In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a
sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it. "He would
rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables,
and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly
he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well
as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau--the mixture that found coherency in
his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once
the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is
never wanting. I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be
brought in to illustrate this here--careful readers who neglect nothing
that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.
But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make
up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on
that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite
guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage
certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist-
casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy:
THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER
Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him,
for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent
on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last
the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act.
The innkeeper got a rope's end.
"Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.
"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only
the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."
"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.
"Fact, I assure you," said the devil.
"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.
"Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to
thrash a thing like me."
"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.
And he made a noose and hanged the devil.
"There!" said the innkeeper.
The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired. We could
scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its
philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John
Silver, entitled _The Persons of the Tale_. After chapter xxxii. of
_Treasure Island_, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before
business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the
story." After a few preliminaries:
"You're a damned rogue, my man," said the Captain.
"Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other. "There's no call to
be angry with me in earnest. I'm on'y a character in a sea story. I
don't really exist."
"Well, I don't really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to
meet that."
"I wouldn't set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider
argument," responded Silver. "But I'm the villain of the tale, I am;
and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is,
what's the odds?"
"Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain. "Don't you
know there's such a thing as an Author?"
"Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively. "And who
better'n me? And the p'int is, if the Author made you, he made Long
John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry--not that George is
up to much, for he's little more'n a name; and he made Flint, what
there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work
about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and--well, if that's a Author,
give me Pew!"
"Don't you believe in a future state?" said Smollett. "Do you think
there's nothing but the present sorty-paper?"
" I don't rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don't see what
it's got to do with it, anyway. What I know is this: if there is sich
a thing as a Author, I'm his favourite chara'ter. He does me fathoms
better'n he does you--fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He
keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves
you measling in the hold, where nobody can't see you, nor wants to,
and you may lay to that! If there is a Author, by thunder, but he's
on my side, and you may lay to it!"
"I see he's giving you a long rope," said the Captain. . . .
Stevenson's stories--one and all--are too closely the illustrations by
characters of which his essays furnish the texts. You shall not read the
one wholly apart from the other without losing something--without losing
much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of
the writer. It is this if fully perceived which would justify one
writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don't forget, in saying, as he did say, that
Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels. Hence
there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately
inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation--creation, broad,
natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to
us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of
Cervantes or Fielding. If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful
_Pall Mall Magazine_ article had made this clear from the high critical
ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so
personal and offensive as they are.
Stevenson's bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this. He
is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it
in his clever sonnet. He is constantly asking himself about moral laws
and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these
suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. He is often a
little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough
and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not,
like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners--his love of
the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse
engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers
who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the
backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the
hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here,
reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure.
His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more,
giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-
consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of
this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson.
I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the
class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is
from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not
the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own
sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated
against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and
always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the
very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most
available--on the stage. The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter
Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the
creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in
and manoeuvred the limelight--all too like the old devil of the mediaeval
drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon
and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is
the case pre-eminently in Huish in the _Ebb-Tide_, he shrank from
inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and
thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect. As to his poems,
they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with
separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type
alien to his own. The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is
everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly
exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children,
will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they
would to, say, the _Lilliput Levee_ of my old friend, W. B. Rands. Rands
showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very
narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.
Even in his greatest works, in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Weir of
Hermiston_, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his
characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or
sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have
secured _dramatically_ is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as
in the Treasure Search in the end of _The Master of Ballantrae_. The
powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his _denouement_ is thus
completely sacrificed. The essence of the drama for the stage is that
the work is for this and this alone--dialogue and everything being only
worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy
completeness.
In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson
himself too clearly behind his characters. The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero
referred to trace to the intrusion behind the glass of a
part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the glass is
moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said
already. For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true
instinct. Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind
_Catriona_, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too
far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like
those in her author were attractive. The constant effort to relieve the
sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of
his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very
most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a
sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the
overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at
Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of
style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of
nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions,
saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer
stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this
kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature.
More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative
illustration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon.
Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with
Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no
casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or
genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic
power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had--his novels--the best of
them--would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of
the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception,
penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common-
sense commonplaceness--if I may name it so--protection against vagary and
that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the
drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for
successful dramatic production. Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly
when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was
Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is
inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation.
Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go
freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and
unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be
not, as Shelley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he
passed away, was but on the way to attain. As we shall see, he had risen
so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot
guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him. For
the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely
this--to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary.
True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art
with all classes lies here and not elsewhere. Cleverness, refinement,
fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere
in this sphere without this.