Once again I quote Goethe:
"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
follows no youth can be a master."
It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and
by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural
simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment--artistic
and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected
concatenations of phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We
often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for,
in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses
it. _The Sedulous Ape_ sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for
occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search
of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new
and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not
be so. And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more
knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's
first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and
well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the
more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting
impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he
also is most artificial and involved. If the story-writer is not so much
in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him,
how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it?
More than once in _Catriona_ we must own we had this experience, directly
warring against full possession by the story, and certain passages about
Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first
introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara Grant,
of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever,
indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere _deus ex
machina_, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson's
own power of _persiflage_, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass,
for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help
saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit
better fate than that.
But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at
the very close. Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth
to the last. To a true critic then, the problem is, having already
attained so much--a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters,
with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,--what would Stevenson have
attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him? It has
over and over again been said that, for long he _shied_ presenting women
altogether. This is not quite true: _Thrawn Janet_ was an earlier
effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real. Here
also he was on the right road--the advance road. The sex-question was
coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in
any broad and true picture. This element was effectively revived in
_Weir of Hermiston_, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it
does not go deeper than _Denis Duval_ or _Edwin Drood_. We know what
Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson
would have done. "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and
unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work
would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it. It shows
the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the
cross-roads--the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism,
freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in
achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.
Yes; there was growth--undoubted growth. The questioning and severely
moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism--the tendency to
casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection--which had so
coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of _The Master of Ballantrae_,
and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured
insight into life itself. The art would gradually have been transformed
also. The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of
the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur,
pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.