A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we
suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,
from the scorn of 'Ephemera Critica' and Mr George Moore, that Stevenson
had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of being
misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto &
Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson's works, 'Robert
Louis Stevenson,' by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he
has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by
his admirers. Mr Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about
Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by
any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially 'Beau Austin,' is
remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes
far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality
which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can
number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame
with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of
the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very
things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express.
Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his
'pessimism'; surely a strange charge against the man who has done more
than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But
he complains that, in 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde,' Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was
one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised
than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and
beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space
and time. 'Whatever we are intended to do,' he said, 'we are not
intended to succeed.' That the stars in their courses fight against
virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very
spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to
all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone
stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It
is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an
old church and see none in the ruins of a man.
The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood
and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we
use Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He
(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be
better employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon might as well say that
Dr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr Clark
Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that
one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and
falsifying marriage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this
error: few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson.
Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and
gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death,
but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action
of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.
Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman
and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there
are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.
The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such
stories as 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Weir of Hermiston.' But there
is another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abrupt
and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a
blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the
standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'The
Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he
loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring
universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as
has not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well
sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch
that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones
left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with the knife that Wicks drove through
his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain
clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting
wood with an axe.
Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an
object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, 'The Destroying Angel,'
in 'The Dynamiter,' that it is 'highly fantastic and putting a strain on
our credulity.' This is rather like describing the travels of Baron
Munchausen as 'unconvincing.' The whole story of 'The Dynamiter' is a
kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story 'The Destroying
Angel' is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the
moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability
is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from
hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least
comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories. He
actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel of
Bohemia, that, 'though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on
the whole rather an irritating presence.' From this we are almost driven
to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr Baildon
thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he were a
man in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite
character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we met
him in real life we should kill him.
The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and
intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional
virtue--that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great
message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters,
it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his
light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone
supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his
versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well
enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,
pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could
not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can
play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he
is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly
well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has
happened in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,' 'The Master of
Ballantrae,' 'The Child's Garden of Verses,' and 'Across the Plains' had
been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by
succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once,
he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But
the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as
that of James Watt.
The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that
romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more
important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the
other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of
all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of
scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted
orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no one
has been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists
in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is
the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and a
ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that
ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adventures. To
think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this is
the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make one
story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for
the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It
is quite inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans
called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr
George Moore by 'Esther Waters.' These novels were only the two or
three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell. But he died
with a thousand stories in his heart.
[Footnote A: 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism.' By H.
Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.]