Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson,
who, like a youth, was all for _Heiterkeit_, cheerfulness, taking and
giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new
sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a
story like _The Master of Ballantrae_--all in a grave, grey, sombre tone,
not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is
conceived to aim at--the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said
that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence."
A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the
essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate
pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his
doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth. This
is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone
which can exult in its power of accumulating shadows and dwelling on the
dark side--it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its
brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own
excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine--hugging to its
heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring
up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined
horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own
relief--rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable,
even were it possible. _The Master of Ballantrae_ indeed marks the
crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure
passion--the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which
yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of
their tendency to pass into this other and apparently opposite. But
here, too, there is nothing single or separate. The device of piracy,
etc., at close of _Ballantrae_, is one of the poorest expedients for
relief in all fiction.
Will in _Will o' the Mill_ presents another. When at the last moment he
decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then
rather incontinent philosophy--which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act
on--spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a
romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace
inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he
were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr
Gwynn thus writing:
"The love scenes in _Weir of Hermiston_ are almost unsurpassable; but
the central interest of the story lies elsewhere--in the relations
between father and son. Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in
the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability
to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no
longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life. Before
this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men
where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled
family group, the result was what we see in _The Master of
Ballantrae_."
In a word, between this work and _Weir of Hermiston_ we have the passage
from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its
patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before
did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within
range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and
workable. He was less the egotist now and more the realist. He was not
so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated;
concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme
was a wee out of ordinary nature. Enough is left to prove that
Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of
being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the
man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and
intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create characters
not unworthy of his greatest predecessors. The blind stroke of fate had
nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he
never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time
enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour
for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward--the triumph of
successful execution.