From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have
read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe
against Stevenson in _The Daily Chronicle_ of 24th April 1897, without
amusement, if not without laughter--indeed, we confess we may here quote
Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr
Moore's high position and his assured self-confidence, we should not
trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it. It was
a review of _The Secret Rose_ by W. B. Yeats, but it passed after one
single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson--an abuse that was
justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead. Had
he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at
least, of fable and moral. And when towards the close Mr Moore again
quotes from Mr Yeats, it is still "harping on my daughter" to undo
Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in _Hamlet_.
"Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who
perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to
the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's _Secret Rose_ is a survival or
a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's
significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always
something there." No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks
with the great literature--unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never
nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always
at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans
Breitmann, he has "nodings on." He is poor, naked, miserable--a mere
pretender--and has no share in the makings of great literature. Mr Moore
has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and
storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid,
which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia,
after all. This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr
Yeats is white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor
other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have
subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory. Mr
Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can
fully subscribe to all this.
Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like
ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master
of the horrifying. {11} He even finds the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the
cockney, in it richly illustrative and grand. "There never was a more
magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little
ruffian. His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the
island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol
he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also,
even (!) of regret."
And well it may! Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste
and opinion, but the _Ebb-Tide_ and the cockney I should be inclined to
cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-believe, in which
there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors
to be quite genuine. The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and
the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that
simplicity which is of inspiration and unassailable. Here Stevenson,
alas! all too often, _pace_ Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of
E. A. Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments.
And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by
desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work
fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing upon the
reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and
pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed
in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to
be gratified. There is a distinction, very bold and very essential,
between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy
to which Aristotle was there referring. Stevenson's "horrifying," to my
mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more
so than in the very forced and unequal _Ebb-Tide_, which, with its rather
doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to
borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of
what came after. No service is done to an author like Stevenson by
fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing.
"Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his
life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet. To romance he brought the
highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour"
(should this not be "essays _full of_" _or_ "characterised by"?) "and
sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the
realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and
tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so"
(should it not be "as"?) "long as our noble English language."
Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he
misses the point. The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing
critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject.
Mr Baildon says about the _Ebb-Tide_:
"I can compare his next book, the _Ebb-Tide_ (in collaboration with
Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as
it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity,
the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have Stevenson's masterly
but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest
villainy in the cockney, Huish. Stevenson's other villains shock us
by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen
satanic glory about them, some shining threads of possible virtue.
They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady
of not wanting. But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul
has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit
venom. . . . He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for
the story, and calls it in one passage of his _Vailima Letters_ 'the
ever-to-be-execrated _Ebb-Tide_' (pp. 178 and 184). . . . He repented
of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt
cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked. So, after what in one
sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height.
That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not
change the character of the _Ebb-Tide_ as 'the ever-to-be-execrated.'"
Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):
"The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency
to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at
its worst in books over which he collaborated."
"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the _Daily News_ on "The
Average Reader" has this passage:
"We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in _A Window
in Thrums_, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson
paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the
pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate. All
these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are
brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth. The events
described must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given
characters, have happened in the way stated. Only in none of the
specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place.
We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic eye--invisible
realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We behold
and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the
earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque
fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and
loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these
wonderful pictures disclose to our view. Had we been lookers-on, we,
the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for
ourselves. But they are there, and genius enables us to see them.
Genius makes truth shine.
"Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average
readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something
altogether different? I think I know what it is. It is an attempt to
describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see
something the writer has never seen himself in his mind's eye. He has
no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an
impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without
any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or
definite effect. To describe, one must first of all see, and if we
see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come
as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender
greening of April meadows.' I, therefore, more than suspect that the
brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy. A
pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not make a picture."
Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which may
exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or even
loftily imaginative conception, at once commanding unity and commanding
it. There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the former line--the
earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses to it. _The Master of
Ballantrae_ abounds in picture and incident and dramatic situations and
touches; but it lacks true unity, and the reason simply is given by
Stevenson himself--that the "ending shames, perhaps degrades, the
beginning," as it is in the _Ebb-Tide_, with the cockney Huish,
"execrable." "We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic
eye--invisible realities, as well as the outward form of the action."
True, but the "invisible realities" form that from which true unity is
derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole the more
incomplete and lop-sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight
beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet
not too assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails,
and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not
degrading, the beginning--"and without the true sense of pleasurableness;
and therefore really imperfect _in essence_." Ah, it is to be feared
that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his
own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring
critics--from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson.
Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of
erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb judgment
by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is pleasant to come on
one who bears the balances in his hand, and will report faithfully as he
has seen and felt, neither more nor less than what he holds is true. Mr
Andrew Lang wrote an article in the _Morning Post_ of 16th December 1901,
under the title "Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled
his part in midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on
Stevenson.
"Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost
daily miss, as that character was displayed in circumstances unknown
to me, I think that I ought to speak of him as I found him. Perhaps
our sympathy was mainly intellectual. Constantly do those who knew
him desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him
the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or things
in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own by the
gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his appreciation. We may
say, as Scott said at the grave of John Ballantyne, that he has taken
with him half the sunlight out of our lives. That he was sympathetic
and interested in the work of others (which I understand has been
denied) I have reason to know. His work and mine lay far apart: mine,
I think, we never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him. But
in a fragmentary manuscript of his after his death I found the
unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness. Again, he once
wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine whom he had
never met. His remarks were ideally judicious, a model of serviceable
criticism. I found him chivalrous as an honest boy; brave, with an
indomitable gaiety of courage; on the point of honour, a Sydney or a
Bayard (so he seemed to me); that he was open-handed I have reason to
believe; he took life 'with a frolic welcome.' That he was
self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he was
fond of attitude (like his own brave admirals) he himself knew well,
and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his habit of
'playing at' things after the fashion of childhood. Genius is the
survival into maturity of the inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson
is not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more
than its inspiration. Other examples readily occur to the memory--in
one way Byron, in another Tennyson. None of us is perfect: I do not
want to erect an immaculate clay-cold image of a man, in marble or in
sugar-candy. But I will say that I do not remember ever to have heard
Mr Stevenson utter a word against any mortal, friend or foe. Even in
a case where he had, or believed himself to have, received some wrong,
his comment was merely humorous. Especially when very young, his
dislike of respectability and of the _bourgeois_ (a literary
tradition) led him to show a kind of contempt for virtues which,
though certainly respectable, are no less certainly virtuous. He was
then more or less seduced by the Bohemian legend, but he was
intolerant of the fudge about the rights and privileges of genius. A
man's first business, he thought, was 'keep his end up' by his work.
If, what he reckoned his inspired work would not serve, then by
something else. Of many virtues he was an ensample and an inspiring
force. One foible I admit: the tendency to inopportune benevolence.
Mr Graham Balfour says that if he fell into ill terms with a man he
would try to do him good by stealth. Though he had seen much of the
world and of men, this practice showed an invincible ignorance of
mankind. It is improbable, on the doctrine of chances, that he was
always in the wrong; and it is probable, as he was human, that he
always thought himself in the right. But as the other party to the
misunderstanding, being also human, would necessarily think himself in
the right, such secret benefits would be, as Sophocles says, 'the
gifts of foeman and unprofitable.' The secret would leak out, the
benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be embittered.
This reminds me of an anecdote which is not given in Mr Graham
Balfour's biography. As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh,
Mr Stevenson read a book called _Ministering Children_. I have a
faint recollection of this work concerning a small Lord and Lady
Bountiful. Children, we know, like to 'play at' the events and
characters they have read about, and the boy wanted to play at being a
ministering child. He 'scanned his whole horizon' for somebody to
play with, and thought he had found his playmate. From the window he
observed street boys (in Scots 'keelies') enjoying themselves. But
one child was out of the sports, a little lame fellow, the son of a
baker. Here was a chance! After some misgivings Louis hardened his
heart, put on his cap, walked out--a refined little figure--approached
the object of his sympathy, and said, 'Will you let me play with you?'
'Go to hell!' said the democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson
against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile
disposition was, it seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be
misconstrued."