In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason
he himself gave about _Deacon Brodie_ utterly fails in that healthy
hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently
dilated. Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and
villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own
artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply.
Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of
that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional. Admitting that
such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the _Ebb-Tide_ on the one
side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely
demanded that they should not stand _alone_, but have their due
complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to
tell on them in the action. If "a knave or villain," as George Eliot
aptly said, is but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to
be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and
this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and
effective sense. It is here that Stevenson fails--fails absolutely in
most of his work, save the very latest--fails, as has been shown, in _The
Master of Ballantrae_, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in
lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or
seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his
sympathy with them or for them. Thus he fails to give his readers the
proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given. The
highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral
poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however
artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set
forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely,
outwardly, and inwardly defeated. It is here the same in the melodrama
of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists
and Shakespeare. "The evening brings a' 'hame'" and the end ought to
show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank
Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of _elevated impression_,
acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true _denouement_
and the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or
acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.
Stevenson's toleration and constant sermonising in the essays--his desire
to make us yield allowances all round is so far, it may be, there in
place; but it will not work out in story or play, and declares the need
for correction and limitation the moment that he essays artistic
presentation--from the point of view of art he lacks at once artistic
clearness and decision, and from the point of view of morality seems
utterly loose and confusing. His artistic quality here rests wholly in
his style--mere style, and he is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment
and reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws. Herein lies
the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders
really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic
work--which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a
mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of
the theatre, and of dramatic creation.
From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to
the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success. He confuses and
so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once
moral and dramatic.
I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from
somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about
_Beau Austin_, and the reason of its failure--complete failure--on the
stage:
"I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this
piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it
could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in
the way the author intended. Yet the fact that _Beau Austin_, in
spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm
Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the
piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success.
Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a
certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with
tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the
serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and
mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the
pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to
earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be
great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy,
a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in
drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the
most dangerous. Now I maintain that in _Beau Austin_ we have an
element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and
noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be
capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman.
Richardson, in _Clarissa Harlowe_, is well aware of this, and is
perfectly right in making his _denouement_ tragic. Stevenson, on the
other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy. It is
even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and
Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could
have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and
ennobled. But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip. He endures a few
minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this
cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong
he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had
done others. He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and
in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be
convincingly effected. Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience,
like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and
sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this
demand. And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or
Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms
of dramatic art."
The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only
be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room
for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature,
change due to deep and unprecedented experiences--religious conversion,
witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of
death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing
it needs to be marked and _fully justified_ in some such way; and no
cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great
law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or
little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this--even
this--is only in appearance.
True, it is not the dramatists part _of himself_ to condemn, or to
approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters
faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each
other. But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside
because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation
of these relations, and the effect upon each other. Character is vital.
And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be
made to tell directly also in the drama. There is no escape from
this--none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a
monster if he is wholly blind to it--like the poet in _In Memoriam_,
"Without a conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too
confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the _Pall
Mall Magazine_, has a remark which I confess astonished me--a remark I
could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very
full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals."
"Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the
books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to
the _Edinburgh Edition_ of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is
implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in
life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it.
What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about
morals," nothing else--the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up
"remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals"
in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic
consistency. Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming
near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius
addresses his son before his going forth on his travels. Mr Henley here
only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and
insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to
relieve _Beau Austin_ and the other plays in which he collaborated with
R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness. The two
youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or
worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower
sense. To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from
it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer
resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self-
conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of
character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our
writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned
and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain
common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack
of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft,
will any way make up. So long as this is tried, with whatever
concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the
more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play,
because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and
instinct for moral proportion--an ethnic reward and punishment, so to
say--is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will
kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not
want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.
Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality," a kind
of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it up with tail-
foremost humour in _Murder as a Fine Art_, etc., etc., but for all such
perversions as these the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such
perversions, and not "remarks about morals," are most strictly prohibited
there. Perverted subtleties of the sort Stevenson in earlier times
especially much affected are not only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and
what genius itself would maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and
rigidly cut away. Final success and triumph come largely by _this_ kind
of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off
of the indulgence of the _egotistical_ genius, which is human discipline,
and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also. This is the
straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but
faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramatic pathway all the flowers of
human passion, hope, love, terror, and triumph.
I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own
impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon, if he
will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain respects on the
dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a
moral callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which the
waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then invasions from the
dream-Stevenson--the result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the
eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small
object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely
natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the
strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself. So, it
must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.
But listen to Mr Baildon:
"In _A Chapter on Dreams_, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to this
still mysterious agency. From a child he had been a great and vivid
dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he used to
awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.' Later in life his dreams
continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in character and
more continuous and systematic. 'The Brownies,' as he picturesquely
names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the scientist would call it,
that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in our dreams,
became, as it were, _collaborateurs_ in his work of authorship. He
declares that they invented plots and even elaborated whole novels, and
that, not in a single night or single dream, but continuously, and from
one night to another, like a story in serial parts. Long before this
essay was written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal
dream-like quality in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to
account for, until I read this extraordinary explanation, for explanation
it undoubtedly affords. Anything imagined in a dream would have a
tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like character,
and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the
dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be blended
beyond recognition. The trouble with the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson
_was his or their want of moral sense_, so that they sometimes presented
the waking author with plots which he could not make use of. Of this
Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity
is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer
so scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as
Stevenson was. But Stevenson admits that his most famous story, _The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, was not only suggested by a
dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised points,
such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the dream. It
had been extremely instructive and interesting had he gone more into
detail and mentioned some of the other stories into which the
dream-element entered largely and pointed out its influence, and would
have given us a better clue than we have or now ever can have.
"Even in _The Suicide Club_ and the _Rajah's Diamond_, I seem to feel
strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . _At certain points
one feels conscious of a certain moral callousness_, _such as marks the
dream state_, _as in the murder of Colonel Geraldine's brother_, _the
horror of which never seems to come fully home to us_. But let no one
suppose these stories are lacking in vividness and in strangely realistic
detail; for this is of the very nature of dreaming at its height. . . .
While the _dramatis personae_ play their parts with the utmost spirit
while the story proceeds, they do not, as the past creations do, seem to
survive this first contact and live in our minds. This is particularly
true of the women. They are well drawn, and play the assigned parts well
enough, but they do not, as a rule, make a place for themselves either in
our hearts or memories. If there is an exception it is Elvira, in
_Providence and the Guitar_; but we remember her chiefly by the one
picture of her falling asleep, after the misadventures of the night, at
the supper-table, with her head on her husband's shoulder, and her hand
locked in his with instinctive, almost unconscious tenderness."