Sept. 21, 1895. Stevenson's Testimony.
In his chapter of "Personal Memories," printed in the _Century
Magazine_ of July last, Mr. Gosse speaks of the peculiar esteem in
which Mr. Frank R. Stockton's stories were held by Robert Louis
Stevenson. "When I was going to America to lecture, he was
particularly anxious that I should lay at the feet of Mr. Frank R.
Stockton his homage, couched in the following lines:--
My Stockton if I failed to like,
It were a sheer depravity;
For I went down with the 'Thomas Hyke,'
And up with the 'Negative Gravity.'
He adored these tales of Mr. Stockton's, a taste which must be shared
by all good men."
It is shared at any rate by some thousands of people on this side of
the Atlantic. Only, one is not quite sure how far their admiration
extends. As far as can be guessed--for I have never come across any
British attempt at a serious appreciation of Mr. Stockton--the
general disposition is to regard him as an amusing kind of "cuss" with
a queer kink in his fancy, who writes puzzling little stories that
make you smile. As for taking him seriously, "why he doesn't even
profess to write seriously"--an absurd objection, of course; but good
enough for the present-day reviewer, who sits up all night in order
that the public may have his earliest possible opinion on the
Reminiscences of Bishop A, or the Personal Recollections of
Field-Marshal B, or a Tour taken in Ireland by the Honorable Mrs. C.
For criticism just now, as a mere matter of business convenience,
provides a relative importance for books before they appear; and in
this classification the space allotted to fiction and labelled
"important" is crowded for the moment with works dealing with
religious or sexual difficulties. Everyone has read _Rudder Grange_,
_The Lady or the Tiger?_ and _A Borrowed Month_; but somehow few
people seem to think of them as subjects for serious criticism.
"Classical" qualities.
And yet these stories are almost classics. That is to say, they have
the classical qualities, and only need time to ripen them into
classics: for nothing but age divides a story of the quality of _The
Lady or the Tiger?_ (for instance) from a story of the quality of _Rip
Van Winkle_. They are full of wit; but the wit never chokes the style,
which is simple and pellucid. Their fanciful postulates being granted,
they are absolutely rational. And they are in a high degree original.
Originality, good temper, good sense, moderation, wit--these are
classical qualities: and he is a rare benefactor who employs them all
for the amusement of the world.
A Comparison.
At first sight it may seem absurd to compare Mr. Stockton with Defoe.
You can scarcely imagine two men with more dissimilar notions of the
value of gracefulness and humor, or with more divergent aims in
writing. Mr. Stockton is nothing if not fanciful, and Defoe is hardly
fanciful at all. Nevertheless in reading one I am constantly reminded
of the other. You must remember Mr. Stockton's habit is to confine his
eccentricities of fancy to the postulates of a tale. He starts with
some wildly unusual--but, as a rule, not impossible--conjuncture of
circumstances. This being granted, however, he deduces his story
logically and precisely, appealing never to our passions and almost
constantly to our common sense. His people are as full of common-sense
as Defoe's. They may have more pluck than the average man or woman,
and they usually have more adaptability; but they apply to
extraordinary circumstances the good unsentimental reasoning of
ordinary life, and usually with the happiest results. The shipwreck of
Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine was extraordinary enough, but their
subsequent conduct was rational almost to precision: and in
story-telling rationality does for fancy what economy of emotional
utterances does for emotion. We may apply to Mr. Stockton's tales a
remark which Mr. Saintsbury let fall some years ago upon
dream-literature. He was speaking particularly of Flaubert's
_Tentation de Saint Antoine_:--
"The capacities of dreams and hallucinations for literary
treatment are undoubted. But most writers, including even De
Quincey, who have tried this style, have erred, inasmuch as they
have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the
waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself. Anyone's
experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events
of dreams as they happen are quite plain and matter-of-fact, and
it is only in the intervals, and, so to speak, the
scene-shifting of dreaming, that any suspicion of strangeness
occurs to the dreamer."
A dream, however wild, is quite plain and matter-of-fact to the
dreamer; therefore, for verisimilitude, the narrative of a dream
should be quite plain and matter-of-fact. In the same way the narrator
of an extremely fanciful tale should--since verisimilitude is the
first aim of story-telling--attempt to exclude all suspicion of the
unnatural from his reader's mind. And this is only done by persuading
him that no suspicion of the unnatural occurred to the actors in the
story. And this again is best managed by making his characters persons
of sound every-day common sense. "If _these_ are not upset by what
befalls them, why"--is the unconscious inference--"why in the world
should _I_ be upset?"
So, in spite of the enormous difference between the two writers, there
has been no one since Defoe who so carefully as Mr. Stockton regulates
the actions of his characters by strict common sense. Nor do I at the
moment remember any writer who comes closer to Defoe in mathematical
care for detail. In the case of the True-born Englishman this
carefulness was sometimes overdone--as when he makes Colonel Jack
remember with exactness the lists of articles he stole as a boy, and
their value. In the _Adventures of Captain Horn_ the machinery which
conceals and guards the Peruvian treasure is so elaborately described
that one is tempted to believe Mr. Stockton must have constructed a
working model of it with his own hands before he sat down to write the
book. In a way, this accuracy of detail is part of the common-sense
character of the narrative, and undoubtedly helps the verisimilitude
enormously.
A Genuine American.
But to my mind Mr. Stockton's characters are even more original than
the machinery of his stories. And in their originality they reflect
not only Mr. Stockton himself, but the race from which they and their
author spring. In fact, they seem to me about the most genuinely
American things in American fiction. After all, when one comes to
think of it, Mrs. Lecks and Captain Horn merely illustrate that ready
adaptation of Anglo-Saxon pluck and businesslike common sense to
savage and unusual circumstances which has been the real secret of the
colonization of the North American Continent. Captain Horn's
discovery and winning of the treasure may differ accidentally, but do
not differ in essence, from a thousand true tales of commercial
triumph in the great Central Plain or on the Pacific Slope. And in the
heroine of the book we recognize those very qualities and aptitudes
for which we have all learnt to admire and esteem the American girl.
They are hero and heroine, and so of course we are presented with the
better side of a national character; but then it has been the better
side which has done the business. The bitterest critic of things
American will not deny that Mr. Stockton's characters are typical
Americans, and could not belong to any other nation in the world. Nor
can he deny that they combine sobriety with pluck, and businesslike
behavior with good feeling; that they are as full of honor as of
resource, and as sportsmanlike as sagacious. That people with such
characteristics should be recognizable by us as typical Americans is a
sufficient answer to half the nonsense which is being talked just now
_à propos_ of a recent silly contest for the America Cup.
Nationality apart, if anyone wants a good stirring story, _Captain
Horn_ is the story for his money. It has loose ends, and the
concluding chapter ties up an end that might well have been left
loose; but if a better story of adventure has been written of late I
wish somebody would tell me its name.