Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the
parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical--to treatment of the world as
an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain
dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted
moralities--"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named
them--that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on
by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his
genealogy on both sides of the house. The strong Celtic strain is now
amply attested by many researches. Such phantasies as _The House of
Eld_, _The Touchstone_, _The Poor Thing_, and _The Song of the Morrow_,
published along with some fables at the end of an edition of _Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde_, by Longman's, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as
forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as
though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real
things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the
shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though
a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which
he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol--no
phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides
suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient--blind to
certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or
the literature of phantasy, more properly.
This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of
impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tendencies in
characters. The little early sketch written in June 1875, titled _Good
Content_, well illustrates this:
"Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek
Content follows them on a snow-white ass. Here, the broad sunlight
falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage,
pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign-
poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under
blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompass them about;
from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable
wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of
jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and
walks with her slim hand upon my arm?
"Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a
will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand.
And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous
way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on
his white ass, follows simpering Content.
"Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. Virtue is all
a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache. Sore
besmirched, on his jackass, follows Content."
The record, entitled _Sunday Thoughts_, which is dated some five days
earlier is naive and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic
moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises
to the fine climax in this respect at the close.
"A plague o' these Sundays! How the church bells ring up the sleeping
past! I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide
out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves.
Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the
pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent
solitary voice of the preacher. To and fro I wander among the graves,
and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow
where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under
their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons
flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut
lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air. Oh,
the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage! Oh, to
have wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree's green heart!
. . . . . . . .
"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
past! Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain. To the door,
to the door, with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may
talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has
been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with
its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that
thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would
speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so
dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my
favour wrought for it on my bed at night. Can you see the device on
the badge? I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess--'_bad
ware nicht_'--is not that the humour of it?
. . . . . . . . .
"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where
the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay
on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet
dead in the kirkyard--some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some
dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for
threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but
what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts,
among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me,
thin and solitary, through the open windows; _if I were what I was
yesterday_, _and what_, _before God_, _I shall be again to-morrow_,
_how should I outface these brazen memories_, _how live down this
unclean resurrection of dead hopes_!"
Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is
assertive. Take here the cunning sentences on _Selfishness and Egotism_,
very Hawthornian yet quite original:
"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily
loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There
is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his
sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a
force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish. But egotism is
a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is
uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it
is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."
If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted
it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the _Pall Mall
Magazine_ article. He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently
apt to the purpose.
In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic.
Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of
selfishness. Here is another very characteristic bit:
"You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son.
It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in
the same case. I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem;
and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good
spirits. I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to succeed,
but to continue to fail, in good spirits."
Again:
"It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the
retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And
there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for
what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been
gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about."
The moral to _The House of Eld_ is incisive writ out of true
experience--phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce,
tragic:--
"Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."
The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously
earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of _Moral Emblems_.
"Reader, your soul upraise to see,
In yon fair cut designed by me,
The pauper by the highwayside
Vainly soliciting from pride.
Mark how the Beau with easy air
Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer
And casting a disdainful eye
Goes gaily gallivanting by.
He from the poor averts his head . . .
He will regret it when he's dead."
Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly
and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free
of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into
the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on
Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in
becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than
has yet been done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once
Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his
temperament and genius. Few men who have by force of native genius gone
into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and
enchanted region. They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it
and kept there as by a spell--the more they struggle for freedom the more
surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them--they are but like the fly
in amber. It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel
Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly
real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils
them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot
disguise what they really are--the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy
writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope
or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking
back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which
keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which
now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came.
Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement--had he
lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been
a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its
tragic laws and wondrous compensations--he would have shown how to make
the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape
from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with
one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not
absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This
side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or
their _confreres_, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most
careful attention and thought that can be given to it.
The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical
inversion, comes out fully in such a work as _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_.
There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the
half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest
speculations on human nature and motive. But even when he is professedly
concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate
to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or
allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought,
or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there
cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also
unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.
Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in _Treasure
Island_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Wrecker_--a something which suffices
decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially
they might be classed.