabre swung about his head nor Robin Hood with the arrow
drawn to his ear; and the descriptions of Stevenson's characters are seldom
static but rather dynamic descriptions; and deal rather with how a man did or
said something than with what he was like. The sharp and shrewd Scottish style
of Ephraim Mackellar or David Balfour seems by its very sound exactly fitted to
describe a man snapping his fingers or rapping with his stick. Doubtless so
careful an artist as Stevenson varied his style to suit the subject and the
speaker; we should not look for these dry or abrupt brevities in the dilettante
deliberations of Loudon Dodd; but I know very few of the writer's works in
which there are not, at the crisis, phrases as short and sharp as the knife
that Captain Wicks rammed through his own hand. Something should also have been
said, of course, of the passages in which Stevenson deliberately plays on a
somewhat different musical instrument; as when he exercised upon Pan's Pipes in
respectful imitation of Meredith upon a penny whistle. Something should have
been said of the style of his poems; which are perhaps more successful in their
phraseology than their poetry. But these again teem with these taut and
trenchant separate phrases; the description of the interlacing branches like
crossed swords in battle; the men upholding the falling skies like unfrowning
caryatids; the loud stairs of honour and the bright eyes of danger. But I have
already explained that I profess no scientific thoroughness about these
problems of execution; and can only speak of the style of Stevenson as it
specially affects my own taste and fancy. And the thing that strikes me most is
still this sense of somebody being pinked with a rapier in a particular button;
of a sort of fastidiousness that has still something of the fighting spirit,
that aims at a mark and makes a point, and is certainly not merely an idle
trifling with words for the sake of their external elegance or intrinsic
melody. As a part of the present criticism, such a statement is only another
way of saying, in the old phrase, that the style is the man; and that the man
was certainly a man and not only a man of letters. I find everywhere, even in
his mere diction and syntax, that theme that is the whole philosophy of
fairy-tales, of the old romances and even of the absurd libretto of the little
theatre-- the conception that man is born with hope and courage indeed, but
born outside that which he was meant to attain; that there is a quest, a test,
a trial by combat or pilgrimage of discovery; or, in other words, that whatever
else man is he is not sufficient to himself, either through peace or through
despair. The very movement of the sentence is the movement of a man going
somewhere and generally fighting something; and that is where optimism and
pessimism are alike opposed to that ultimate or potential peace, which the
violent take by storm.
Chapter VII. Experiment and
Range
In any generalisation about Stevenson, it is of course easy to forget that
his work was very varied, in the sense of being very versatile. In one sense,
he tried very different styles; and was always very careful only to try one
style at a time. The unity of each accentuates the diversity of all. The very
fact that he was careful to keep each several study in its own tone or tint,
makes the range of his work look more like a patchwork than it really is. It is
always a sharp contrast between complete and homogeneous things; when these
things are broken up into subdivisions, the whole falls back into a more mixed
but a more general pattern. In one sense this is merely a platitude. It would
hardly be difficult to point out that the style of Prince Otto is very
different from the style of The Wrong Box. It is different with the whole
difference between a man working in wax or cardboard or ivory or ebony. Prince
Otto is a sort of china shepherdess group, practising arcadian courtliness
in an eighteenth-century park; the other is a sort of Aunt Sally pelted with
comic misfortunes as if with cocoanuts. Nobody is likely to confuse these forms
of art; nobody sets up a china shepherdess to be pelted with cocoanuts; few are
so chivalrous as to approach their Aunt Sally with the deferential bows of a
courtier. But when we get past this obvious contrast, which nobody could
possibly miss, we find that (in a queer manner) there is versatility without
variety. What makes those two stories stand out in our memory is a certain
spirit with which they are told; yes, and even a certain style as well as
spirit. It is not exactly the stories themselves; still less is it any real
immersion of the author in the subjects of the stories themselves. We feel,
even as we read, that Stevenson would be the last man really to wish to be
imprisoned for life in a petty German court or poised for ever amid such very
fragile china. We know it, just as we know that Stevenson does not really
intend to turn his attention to the leather-business, or even (though here we
may fancy the temptation stronger) to become a rowdy solicitor with shady
clients, in the manner of the priceless Mr. Michael Finsbury. We remember the
treatment more than the subject; because the treatment is really much more
alive than the subject. Long after the ghosts in that ornamental garden have
faded, and we have completely forgotten Who was Who at the court of Prince
Otto, we hear and remember in the depths of that valley, "the solid plunge
of the cataract." And long after the details of the Tontine System have
become blurred and all the far less interesting details of our own daily life
along with them, when all lesser things have diminished and life itself is
fading from my eyes--I shall still see before me the Form called up by that
inspired paragraph: "His costume was of a mercantile brilliancy best
described as stylish; nor could anything be said against him, except that he
was a little too like a wedding guest to be quite a gentleman."
Even through these wide divergences of subject, therefore, there runs
something which is not only the genius but decidedly the method of Stevenson.
In one sense he is careful to vary the style; in another sense the style is
never varied. We might say, so to speak, that it is the style within the style
that is never varied. But subject to this general understanding, it is only
just to him to insist on the wide range that he managed to cover in his short
and very much hampered literary life. He once reproached himself with not
having enlarged his life by building lighthouses as well as writing books. But
the firm of Stevenson and Son might have been mildly convulsed if there had
risen on every side lighthouses in seven styles of architecture; a Gothic
lighthouse, an ancient Egyptian lighthouse, and a lighthouse like a Chinese
pagoda. And that is what he did with the towers of imagination and the light of
reason.
There are indeed, as I have hinted, one or two places where it may be
maintained that Stevenson let his style stray; and wandered into other tracks,
sometimes older tracks, away from the immediate track of travel. Personally, I
have this feeling about the wanderings of the Master of Ballantrae and the
Chevalier Burke. They are a sort of adventure story in the wrong place; and
though Mr. James Durie was certainly an adventurer in the bad sense, it is
impossible to make him one in the good. It is impossible to turn a villain into
a hero for the purposes of pure romance; Jim Hawkins could not have gone on his
adventures permanently arm-in-arm with Long John Silver. The episode of
Blackbeard is a sort of fizzling anticlimax, spluttering like the blue matches
in that fool's hat. Such a shoddy person had no claim to be so much as
mentioned in that spiritual tragedy of the terrible twin spirits; the brothers
of Durrisdeer. It is almost as if pirates were really a private mania with the
author; and he could not keep them out of the tale if he tried; though pirates
have really no more business in this tale than pirates in The Wrong Box.
But it is curious to note how completely they are discoloured by the white
death-ray that shines on that winter's tale. Their blood and gold were not
really red; their seas were not even really blue. This was no occasion for
Two-pence Coloured. The very style of Mackeller's narrative might be shrewdly
summed up indeed under the title of A Penny Plain. But this is not only because
that worthy steward was addicted to plainness and not averse to pennies. It is
also because he is addicted to home and habit and averse to adventure; and the
notion of the Master dragging him across half the world has something about it
ungainly and grotesque and unworthy of the intensity of their intellectual and
spiritual relations. The truth is that the Master of Ballantrae is not only a
family demon but also a family ghost; and ought not to haunt any house except his
own. Ghosts do not travel like tourists; even for the pleasure of visiting
their relatives in the colonies. The story of the Duries is emphatically
domestic; like those very domestic stories of home life in which Oedipus
butchered his father or Orestes trampled on the body of his mother. These
incidents were regrettable, and even painful; but they were all kept in the
family. Something tells us that most of them happened behind high barred doors
or in terrible unrecorded interviews. They did not wash their bloody linen in
public; least of all did they wash it in all the seven seas of the
But this mixture of two types of tale in one is the very reverse of
characteristic. I know not where else in his works it can be found; unless
perhaps we might take exception to the slight element of political irritation
that makes itself felt, of all places in the world, in the amiable nightmare of
The Dynamiter. It is really impossible to use a story in which
everything is ridiculous to prove that certain particular Fenians or anarchist
agitators are ridiculous. Nor indeed is it tenable that men who risk their
lives to commit such crimes are quite so ridiculous as that. But broadly
speaking, the characteristic of this writer's conscientious artistry is that he
is very careful to keep the different forms of art in water-tight compartments.
It was, of course, a sentiment about technique and material which was very
fashionable in the age of Whistler and the world where Stevenson had studied
art. And the artist would as soon have stuck a lump of marble into the middle
of a bas-relief in terracotta, or applied a coat of paint to a tracery he was
making out of ivory, as put a piece of tragedy into the middle of a tea-table
comedy or a burst of righteous indignation into a farce. In all this part of
Stevenson's mind, especially as revealed in his letters, most of the critics
have missed the very lasting effect of the chatter of craftsmanship, and all
the jargon of tricks of the trade, which he heard among the French art
students. He had reversed almost the whole philosophy of everything that they
wanted to do; but he still retained the dialect in which they talked about how
it was done. But he talked it much better than they did; and he had his own
knack of using the right word even for the search for the right word. It is
typical that he said that a story must have one general tendency; and that in
the whole book there must not be a single word "that looks the other
way." There is not a single word that looks the other way in the whole of Prince
Otto or in the whole of The Wrong Box.
But now and then he did something more than this. He created a form of art.
He invented a genre which does not really exist outside his work. It may
seem a paradox to say that his most original work was a parody. But certainly
the notion of The New Arabian Nights is quite as unique in the world as
the old Arabian Nights; and it does not owe its real ingenuity to the
model which it mocks. Stevenson here wove a singular sort of texture, or mixed
a singular sort of atmosphere, which is not like anything else; a medium in
which many incongruous things may find a comic congruity. It is partly like the
atmosphere of a dream; in which so many incongruous things cause no surprise.
It is partly the real atmosphere of
But it is worth while to remark that even here, where the atmosphere might
be expected to be more hazy, the generalisation stands about edges and the
exact extravagance of Skelt. However delicate is the air of mockery or mystery,
there is very little change in the staccato style. The quarrel with the Suicide
Club is "put to the touch of swords" and the phrase tingles like the
twin blades of Durrisdeer. Nothing could be more angular than Mr. Malthus, the
horrible paralysed man who plays on the brink of the precipice of suicide; he
is as hard as a huge beetle. There is all the jerk of the old energetic puppets
when he jumps from his seat, losing his disease for an instant at the sight of
death. There is more movement in that one paralytic than in crowds of softly
moving society figures, in milder or more meditative fiction. The very clatter
of his broken bones down the stone steps of
Again, it illustrates this variety of experiment that Stevenson also wrote
a detective story; or as he characteristically called it (in a sort of pedantic
plain English) a police novel. He wrote it in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd
Osbourne; and I have considered another aspect of it already, in the local
colour of The Wrecker. But The Wrecker is ultimately a police
novel; and the best sort of police novel, in which the police are never called
in. Stevenson explained his reasons for leading up to the problem with studies
of social life; and certainly it says much for the liveliness of that life that
we do not grow so impatient as to offer the obvious comment. Otherwise we
should certainly make one reasonable criticism. The writer may be pardoned if
he is a long time getting to the solution, but not when he is such a long time
getting to the mystery. It must be confessed that we have to wait for the
question to be asked, as well as for it to be answered. Personally I am very
glad to wait in the waiting-room of Pinkerton and Dodd. But anyhow when the
question is asked, it is with great animation; and the excitement of beginning
to piece together a puzzle, which is the essence of a detective story, has
seldom been more lively and lifelike than in the cross questions and crooked
answers of Captain Nares and his super-cargo. Here, however, the detective
story merely illustrates the fact of his having almost as many irons in the
fire as Jim Pinkerton. It illustrates the general fact that he tried a great
many different styles; and yet his style was not different.
If there were experiments in which his touch was less happy they were,
strangely enough perhaps, those connected with the simple or semi-savage world
in which he found so much happiness. The Island Nights' Entertainments
are not quite so entertaining as the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, whether
New or Old. The explanation may be found, perhaps, in that casual phrase with
which he swept the
When Stevenson drew the long bow for the last time, like Robin Hood, he had
two strings to his bow; and they both broke; but one was much stronger than the
other. In other words he had two stories in his head, both of which broke off
short; and perhaps it is not surprising that the weaker was rather neglected in
favour of the stronger. The story of St. Ives contains excellent things,
as does everything that he ever wrote, down to the most casual private letter.
But it may be called disappointing, with rather more exactitude than is usual
in the use of that word. St. Ives can hardly avoid being a sort of
historical novel; and yet it is a rather unhistorical novel. By which I do not
mean that there may be mistakes about dates or details; which matter nothing in
fiction and are made too much fuss of even in history. I mean it is
unhistorical in showing a strange lack of historical imagination and the sense
of historical opportunity. It is the story of a soldier of Napoleon imprisoned
on Edinburgh Rock and escaping from it. But indeed we might fancy it was
Stevenson and not St. Ives who was imprisoned on Edinburgh Rock. And Stevenson
does not escape from it. Such a subject demanded a sort of international
interpreter; but it is in truth the most strangely insular of all his books.
St. Ives is not a Frenchman; he is the less and not the more French because he
is given all the foppery and swagger which spinsters in
But perhaps in this very insularity there is something like a return to
earlier things, and a rounding off of his life. In that sense the story of
Stevenson, like the story of St. Ives, began on the crag and
But the book offers a yet better example of this return to an almost
narrowly national romance, like the flight of a homing bird. It occurs almost
in the first few lines of the book; yet it might stand in a fashion for a title
to all his books. It occurs in connection with the highly characteristic
passage, typical of his love of gay pictorial colouring, in which he instantly
lights up the prison hill with flames; saying that the yellow convict coats and
the red uniforms made up together "a lively picture of hell." And
with reference to this he remarks, as if in passing, that the ancient Pictish
or Celtic name of that
Anyhow, it was in the midst of these new experiments that he did perish;
fulfilling the very terms of his challenge in Aes Triplex; of the happy
man whom death finds flushed with hope and planning vast foundations. And
indeed his death may well come also at the end of this chapter of experiment,
as the last of his experiments. I was a lad when the news came to
Chapter VIII. The Limits of
a Craft
The truest adverse criticism of Stevenson was written by Stevenson. It was
also very Stevensonian; for it took the form of saying, about his own
fictitious characters, that his temptation was always "to cut the flesh
off the bones." Even here we may note his peculiar cutting or hacking
accent; it sounds like some horrid crime of Barbecue or Billy Bones. Indeed
that word is sufficiently symbolic of Stevenson. His name might have been
Bones, like the seafaring man at the "Admiral Benbow"; nor was this
only because his eternal boyhood was as full of skeletons as the school life of
Traddles. It was also because of a certain bony structure in his whole taste
and turn of mind; something that was angular though slender like his own slim
and brittle frame and long Quixotic face. Nevertheless the words were uttered
as a condemnation; and they were a just condemnation.
The real defect of Stevenson as a writer, so far from being a sort of
silken trifling and superficial or superfluous embroidery, was that he
simplified so much that he lost some of the comfortable complexity of real
life. He treated everything with an economy of detail and a suppression of
irrelevance which had at last something about it stark and unnatural. He is to
be commended among authors for sticking to the point; but real people do not
stick quite so stubbornly to the point as that. We can here best realise his
real error, as well as his real originality, by comparing him with the great
Victorian novelists in whose vast shadow he grew up. I shall have occasion to
note afterwards that his collision was not with these in the matter of morals or
philosophy; for on that side he was looking forward and not back. But there is
a strong contrast, and a striking new departure, in the passage from the very
best of Thackeray or Trollope to the first sketches, I had almost said
scratches, of Stevenson. Those sketches were in a few lines, and only of the
necessary lines; it was the whole point that one necessary line was a loss and
not a gain. Compared with this, the very best of the old Victorian novels were
full of padding. But there was something to be said for the Victorian padding;
as there was for the Victorian upholstery. Comfort is not always a contemptible
thing, when its other name is hospitality; and Dickens and Thackeray and
Trollope had a huge hospitality for their own characters. They were heartily
and unaffectedly glad to see them; and especially glad to see them again. Hence
their taste for sequels and continuous family histories; and all the positively
last appearances of Mr. Pendennis or Mrs. Proudie. And this repetition, this
rambling, even this padding, did in a curious confused fashion confirm the
reality of the characters. As the padded Victorian furniture did really make
people feel at home, so the padded Victorian novels made the reader feel at
home with the characters. Now the reader never does feel quite at home with
Stevenson's characters. He cannot get rid of an impression that he knows too
little about them; though he knows that he knows all that is important about
them. His tragedy is that he knows only what is important. Alan Breck Stewart
is not only a very lively but a very loveable character. And yet there is too
little of him to love; though he might well draw his claymore upon us, if we
made so dangerous an allusion. We are not quite at ease with him, as we are at
ease with Pickwick or Pendennis. We know the vital things about him; and they
are very vital. But we do not know thousands of things about him; as we
do about a man with whom we have lived through a long Early Victorian novel.
Stevenson has in fact done exactly what he accused himself of doing; it is he
who wields the claymore and he has cut the flesh off the bones.
An illustration of the difference, of course, could be found in the
presentation of the externals of a character. The dark vivacity of the face of
Alan Breck, the eyes with their "dancing madness, at once engaging and
alarming," springs up before us as clearly as a coloured photograph in the
first few words of description; and the same few words have already set
strutting the whole brisk little figure in the blue coat and silver buttons and
the swagger of the big sword. But the whole operation is so rapid and complete
as to have something about it almost unconvincing, like a conjuring trick. It
is like seeing something by a single flash of lightning; there is in that
illumination a sort of illusion. For in the heart of anything that partakes of
magic there is also something of mockery. It is not so that we "get to
know" the personal appearance of somebody in Thackeray or Trollope. It is
by a multitude of apparently accidental or even unnecessary allusions that we
gradually gain the impression that
The loftiest things of this world have their weakness or defect; and with
that word "thin" we come to the limit of the glory of Skelt and
discover that even the maker of toy theatres is human. Just as Stevenson gained
in that school of boyish bravado his admirable sense of symbolic attitude and
action, his deep joy in gay colour and gallant carriage, his fine feeling for
life as a story and honour as a fight; his response to the challenge of the
open door or the drag of the road over the hill--as he gained all these great
virtues and values under the symbol of A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, so
he betrayed also even in his best work something of the technical limitation of
such an instrument. And it cannot be more clearly stated than by saying that
these flat figures could only be seen from one side. They are aspects or
attitudes of men rather than men; though the aspects and attitudes are of great
importance considered as symbols, like the flat haloes of saints or the flat
blazonry of shields. In that sense only they are not deep enough; and lack
another measurement. They are deep enough in the sense in which any beautiful
picture is deep; in the sense that anything beautiful always means more than it
says; possibly means more than it means to mean. In that sense there can be
depth enough even in the shallow scenery of Skelt, when the child's eye plunges
into it. But there is not depth in the sense of a great familiarity with the
other side of the scenery or the implied life behind the scenes. When all is
said and done, the splendid and inspiring figure of Three-Fingered Jack is a
figure and not a statue. You cannot walk round him; and if he has no more than
three fingers, he has much less than three dimensions. But the important
paradox is that in this the imperfection of the work is actually due to the
perfection of the art. It is exactly because Balfour or Ballantrae only do what
they are meant to do, and do it so swiftly and well, that we have a vague
feeling that we do not know them as we know more loitering, more rambling or
more sprawling characters. This is, if you will, a weakness in the author's
work; but it is even more emphatically a weakness in the critics who call him
weak. For they accuse him of the very opposite of his real fault; of a sort of
self-indulgent delicacy or a luxury of mere words. The evil arises from his
very passion of economy and severity; from the fact that he pruned too much, so
as almost to kill the plant; from the fact that he went too straight to the
point, so that the movement was too quick to be clear, let alone familiar;
above all, from the fact that such hardness of technique had about it something
almost inhuman. He does sometimes simplify the puppet so much as to show the
wire. But even in that relation between wire and wood there is a queer sort of
realism.
Stevenson was a man who believed in craftsmanship; that is, in creation. He
had not the smallest natural sympathy with all those hazy pagan and pantheistic
notions often covered by the name of inspiration. He might not have expressed
it in the phrase that man is an image of the Creator; but he did very
definitely regard man as a maker of images. There is, and has long been,
pouring upon the world, mostly in an immediate sense from the Germans and the
Slavs, probably in an ultimate sense from the dark philosophies of Asia, a sort
of doctrine of mystical helplessness that takes a hundred forms; and that
recognises everything in the world except will. It denies the will of God and it
does not believe even in the will of man. It does not believe in one of the
most glorious manifestations of the will of man, which is the act of creative
choice essential to art. The tendency has been admirably treated in the work of
M. Henri Massis in his book on the Defence of the West; and another French
writer of the same school, M. Maritain, has remarked on the important part
which the word artifex, as the title of an artist, played in mediaeval
philosophy as well as mediaeval craftsmanship. As we shall see later, it is the
paradox of Stevenson that he would have cared nothing for such mediaeval
metaphysics; and yet he carried out in practice precisely what these writers
are now maintaining in principle. He was, if ever there was one, an artifex;
not a mere mouthpiece of elemental powers or destinies, but a man making
something by the force of will and in the light of reason. It was a sort of
craftsmanship characteristic of mediaeval work in literature as well as
sculpture. It was strikingly present in those mediaeval poets whom Stevenson
himself admired; and perhaps admired more than he understood. It is supremely
typical of the close and finely carved ballades of Villon. Indeed the name of
Stevenson will always, I suppose, be picturesquely associated with the name of
Villon; if only because of the fine macabre nocturne of A Lodging for the
Night. And yet if there was one thing in the world about which Stevenson
was entirely wrong, it was about François Villon. He was even, on that subject,
guilty of a very unusual lapse of logic and error of fact. In his essay on
Villon, while showing all the enthusiasm of a fine critic for a fine poet, he
insists with almost rabid emphasis that the mind of the man was rotten with
mere bestial cynicism and base materialism. "His eyes were sealed with
their own filth"; and he could see nothing noble or beautiful in heaven or
earth. And to this he adds the rather curious remark that even in that
I have paused upon this parenthesis; because it foreshadows the general
view to which all these rather rambling criticisms ultimately tend; that
Stevenson stood for the truth and did not quite understand the truth he stood
for. If he had understood it, he would have known that the virile craftsmanship
which he was only too eager to admire in Villon, was really connected with
certain virtues, which were none the less the virtues of a craftsman because
they happened to be the virtues of a thief. Nobody pretends that Villon was a
saint; but the socially disreputable externals of his sin do not (for those of
his faith) make him a specially or supremely hopeless sinner. If he was a thief,
nobody can prove that he was not a penitent thief; and the moral system to
which he was attached had raised such a man to its altars under the somewhat
paradoxical title of The Good Thief. He was probably the last man to expect in
his own person to be that night in paradise; but he was not any further off
from heaven merely because he was likely to be hanged high on a gallows. Here
we have once more, I fancy, a touch of Calvinism with its finger of fear. There
is also that grim and stony optimism attributed to the Old Testament, with its
divine favouritism for the fortunate. But though the surface of this rather
superficial criticism was alien to that free will which is the creed of
craftsmanship, the personal creative spirit underneath the criticism was still
that of the genuine Christian craftsman. When Stevenson set about to describe
Villon and his gang of ragamuffins, under the snow and gargoyles of mediaeval
The point here is that even his chief fault as an artist was typically the
fault of a craftsman. He worked too narrowly, perhaps, producing only a thing perfect
of its kind out of certain materials, by a certain method and under the
limitations of a certain style. The same sort of criticism that feels a French
ballade to be too fixed and artificial a form, the same sort of criticism that
feels a fourteenth-century Virgin to be too stiff or affected in its posture,
does doubtless feel a story of Stevenson to be too meagre in its materials or
too strict in its stylistic unity. As I have explained above, I do not mean to
suggest that such criticism is entirely unjust or unreasonable. Stevenson's
work has its faults, like other good work; and its chief deficiency does appear
in a certain defect of thinness, which is produced by this instinct for hard
simplification. But nobody could adequately write a history of nineteenth-century
literature without noting this important departure in the direction of a closer
and more vigilant verbal choice, as compared either with the cheerful laxity
that went before it or the more gloomy laxity that has come since. Whatever else
Stevenson stands for, he certainly stands for the idea that literature is not
mere sensation or mere self-expression or mere record; but is sensation
appealing to certain senses, self-expression in a certain material and record
in a certain style. And in this he was certainly asserting the rights of the
soul of man, as against various formless forces which some regarded as the soul
of nature; the anima mundi of the pantheists. In this way Stevenson
represented the same deep, ancient, hieratic and traditional truth that was
taught to that generation by William Morris; and neither of them had the least
idea what it was.
Chapter
IX. The Philosophy of Gesture
Something has been said, from time to time, in these pages about the
justice or injustice of the alleged reaction against Stevenson. Little or
nothing will be said about its final success or failure, and that for at least
two reasons. First, that such guesses about the fashions of the future are
generally quite wide of the mark, because they are founded on a very obvious
fallacy. They always imply that public taste will continue to progress in its
present direction; which is, in truth, the only thing we know that it will not
do. A thing that wanders away in great winding curves may end anywhere; but to
turn each curve into a straight line striking out into the void will be wrong
in any case. This is obvious even in the tolerably short history of the modern
novel. Victorians had a sort of parlour game of comparing Dickens and
Thackeray; but they would have been amazed to hear modern young people
declaring that Thackeray is much more sentimental than Dickens. They would have
been astounded by the revival of Trollope, accompanied by the comparative
neglect of Thackeray. For to the more earnest Victorians of that world,
Trollope was another name for triviality. They would have felt as we should
feel if we were told that Charles Garvice would outlive John Galsworthy. For a
great genius may appear in almost any disguise; even in the disguise of a
successful novelist. The second reason for which I wave away from me the
prophet's mantle, and decline to decide the question of the future, is that I
do not think it very much matters. There are fine writers of the past as well
as the present, who are read only by few; and I do not admit that the many know
all about them, merely because they never knew them. I do not see why we should
so blindly distrust popularity and so blindly trust posterity. But some of the
conditions of survival may perhaps be generally considered.
The fame of Stevenson in the future will stand or fall with the strength or
weakness of a particular argument. It was perhaps most compactly expressed by a
critic who accused him of "externality." What he called the fault of
externality I should be inclined to ascribe to the fallacy of internalism.
Perhaps it will be recognised better if I call it the fallacy of
"psychology." It is the notion that a serious novelist should confine
himself to the inside of the human skull. Now Stevenson's fiction is full of pantomime;
in the strict sense of animated action or gesture. And it really seems as if
the critics, by a sort of pun or perversion of meaning, associated it with a
children's pantomime; though Stevenson would have been the last to object even
to that. Anyhow, this idea that intellectual fiction should concern the
solitary and uncommunicative intellect is a very obvious fallacy indeed. It is
sound enough to say that we can see below the surface; but not that we cannot
see what is on the surface. Least of all is it sensible to say that we cannot
believe in it because it has come to the surface; though it were as enormous as
a spouting whale. Indeed the tone rather recalls that of some sceptics who
implied that sailors ought not to think they saw the Great Sea Serpent, because
it was a quarter of a mile long when they saw it. So we may well urge that
psychological things are not less psychological because they come to the
surface in pantomime. The argument amounts to saying that a really delicate
piece of clockwork only exists when the clock stops. And indeed I suppose these
critics would consider the action of a clock, in whirling its hands about, a
very offensive piece of foreign gesticulation. It is like saying that a
locomotive steam-engine is only a steam-engine when it is standing still; or
that a building blowing up with a loud bang offers a final proof that it was
not a powder-magazine.
Indeed in this respect the psychological critics are rather backward even
in psychology. It generally distresses such people more to be behind the times
than to be against the truth; and in this case it seems possible that they are
both. The objection to their fallacy of internalism is that it is nonsense to
think only of thoughts and not of words or deeds, since words are only spoken
thoughts and deeds are only acted words. They are in fact the most dominant
words and the most triumphant thoughts; the thoughts that emerge. But,
according to "the latest modern psychology" (that infallible and
immutable authority), it is even more of a mistake to treat the surface so
superficially. Acts are not only the swiftest thoughts; they are even too swift
to be called thoughts. They come from something more fundamental than common or
conscious thinking. It is exactly our subconsciousness that appears in acts
more than in words, or even thoughts. It is precisely our subconsciousness that
bites its nails or twirls its moustaches, that kicks its heels or grinds its
teeth. According to some, it is even our subconsciousness (that jolly companion)
that occasionally cuts our mother's throat or picks our father's pocket. I do
not take the latest modern psychology quite so seriously; but what element of
truth there is in it is all against the tone of the latest Stevensonian, or
Anti-Stevensonian, criticism. The test of fine fiction, by this or any other
standard, is not whether it follows out threads of thought in silence; not
whether it is subjective rather than objective or avoids any violent issue in
events. It is simply whether it is right; whether the psychology is right and
whether the act represents it rightly. In psychology, as in any other science,
one cannot be more than right. And the most embittered critic will find it very
difficult to show that Stevenson was very often wrong. What the embittered
critic can show, and what will make him still more embittered, is that
Stevenson expressed everything by some dramatic act. And, according to such
critics, anything that is dramatic is melodramatic. The boyish brooding and
smarting sentimental self-importance of David Balfour during his one quarrel
with Alan Breck Stewart are described so delicately and exactly as to be worthy
of George Meredith, who was so excellent with boys; they might easily be the
broodings of Evan Harrington or Harry Richmond. Only in Stevenson's story they
end (alas!) in the crossing of blades and Alan tossing away his sword; and
that, of course, is dreadfully melodramatic. One cannot be psychological inside
a sword-belt; and cerebral processes must not take place under a three-cornered
hat. The interlude of Henry Durie's crippled and almost half-witted happiness,
when the shadow of his brother is withdrawn for a season and his child is
growing in the sun, is as pathetic and as true as any lucid interval (if such
there be) in the suburban depression of the school of Gissing. Only when the
fool's paradise is lost, by a random word about the possible perversion of the
child, it is not to be denied that Henry Durie falls to the earth like a stone.
And the thoughtful critic explains that such a man cannot have had any really
internal feelings; because his internal feelings were strong enough to knock
him down. The dark, drudging and almost automatic altruism of poor Herrick,
amid all his tangle of treasons in The Ebb-Tide, is as sad and true as
the most miserable modern could wish it to be. But then Herrick jumps into the
sea with a great splash; though he ought to endear himself to the modern critic
by not actually doing anything after all, even for the fruitful cult of suicide.
The girl Kirstie's "gabble" of recollection and daydream and
imaginary lovers' quarrels, as she goes home from church, is quite as true to
the actual inner workings of the young sentimental mind as any feminine fine
shade in Henry James. But then the critic cannot be expected to forgive her for
giving two or three little skips as she walks along the road. No lady in Henry
James ever skipped. It is because in each of these cases some outward motion
makes memorable the inward mood that these critics feel that it cannot really
be so very inward. It is to be noted that they do not commit themselves to a
positive negation; they do not affirm that the characters in question would
_not_ feel as they are described as feeling; they do not even say that they would
not act as they are described as acting; that David would not fight or Durie
fall or Kirstie leap upon the road. They simply have a refined and delicate
feeling that psychological fiction ought to deal only, or mostly, with unspoken
words or uncompleted thoughts. That is a very interesting point of view; and it
is just as well to have it clearly stated and understood. If Stevenson had only
served as an excuse for expounding this interesting critical thesis, they might
so far thank him and even constrain themselves to be reasonably polite to him.
Anyhow, that seems to be their principle; and I have paused long enough upon it
to show that I do not wish to ignore it. Only I would respectfully submit that
their quarrel is not with Stevenson; certainly their quarrel is not merely with
Stevenson. It is with Homer and the bending of the bow; it is with Hamlet and
the leap into the grave; it is with Francesca dropping the book or Quixote
driving at the windmill; it is with Henry putting on his crown or Anthony putting
off his helmet; it is with Roland in Roncesvaux, blowing the horn and breaking
the sword and holding up his glove to God. It is in all those epic energies
which gave to the last story and its sequel the noble title of Songs of
Action--Chansons de Geste.
Among the many unreasonable objections to the Stevensonian romance, I admit
that there is a reasonable objection that may be advanced here. It may be said
that he was guilty of externality in this sense; that he sometimes began with
externals, in so far as he saw in some scene or other setting the suggestion or
rather the provocation of romance. "Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a
murder," he very truly observed; and he was often moved to commit the
murder in a vicarious literary manner. He wished sometimes, he said, to fit
every such place with its appropriate legend. Superficially there is sense in
this objection; but in a deeper and more sympathetic sense I do not admit that
it contradicts what I have said of the deep spring of gesture or the deliberation
of craftsmanship. It merely means that there was from the first, in any such
work of art, the unity of mood that there always ought to be. It means that he
had decided what sort of novel he would write, before he had decided what novel
he would write; and this is right and inevitable. The dank garden cannot cry
aloud immediately, in so many words, "In this place the sinister tutor
with one eye larger than the other buried the old sailor's cutlass with which
he had killed the horribly but secretly wicked admiral who was really his
brother." No dank garden ever expressed itself with such accuracy when
crying aloud to anybody; but it is none the less true that the exact shade of
gloom and the exact outline of disorder may have suggested, not merely a vulgar
murder, but a murder having certain special qualities of the unnatural or the
strange. This does not prove that they were not _deep_ feelings which thus rose
up at the sight of the strange landscape and groped to find their appropriate
images of doom. It only proves that the origin of the story was of the same
sort as the origin of a poem. We can call Stevenson a prose poet, if we like;
but we cannot call him a superficial writer, unless all poets are superficial.
I shall have occasion to remark elsewhere that there is one strictly
technical sense in which Stevenson's treatment can be called a thin or a flat
treatment. It is a sense in which we might say that a certain style in
decorative ironwork is light and slender, in which we might say that Whistler's
way of laying on monochrome washes was merely flat. It has its defects, even
considered as a technical treatment; there is an artistic aversion to filigree;
and many have maintained that Whistler's washes were too washy. But it is
essential that this criticism should not be confused with the suggestion I have
just answered; the suggestion that the spiritual significance of the pattern or
the picture is shallow and not deep. That is another matter and has nothing
whatever to do with the question of our favourite form; and though Stevenson's
favourite form was sometimes picturesque to excess, there was nothing
platitudinous or merely sentimental about the moral of the picture. On the
contrary, he was very much drawn towards difficult and perplexing moral themes
and liked to put puzzles to himself in the possible relations of human souls.
Only, as we have seen, he liked to make the human soul come to a conclusion in
some fashion and announce its conclusion in some way. Hence all the abrupt
signals and bodily departures which the sensitive so much lament; hence the
coin hurled through the windowpane at Durrisdeer; the banjo flung into the fire
on Midway Island; the knife sticking in the mast or the diamond tossed into the
river. In short, Stevenson's stories were often problem stories, in the style
of what were called problem plays. But by one crime he disqualified himself for
the company of the really realistic and earnest authors of problem plays or
problem novels. He had a weakness for solving the problem.
There is in this merit the other side of a fault; and a fault of which he
has often been accused. He was called self-conscious; and in his work he was
perhaps a little too self-conscious, as compared with some writers whose
fundamental and even almost forgotten impulses were allowed to flow forth more
freely, and perhaps more naturally. But these things are a matter of degree and
balance; and some may hold that it is the opposite type that has now become
unbalanced. Walking the world to-day, I am not sure that I do not prefer the
self-conscious to the subconscious. Stevenson felt a responsibility in art
which was like his vivid and almost morbid sense of responsibility in conduct.
His problems of conduct were indeed sometimes a little anarchical; and his ethical
decision in them perhaps a little amateurish. Like Ibsen and Bernard Shaw and
many men of his time, he had not quite discovered the pressing practical
necessity of having a general rule, in the absence of which the world becomes a
welter of exceptions. But he was intensely interested in the right moral
solution whatever it might be; even if it seemed to involve the inversion of a
moral rule. And this sense of social responsibility was thoroughly sincere:
even when the special pleading had to be, perhaps, a little too individual to
be social. It was natural for a novelist, perhaps, to feel most fiercely and
keenly the particular personal case. Anyhow, I think he generally did so; as
did Loudon Dodd in The Wrecker, when he balanced opium and Jim. He was
certainly vastly intrigued by that sort of problem.
And with this matter of responsibility, and the reliance on the will in
moral matters, we come to that larger question to be considered in the last
chapter. It will be in a sense a summary of what has already been said; and yet
it will be necessary to say it somewhat more plainly, and in relation to large
matters about which many modern people are rather too confused or too timid to
talk plain. For the moment it need only be said that the importance of
Stevenson largely consists in his relation with the tendency of his age. That
tendency was towards a certain mysticism of materialism, of which the most
dogmatic expression is what is called monism; but which can be more lightly
expressed in a hundred forms, as that all life is one, or that everything is
heredity and environment, or that the impersonal is higher than the personal,
or that men live by the herd instinct or the soul of the hive. Our fathers
called the general atmosphere fatalism; but it has now any number of more
idealistic names. Stevenson felt all this, without exactly defining it; he felt
it in the realism of nineteenth-century literature, in the pessimism of
contemporary poetry, in the timidity of hygienic precaution, in the smugness of
middle-class uniformity. And while he was entirely of that time and society,
while he read all the realists, knew all the artists, doubted with the doubters
and even denied with the deniers, he had that within him which could not but
break out in a sort of passionate protest for more personal and poetical
things. He flung out his arms with a wide and blind gesture, as one who would
find wings at the moment when the world sank beneath him.
Chapter X. The Moral of
Stevenson
Even those unfortunates for whom the tale of
What was the historical meaning then of that strange splash of crimson lake
on the drab age of Gissing and Howells; like a burlesque bloodstain in a
detective story? To begin with, I foresee that in having stated the matter thus
historically, I have laid myself open to some criticisms of the strictly
historical sort. It may be said that the dates and details of Stevenson's life
and time do not correspond with such a comparison; that he came too early in
the Victorian progress to be really a type of the 'nineties; and that his real
rivals or models were the Victorian Philistines. I do not admit this as a
truth, even where I might admit part of it as a fact. An anachronism is often
simply an ellipsis; and an ellipsis is often simply a necessity. The thing that
a living intelligence like that of Stevenson feels is not the stale and static
conventions of his world, but the way the world is going. We talk familiarly of
time and tide; and, in a case like this, it is idle to remember a time without
realising that it was a tide. The author of The Ebb-Tide knew well
enough what tide was at that moment ebbing. It was the tide of what many
regarded as Victorian virtue and all the happiness described in the
three-volume novel. Stevenson knew very well that this stuffy sort of stuff was
not the strong menace or promise of the coming time. He sometimes pokes fun at
the Philistines; but he thrusts with furious energy at the Aesthetes. Compare
for instance the way in which he speaks of Walter Besant with the way in which
he speaks of Henry James, when he has to differ from them both, in that
admirable letter about "art competing with life." He dismisses the
successful novelist as representing something that had already failed; but he
takes seriously the serious novelist, and is obviously afraid that in the long
run his more subtle methods may succeed. Those more subtle methods, of the
impressionists and realists and the rest, were obviously for him the real
danger because they were the rising tide. In short, it may be complained that I
have represented Stevenson as reacting against decadence before it existed. And
I answer that this is the only real way in which a fighting man ever does
successfully attack a movement; when he attacks later, he attacks too late.
Or again, it may be said that I exaggerate the novelty of work like that of
What then exactly did he mean? What, so to speak, did it mean; even
if in a sense he did not mean it; or at least, did not mean to mean it? First
of all it was, I think, a sort of dash for liberty; and especially a dash for
happiness. It was a defence of the possibility of happiness; and a kind of
answer to the question, "Can a man be happy?" But it was an answer of
a curious kind, defiantly delivered in rather curious circumstances. It was the
escape of a prisoner as he was led in chains from the prison of Puritanism to
the prison of Pessimism. Few have understood that passage in the history of the
manufacturing civilisation of northwest Europe and
It is only the obvious things that are never seen; and a thing is often
counted stale merely because men have been staring at it so long without seeing
it. There is nothing harder to bring within a small and clear compass than
generalisations about history, or even about humanity. But there is one
especially evident and yet elusive in this matter of happiness. When men pause
in the pursuit of happiness, seriously to picture happiness, they have always
made what may be called a "primitive" picture. Men rush towards
complexity; but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they
dream of being shepherds. This is equally true whether they look back to a
Golden Age or look forward to the most modern Utopia. The Golden Age is always
imagined as an age free from the curse of gold. The perfect civilisation of the
future is always something which many would call the higher savagery; and is
conceived in the spirit that spoke of "Civilisation, its Cause and
Cure." Whether it is
Stevenson might have been asking his question a hundred years before, at
the time of the first humanitarian revolt against the Puritans; when the same
city of
I once heard in a railway-train a farmer's family of the Puritan sort
discussing with a Nonconformist minister the action of a boy, at the front in
the Great War, who had occupied himself in hospital with carving a wooden cross
and sent it home to his family. His family was pained but apologetic. Their
remarks had a continual chorus of, "He didn't mean anything by it."
This extraordinary state of mind intrigued me so much that I listened to the
rest of the conversation; at intervals of which the minister repeated firmly
that we didn't want that sort of thing; what we wanted was a living Christ. And
it never seemed to occur to this reverend gentleman that he was at that moment
at war with every living as well as every Christian thing; with the creative
instinct, with the desire for form, with the love of family, with the impulse
to send signals and messages, with humour, with pathos, with the virility of
martyrdom and the vividness of exile. It was in truth the carver of the cross
who was bearing witness to a living Christ and the partisan of a living Christ
who was repeating a dead form. It was none the less so, because it was not a
fixed shape in wood, but only a fixed shape in words. This curious incident has
always remained in my memory, however, if only for its fresh and superficial
humour. The image of the unconscious youth who didn't mean anything by it, who
merely whittled a stick until it came by sheer ill-luck into the form of a
cross, will always be a source of fruitful entertainment to the mind. The idea
of the young man hacking wood about right and left in a reckless manner, and
seeing theological symbols spring up on every side in spite of his most earnest
efforts, has something in it of the fairy-tale. And the idea that if he had only
known what was coming, nothing would have induced him to touch anything so
improper and shocking, is a matter of deep indwelling joy.
And yet, strangely enough, I must in a manner apologise to the poor
minister and admit that something like that fantastic suggestion may really
occur. After all, there is in the world a great crowd of unconscious
cross-builders or unintentional crosses. There is, running through the very
framework of our houses and our furniture, a sort of pattern of crosses. There
are a great many honest carpenters and joiners who make wooden crosses and
don't mean anything by it. But the figure means something for all that;
precisely because it is a fundamental figure, based on basic principles of
balance and conflict and support. All our chairs and tables are full of
crosses, of cross-bars and cross-beams; and it is probable that most of us use
the furniture without feeling the significance; do not think of a table as the
condition of a communion table and can sit on a chair without immediately
speaking ex cathedra. And in the same fashion, the more we study active
and artistic history, the more often we shall see men making thrones when they
meant only to make chairs or building churches when they meant only to build
houses. And in the retrospect of religious history, it seems to me that most
excursions and even aberrations have only served to scrawl on a larger scale
the truth of certain ancient doctrines near and necessary to man; and
illustrate orthodoxy if only with awful examples.
Now the men of Stevenson's generation, and especially the men who were as
intelligent as he was, were perhaps more unconscious of the real case for these
old ideas than any men who have lived before or since. Nothing was further from
their thoughts than the suggestion that their artistic fancies could refer back
to those antiquated and sombre dogmas about the Fall or the obscuration of the
divine light by sin. Wordsworth, though he is sometimes called pantheistic, saw
in the vivid pleasures of childhood what he called intimations of immortality.
Stevenson admitted that he often found it difficult to get any intimations of
immortality. And yet, if he could bear no witness to the Resurrection, he was
continually bearing witness to the Fall. We say lightly enough of a good man
that he is a Christian without knowing it. But Stevenson was a Christian
theologian without knowing it. Nothing, as I say, would have surprised him or
his generation more than to discover it; and it may be that some even of a
younger generation are so traditional as to have missed the gradual unfolding
of the truth. He would have been the first to say that such dogmas were dead
and that we cannot put back the clock to the fifth century. Yet he did not
explain why he was so often trying to put back his own clock to his fifth year.
For the truth is that there really is no sense or meaning, in this continuous
tribute of the poets to the poetry of early childhood, unless it be, as
Treherne says, that the world of sin comes between us and something more
beautiful or, as Wordsworth says, that we came first from God who is our home.
I will not pause to distinguish here between the true doctrine of the Fall and
the doctrine of depravity which the Calvinists had probably taught to
Stevenson, which would alone be enough to explain his not knowing how orthodox
he was. Nor will I here expound the distinction between original and acted sin,
apart from the ideal of infant baptism; or the already bewildered modern
sceptic would probably think I was mad. He must accept my benevolent assurance
that it is rather he that is mad; or rather, through no fault of his own,
mentally defective. The point is that there really is no explanation of this
intense imaginative concentration on babies except a mystical explanation. The
whole point of Stevenson's story is that of a man haunted by a tune, always
seeking for the broken notes of a lost melody; which he himself called the note
of the time-devouring nightingale. "But only children hear it right."
Why?
Moreover, as I have already noted, this principle of the beatific vision of
innocence was even more proved in the breach than in the observance. The
rationalists and realists who were praising the adult pursuit of happiness, or
ought to have been praising such a pursuit of happiness, were (and still are)
mainly occupied with describing unhappiness. They only prove that free life and
free love are really worse than any ascetic had ever represented them. The
naturalistic philosophies did not only contradict Christianity. The
naturalistic philosophies also contradicted the naturalistic novels. Their own
exercise of their own right of expression was quite enough to show that the
mere combination of the maturity of reason with the pleasures of passion does
not in fact produce a Utopia. We need not debate here whether the Zolaists were
justified in so laboriously describing horrors. If mere liberty had really led
to happiness, they would have been describing happiness. It would not have been
necessary for a grown man with a library of modern literature to hide himself
in a twopenny toy theatre in order to be happy.
This very simple truth is probably too simple to be seen; because, like
many such things, it is too large to be seen. But certainly it is still there
to be seen, if any of the moderns could enlarge their minds enough to see it.
The type of realism has changed since the days of Zola, just as the type of
romance has changed since the days of Stevenson. But it has not answered this
unanswerable distinction between the cheerful songs of innocence and the
melancholy songs of experience. Of the recent literature of the rising
generation, there is much that is frivolous, but uncommonly little that is
joyous. Just now we are incessantly asked to rejoice in the sight of youth enjoying
itself; which I for one am very ready to do; but all the readier if I can be
quite certain that it is enjoying itself. And it is a curious fact that in its
characteristic contemporary literature there is an almost complete absence of
joy. And I think it would be true to say, in a general fashion, that it is not
childish enough to be cheerful. In this connection I may be allowed once more
to be at once anecdotal and allegorical. When I first saw the title of The
Green Hat I pictured it as the top-hat of an old gentleman who had a fancy
for that colour. I imagined him a strutting symbolic figure of springtime, with
hair like the hawthorn and a hat like the new leaves; my mind lost itself amid
tree-tops and all the antics of the April wind; I imagined him chasing his hat
to elfland and the end of the world, or climbing trees to find the blue bird
nesting in the green headgear. The mere idea of a green hat gave me a glimpse
into that elusive element of which the blue bird was made the emblem. When I
opened the book and found that the green hat was only a lady's hat, and that
the book was full of sentiments about sex, I was as blankly disappointed as a
boy who has been given a dictionary instead of a book. My feelings towards the
intrusive females were those of Jim Hawkins; much what he would have felt if a
fashionable lady had dissuaded Squire Trelawney from going to sea. It is true
that the people in the book professed to be enjoying themselves, in what
appeared to be their own fashion; but they could not help me to enjoy myself,
as I should have done with the only true, real and original story of the green
hat. I recognised that there was wit in the work, but no fun in it; there was
no stir of that deep gale of spring; but rather an accepted air of autumn; of
things dancing as dead leaves dance; like the Falling Leaves in the joyful
revelation of Mr. Aldous Huxley. I know all about the defence of this gloomy
realism on the ground that it is real. I have known it ever since the time of
Stevenson writing on Zola. But I am not talking about whether this literature
is reasonable or justifiable; I am talking about whether it does in fact call
up, or even try to call up, the passion of positive joy.
That is why this episode is worth noting and recalling if only as an
episode; and all the more so, if it is in sharp contrast with the episodes that
follow as well as the episodes that went before. I have admitted that some part
of Stevenson's deliberate choice of childishness was a reaction from ill-chosen
surroundings and courses of conduct in the periods of passion and of youth. But
the younger writers, who boast of choosing for themselves, seem just as
unsuccessful in making passion identical with pleasure; and just as
unsuccessful in preserving the youthful spirit of youth. I have admitted that
when he made his dash for liberty and happiness, it may have appeared that
there was no other alternative but that of Puritanism or pessimism. But the new
writers who are not threatened with Puritanism seem to be just as much moved to
pessimism. There seems no explanation of the two tempers; except that the
apostle of childhood was at least seeking pleasure where it could be found,
while the apostles of youth are seeking it where it cannot be found. What
awaits us after all these episodes I will not pretend to prophesy; I will only
profess to hope that it may be the rebuilding of the great and neglected
Christian philosophy, to which all contributions will be thankfully received,
especially those of atheists and anarchists. And that is really the chief
importance, both of the man who can show human nature happy in the nursery and
the man who can only show it unhappy in the night-club. Both of them may be,
and generally are, of the sort that would smile scornfully at the thought of
calling up the old pious fables about heaven and hell. But in fact Stevenson
was describing the kingdom of heaven and calling it Skelt; while Zola was
describing all the kingdoms of hell and calling it real life. Neither of them
get outside the iron ring of the real truth of the matter; that the one thing,
however babyish, really is a picture of contentment, while in the other the
only decent element is discontent.
It may be that the world will forget Stevenson, a century or so after it
has forgotten all the present distinguished detractors of Stevenson. It may be
quite the other way, as the poet said; it may be the world will remember
Stevenson; will remember him with a start, so to speak, when everybody else has
forgotten that there ever was any story in a novel. The dissolution hinted at
by Sir Edmund Gosse, whereby fiction which was always a rather vague form shall
become utterly formless, may have by that time dropped out of the novel all its
original notion of a narrative. Mr. H. G. Wells, if he lives to delight the
world so long, will be able to deliver the goods in the form of great masses of
admirable analyses of economics and social conditions, without the
embarrassment of having to remember at every two hundred pages or so that he
has somewhere left a hero in a motor-car or a heroine in a lodging-house. Miss
Dorothy Richardson may pour out those vivid inventories of the furniture and
family crockery, which her subconscious self notes with the accuracy of an
inventory clerk, without being pestered to tell us who owned these objects, or
what was the object of owning them. The psychologists may present us with a
series of subtle and fascinating states of mind, without our being morbidly
curious to enquire whose mind. They in turn may yield to some other school;
such as those bright and breezy Americans who call themselves Behaviourists.
They declare with some warmth that there is really nothing in their minds and
that they only think with their muscles; which, in the case of some thinking,
we might well believe. At present the Behaviourists are on their best
behaviour. But there seems no reason why this new sort of muscular Christianity
should not eventually invade the novel, just as psychoanalysis did; and we
shall all be able to rejoice in a new type of fiction, in which a bright
thought flashes through Edwin's biceps or a vivid memory rises unbidden in the
deltoid of Angelina. For it is the habit of modern psychological science to
make quite sure of its fiction a long time before it is sure of its facts. But
the trouble about such fiction will be that it is very much of a novelty, but
not much of a novel. The passion for making patterns of loops and spirals, like
a chart of currents at sea, has so far dissolved the outline of individuality
that we lose all sense of what a man is, let alone what a man wants. Nameless
universal forces streaming through the subconsciousness, run very truly like
that dark and sacred river that wound its way through caverns measureless to
man. When this process of shapelessness is complete, it is always possible that
men may come upon a shape with something of a sharp surprise; like a geologist
finding in featureless rocks the fossil of some wild creature, looking as if
petrified in the last wild leap or on the wing. Or it is as if an antiquary,
passing through halls and temples of some iconoclastic city, covered with dizzy
patterns of merely mathematical beauty, were to come upon the heaving limb or
lifted shoulder of some broken statue of the Greeks. In that condition it may be
that the novel will again be novel. And in that condition, in that reaction,
certainly no novel will serve its purpose so forcibly, or make its point so
plainly, as a novel by Stevenson. The story, the first of childish and the
oldest of human pleasures, will nowhere reveal its structure and its end so
swiftly and simply as in the tales of Tusitala. The world's great age will in
that degree begin anew; the childhood of the earth be rediscovered; for the
story-teller will once more have spread his carpet in the dust; and it will
really be a magic carpet.
But whether or no the world returns thus to Stevenson, whether or no it
returns thus to stories, it will certainly return to something; and to
something of this kind. The only thing which we can safely prophesy is the one
thing which is always called impossible. Again and again we are told, by all
sorts of priggish and progressive persons, that mankind cannot go back. The
answer is that if mankind cannot go back, it cannot go anywhere. Every
important change in history has been founded on something historic: and if the
world had not again and again tried to renew its youth, it would have been dead
long ago. As the poet makes his songs out of memories of first love, or the
writer of fairy-tales has to play at being a child as the child plays at being
a man, so every republican has looked back to the remote republics of antiquity
and even the Communist talks about a primitive community of goods. The sharp
return to simplicity, as the expression of the fiery thirst for happiness--that
is the one recurring fact of all history; and that is the importance of
Stevenson's place in literary history. Nor is there the smallest reason to
suppose that the literary history of the future will in this respect be any
different from the literary history of the past. On the contrary, the two or
three examples of extreme change, with which the most recent days have
challenged us, have very curiously confirmed this old truth in a new way. Of
that it is indeed true to say that the more it changes, the more it is the same
thing; and a jolly good thing too.
Fashions change; but this return to the nursery is not a fashion and it
does not change. If we turn to the very latest, and we might say loudest, of
literary innovators, we still find that in so far as they are saying anything,
they are saying that. Let us suppose that the Stevensonian way of doing it is
altogether dated and out of date; let us leave Stevenson behind in the dead
past, along with such lumber as Cervantes and Balzac and Charles Dickens. If we
shoot forward into the most fashionable fads and fancies, if we rush to the
newest salons or listen to the most advanced lectures, we do not escape the
challenge of our childhood. There is already a group, we might say a family group,
of poets who consider themselves, and are generally considered, the last word
in experiment and even extravagance; and who are not without real qualities of
deep atmosphere and suggestion. Yet all that is really deep in the best of
their work comes out of those depths of garden perspective and large rooms as
seen by little children, white with the windows of the morning. The best poetry
of Miss Sitwell is after all a sort of parody of _A Child's
That is why the real story of Stevenson must end where it began; because it
was to that end that he himself perpetually wandered and strove. I said at the
beginning that the key to his career was put early into his hands; it was well
symbolised by the paint-brush dipped in purple or prussian blue, with which he
started to colour the stiff caricatures upon the cardboard of Skelt. But that
paint-brush has been in other hands besides his; I remarked elsewhere that,
dipped in somewhat paler hues, it has brightened the lives of many of those
vague Victorian aunts whose cloudy crinolines float through the gardens of the
new "Early Victorian" poetry. Neither perhaps know that, even in
lingering on such things, they do but illustrate a more ancient parable and the
mystery of a child set in the midst. Here, however, we may take the matter more
lightly and leave it to tell its own story; but at least it is amusing to
reflect that the old story of the unconsciously comic tombstone, the epitaph that
was the butt of a hundred jests, is not really so far wrong after all; that
there is a sort of truth concealed in that remarkable inscription, and that
(leaving on one side a somewhat needless allusion to the Earl of Cork) we may
repeat the epitaph with truth and even profundity: "He also painted in
watercolours. For of such is the kingdom of heaven."
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