The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective
impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost
abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal courage, audacity, and
doggedness, and, in the second place, to his theory of life, his
philosophy, his moral view. He produces an artificial atmosphere.
Everything then has to be worked up to this--kept really in accordance
with it, and he shows great art in the doing of this. Hence, though, a
quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere--at once really a lack
of spontaneity and of freedom. He is freest when he pretends to nothing
but adventure--when he aims professedly at nothing save to let his
characters develop themselves by action. In this respect the most
successful of his stories is yet _Treasure Island_, and the least
successful perhaps _Catriona_, when just as the ambitious aim compels him
to pause in incident, the first-person form creates a cold stiffness and
artificiality alien to the full impression he would produce upon the
reader. The two stories he left unfinished promised far greater things
in this respect than he ever accomplished. For it is an indisputable
fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary types of men and
women have little or no attraction for Stevenson, nor their commonplace
passions either. Yet precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of
this very interest. Nothing else will supply the place. The ordinary
passion of love to the end he _shies_, and must invent no end of
expedients to supply the want. The devotion of the ordinary type, as
Thomas Hardy has over and over exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson
wants, to impart to his novels the full sense of reality. The secret of
morals, says Shelley, is a going out of self. Stevenson was only on the
way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive. His characters, in a
way, are all already like himself, romantic, but the highest is when the
ordinary and commonplace is so apprehended that it becomes romantic, and
may even, through the artist's deeper perception and unconscious grasp
and vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing. The very
atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien to this; and,
so far as he went, his most successful revelations were but records of
his own limitations. It is something that he was to the end so much the
youth, with fine impulses, if sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and
that, too, in such a way as to render his work cold and artificial, else
he might have turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or
Fielding. Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause mainly complete
failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the
Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been
a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to
losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all
Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,--a farce,
felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the
more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human
being too icily perfect whom he had met.
On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final,
that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:
"From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard,
affection, and esteem of his wife. He goes eavesdropping among the
peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coarsely
impugned. After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to
rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails.
. . . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown
away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject. The
music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this
genteel comedy Princess. A touch of Offenbach would seem more
appropriate. Then even in comedy the hero must not be the butt." And
it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess
that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest--it is to
make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style
and mere external technical art.