The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man
who "perceives only the visible world"--he should not engage himself with
problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to
their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain
conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of
zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the
Palace of Art:
"As God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all,"
because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine
issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and passion,
and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.
All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid
appeal to heart and emotion--in the measure that they may, in his hands,
be made to tell for sympathy and general effect. He creates an
atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but
never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other
that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the
destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for
which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name.
Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all
high creative art. Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and
occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it--an over-
elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far
alien to the very highest--he was too often like a man magnetised and
moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to
his own freewill and as he would.
Action in creative literary art is a _sine qua non_; keeping all the
characters and parts in unison, that a true _denouement_, determined by
their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all
asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really
unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it. Egotistical
predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the full
result, the unity which is finally craved: Stevenson fails, when he does
fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has
said, in the French sense, too _personnel_, and cannot escape from it.
And though these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed
fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are,
and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested revelation
of life and reality. Instead, therefore, of "the visible world," as the
only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that between it and him lies a
cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which dims the
lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in fact melting them
into each other; and in his sympathetic regards, causing them all to
become too much alike. Scott had more of the power of healthy
self-withdrawal, creating more of a free atmosphere, in which his
characters could freely move--though in this, it must be confessed, he
failed far more with women than with men. The very defects poor Carlyle
found in Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with him, as sounding
no depth, are really the basis of his strength, precisely as the absence
of them were the defects of Goethe, who invariably ran his characters
finally into the mere moods of his own mind and the mould of his errant
philosophy, so that they became merely erratic symbols without hold in
the common sympathy. Whether _Walverwandschaften_, _Wilhelm Meister_, or
_Faust_, it is still the same--the company before all is done are
translated into misty shapes that he actually needs to label for our
identification and for his own. Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could
not help declaring his own lack of interest in the latter parts of
Goethe's greatest efforts. Stevenson, too, tends to run his characters
into symbols--his moralist-fabulist determinations are too much for
him--he would translate them into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on
a board. The essence of romance strictly is, that as the characters will
not submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer may
consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the magic wand
of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere fanciful invention it is
enough. Tieck's _Phantasus_ and George MacDonald's _Phantastes_ are
ready instances illustrative of this. But it is very different with the
story of real life, where there is a definite check in the common-sense
and knowledge of the reader, and where the highest victory always lies in
drawing from the reader the admission--"that is life--life exactly as I
have seen and known it. Though I could never have put it so, still it
only realises my own conception and observation. That is something
lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me lovingly
remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce with such
vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him, exactly as though
I had been looking on real men and women playing their part or their game
in the great world."
Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:
"He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of
adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to bring
out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed character he
was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure books, but a modified
creature. . . . It is his essays and his personality, rather than his
novels, that will count with posterity. On the whole, a great
provincial writer. Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a
man's provinciality the very source of his strength . . . only the
centuries can show.
The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson--he could not, wholly or at
once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to his first
love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist, and the
mystic--Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the Mill, insisted on
his acknowledging them in his work up to the end. _The modified
creature_ at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the
egotistic element as well as through the romantic action, and this point
missed the great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in
generals.
M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart looked
when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance
of John Ford's _Annabella and Giovanni_, and how at the next performance
the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a
bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say
significantly:
"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette
espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la
couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de
nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des fantomes de la
verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez en passant que
les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois
Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."
Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves
celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and
more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the
religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father--a
circumstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other
changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had
deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old
Bristo Port in Edinburgh--something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss
Simpson deliberately wrote:
"Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life--what he
calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be remembered that Mr
Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with
Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to
the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which
his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten. Mr
Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to _Virginibus
Puerisque_ dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at
twenty-five.' In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about
the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Saturday and
Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa."
Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact. It will be the
business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of
necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of
morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere--the purely
egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier
life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long
whiles content to work.