We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the
ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are,
of necessity, of a very vital character. We have shown only as yet the
effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort. The
position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to
eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic
presentation. That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly,
between good and evil--between right and wrong--between the secret
consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere
strength and force in certain other ways.
Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here--no technical
skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches,"
as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand
here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated. This
is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley--young men of great talent,
failed--utterly failed--they thought they could make a hero out of a
shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally--and failed.
The spirit of this is of the clever youth type--all too ready to forego
the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking
selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth--whose tender mercies are often
cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were
young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was
a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the _Ebb-
Tide_ with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it;
which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of _The
Master of Ballantrae_ "_shame_, _and perhaps degrade_, _the beginning_."
He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late
to remedy it--he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to
put right errors in what was done.
Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the
far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:
"Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached
him--the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the
truth about life--was abundantly made good in his later writings. It
is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to
underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most
compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry
James:--'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his
hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he.
"Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect? Expect to find a gold
watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not?' Heavenly, by all
means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he
'smiling passed the moral by.' In his enjoyment of the waiter's
effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was
himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary
button. He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based
upon just this audacious paralogism."
Many writers have done the same--and not a few critics have hinted at
this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more
directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine,
about the time of Stevenson's death; and the whole is so good and clear
that I must quote it--the writer was not thinking of the drama specially;
only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage the more effective
and apt to my point.
"In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis
Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in
middle life 'with only half his message delivered.' Such a phrase may
have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism. Still it set
one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that part of
it which we had time given us to hear.
"Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined
to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide. To a
certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys'
books, which yet held captive older people. Now, undoubtedly there
was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys. It
gratified their yearning for adventure. To too large a number of his
readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson's chief charm; though even
of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the
literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so
daintily.
"Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_,
and_ The Master of Ballantrae_, tended to foster delusion in this
direction. The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts,
and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had
their titles given more indication of their real scope and tendency.
"All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true
power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature'
and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we have
our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world. He has
the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and
his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their
perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are
pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at
work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast crimes and the
reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used
to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without
them.
"And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far
as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom--the creed that
good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the sense that
good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil.
That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the
seed of the Church. We should not have marvelled in the least that a
genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy
endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of
Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against
Providence. But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of
life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of
absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and
evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde.
The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems
to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to _Kidnapped_ shows
David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple
Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly
made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.
"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life
had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet
one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life,
to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited.
Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover
that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?
"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should
see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it
works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy
optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and
bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is
our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.
"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness
of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to
contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons
with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable
moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of
pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not
matter; nothing will ever come right!'
"Shakespeare has shown us--and never so nobly as in his last great
creation of _The Tempest_--that a man has one stronghold which none
but himself can deliver over to the enemy--that citadel of his own
conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe,
who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause
there.
"We must remember that _The Tempest_ was Shakespeare's last work. The
genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature
against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of
life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we
become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it
that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before
those later years are reached!"
Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which
short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength."
And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified
Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of
art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very
well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a
motto for himself:
"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7}
Stevenson's own verdict on _Deacon Brodie_ given to a _New York Herald_
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the
_Ludgate Hill_, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been
all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an
audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. _But we
were both young men when we did that_, _and I think we had an idea that
bad-heartedness was strength_."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as
I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him
for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal
gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have
done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater
works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself
when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the _Pall Mall
Magazine_ about the _Edinburgh Edition_, etc. Men are mirrors in which
they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more
effectively in that now notorious _Pall Mall Magazine_ article than he
did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking
paltry revenges--writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty
grievances--they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a
kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their
subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis,
and various other things.
R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at
bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due,
perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then
received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself
called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the
close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the
truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he
pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings
"disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and
effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity
that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and
well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too
late:--certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet
gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled
web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as
Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in _Pippa
Passes_:
"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillsides dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"All service ranks the same with God,
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work--God's puppets best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first."
It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but
allowed him.