only because the purpose of it is to insist that the only sane behaviour
is to leave death and the accidents that lead to it out of our
calculations. Life “is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the
longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing
bride of ours.” The person who does so “makes a very different
acquaintance with the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast,
and gathers impetus as he runs, until if he be running towards anything
better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the
end.” Nothing can be more deplorable than to “forego all the issues of
living in a parlour with a regulated temperature.” Mr. Stevenson adds
that as for those whom the gods love dying young, a man dies too young
at whatever age he parts with life. The testimony of “Aes Triplex” to
the author’s own disabilities is after all very indirect. It consists
mainly in the general protest not so much against the fact of extinction
as against the theory of it. The reader only asks himself why the hero
of _Travels with a Donkey_, the historian of Alan Breck, should think of
these things. His appreciation of the active side of life has such a
note of its own that we are surprised to find that it proceeds in a
considerable measure from an intimate acquaintance with the passive. It
seems too anomalous that the writer who has most cherished the idea of a
certain free exposure should also be the one who has been reduced most
to looking for it within, and that the figures of adventurers who, at
least in our literature of to-day, are the most vivid, should be the
most vicarious. The truth is, of course, that as the _Travels with a
Donkey_ and _An Inland Voyage_ abundantly show, the author has a fund of
reminiscences. He did not spend his younger years “in a parlour with a
regulated temperature.” A reader who happens to be aware of how much it
has been his later fate to do so may be excused for finding an added
source of interest--something indeed deeply and constantly touching--in
this association of peculiarly restrictive conditions with the vision of
high spirits and romantic accidents, of a kind of honourably picaresque
career. Mr. Stevenson is, however, distinctly, in spite of his
occasional practice of the gruesome, a frank optimist--an observer who
not only loves life but does not shrink from the responsibility of
recommending it. There is a systematic brightness in him which testifies
to this and which is after all but one of the innumerable ingenuities of
patience. What is remarkable in his case is that his productions should
constitute an exquisite expression, a sort of whimsical gospel of
enjoyment. The only difference between _An Inland Voyage_ or _Travels
with a Donkey_ and _The New Arabian Nights_ or _Treasure Island_ or
_Kidnapped_, is that in the later books the enjoyment is reflective
(though it simulates spontaneity with singular art), whereas in the
first two it is natural and, as it were, historical.
These little histories--the first volumes, if I mistake not, that
introduced Mr. Stevenson to lovers of good writing--abound in charming
illustrations of his disposition to look at the world as a not exactly
refined but glorified, pacified Bohemia. They narrate the quest of
personal adventure, on one occasion in a canoe on the Sambre and the
Oise and on another at a donkey’s tail over the hills and valleys of
the Cévennes. I well remember that when I read them in their novelty,
upwards of ten years ago, I seemed to see the author, unknown as yet to
fame, jump before my eyes into a style. His steps in literature
presumably had not been many; yet he had mastered his form--it had in
these cases perhaps more substance than his matter--and a singular air
of literary experience. It partly, though not completely, explains the
phenomenon, that he had already been able to write the exquisite little
story of _Will of the Mill_, published previously to _An Inland Voyage_,
and republished to-day in the volume of _The Merry Men_, for in _Will of
the Mill_ there is something exceedingly rare, poetical and unexpected,
with that most fascinating quality a work of imagination can have--a
dash of alternative mystery as to its meaning, an air (the air of life
itself), of half inviting, half defying you to interpret. This brief but
finished composition stood in the same relation to the usual “magazine
story” that a glass of Johannisberg occupies to a draught of table
d’hôte _vin ordinaire_.
“One evening he asked the miller where the river went.... ‘It goes
out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs
through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all
alone in great palaces, with a sentry walking up and down before
the door. And it goes under bridges, with stone men upon them,
looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folks
leaning on their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then
it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at
last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring tobacco
and parrots from the Indies.’”
It is impossible not to open one’s eyes at such a paragraph as that,
especially if one has taken a common texture for granted. Will of the
Mill spends his life in the valley through which the river runs, and
through which, year after year, post-chaises and waggons and
pedestrians, and once an army, “horse and foot, cannon and tumbrel, drum
and standard,” take their way, in spite of the dreams he once had of
seeing the mysterious world, and it is not till death comes that he goes
on his travels. He ends by keeping an inn, where he converses with many
more initiated spirits; and though he is an amiable man he dies a
bachelor, having broken off with more plainness than he would have used
had he been less untravelled (of course he remains sadly provincial),
his engagement to the parson’s daughter. The story is in the happiest
key and suggests all kinds of things: but what does it in particular
represent? The advantage of waiting, perhaps--the valuable truth that,
one by one, we tide over our impatiences. There are sagacious people who
hold that if one does not answer a letter it ends by answering itself.
So the sub-title of Mr. Stevenson’s tale might be “The Beauty of
Procrastination.” If you do not indulge your curiosities your slackness
itself makes at last a kind of rich element, and it comes to very much
the same thing in the end. When it came to the point poor Will had not
even the curiosity to marry; and the author leaves us in stimulating
doubt as to whether he judges him too selfish or only too philosophic.
I find myself speaking of Mr. Stevenson’s last volume (at the moment I
write), before I have spoken, in any detail, of its predecessors: which
I must let pass as a sign that I lack space for a full enumeration. I
may mention two more of his productions as completing the list of those
that have a personal reference. _The Silverado Squatters_ describes a
picnicking episode, undertaken on grounds of health, on a mountain-top
in California; but this free sketch, which contains a hundred humorous
touches, and in the figure of Irvine Lovelands one of Mr. Stevenson’s
most veracious portraits, is perhaps less vivid, as it is certainly less
painful, than those other pages in which, some years ago, he
commemorated the twelvemonth he spent in America--the history of a
journey from New York to San Francisco in an emigrant train, performed
as a sequel to a voyage across the Atlantic in the same severe
conditions. He has never made his points better than in this
half-humorous, half-tragical recital, nor given a more striking instance
of his talent for reproducing the feeling of queer situations and
contacts. It is much to be regretted that this little masterpiece had
not been brought to light a second time, as also that he has not given
the world (as I believe he came very near doing), his observations in
the steerage of an Atlantic liner. If, as I say, our author has a taste
for the impressions of Bohemia, he has been very consistent, and has not
shrunk from going far afield in search of them. And as I have already
been indiscreet, I may add that if it has been his fate to be converted
in fact from the sardonic view of matrimony, this occurred under an
influence which should have the particular sympathy of American readers.
He went to California for his wife, and Mrs. Stevenson, as appears
moreover by the title-page of his work, has had a hand--evidently a
light and practised one--in _The Dynamiter_, the second series,
characterised by a rich extravagance, of _The New Arabian Nights_. _The
Silverado Squatters_ is the history of a honeymoon, prosperous it would
seem, putting Irvine Lovelands aside, save for the death of dog Chuchu
“in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken
with alarm and with the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his
eye.”
Mr. Stevenson has a theory of composition in regard to the novel on
which he is to be congratulated, as any positive and genuine conviction
of this kind is vivifying so long as it is not narrow. The breath of the
novelist’s being is his liberty, and the incomparable virtue of the form
he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to
every variety of illustration. There is certainly no other mould of so
large a capacity. The doctrine of M. Zola himself, so jejune if
literally taken, is fruitful, inasmuch as in practice he romantically
departs from it. Mr. Stevenson does not need to depart, his individual
taste being as much to pursue the romantic as his principle is to defend
it. Fortunately, in England to-day, it is not much attacked. The
triumphs that are to be won in the portrayal of the strange, the
improbable, the heroic, especially as these things shine from afar in
the credulous eye of youth, are his strongest, most constant incentive.
On one happy occasion, in relating the history of _Doctor Jekyll_, he
has seen them as they present themselves to a maturer vision. _Doctor
Jekyll_ is not a “boy’s book,” nor yet is _Prince Otto_; the latter,
however, is not, like the former, an experiment in mystification--it is,
I think, more than anything else, an experiment in style, conceived one
summer’s day when the author had given the reins to his high
appreciation of Mr. George Meredith. It is perhaps the most literary of
his works, but it is not the most natural. It is one of those
coquetries, as we may call them for want of a better word, which may be
observed in Mr. Stevenson’s activity--a kind of artful inconsequence. It
is easy to believe that if his strength permitted him to be a more
abundant writer he would still more frequently play this eminently
literary trick--that of dodging off in a new direction--upon those who
might have fancied they knew all about him. I made the reflection, in
speaking of _Will of the Mill_, that there is a kind of anticipatory
malice in the subject of that fine story: as if the writer had intended
to say to his reader “You will never guess, from the unction with which
I describe the life of a man who never stirred five miles from home,
that I am destined to make my greatest hits in treating of the rovers
of the deep.” Even here, however, the author’s characteristic irony
would have come in; for--the rare chances of life being what he most
keeps his eye on--the uncommon belongs as much to the way the inquiring
Will sticks to his door-sill as to the incident, say, of John Silver and
his men, when they are dragging Jim Hawkins to his doom, hearing in the
still woods of Treasure Island the strange hoot of the maroon.
The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his account is liable
to awkward confrontations, as we are compelled to reflect in this age of
newspapers and of universal publicity. The next report of the next
divorce case (to give an instance) shall offer us a picture of
astounding combinations of circumstance and behaviour, and the annals of
any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and startling example.
That interesting compilation _Vicissitudes of Families_ is but a
superficial record of strange accidents: the family (taken of course in
the long piece), is as a general thing a catalogue of odd specimens and
tangled situations, and we must remember that the most singular products
are those which are not exhibited. Mr. Stevenson leaves so wide a margin
for the wonderful--it impinges with easy assurance upon the text--that
he escapes the danger of being brought up by cases he has not allowed
for. When he allows for Mr. Hyde he allows for everything, and one feels
moreover that even if he did not wave so gallantly the flag of the
imaginative and contend that the improbable is what has most character,
he would still insist that we ought to make believe. He would say we
ought to make believe that the extraordinary is the best part of life
even if it were not, and to do so because the finest feelings--suspense,
daring, decision, passion, curiosity, gallantry, eloquence,
friendship--are involved in it, and it is of infinite importance that
the tradition of these precious things should not perish. He would
prefer, in a word, any day in the week, Alexandre Dumas to Honoré de
Balzac, and it is indeed my impression that he prefers the author of
_The Three Musketeers_ to any novelist except Mr. George Meredith. I
should go so far as to suspect that his ideal of the delightful work of
fiction would be the adventures of Monte Cristo related by the author of
_Richard Feverel_. There is some magnanimity in his esteem for Alexandre
Dumas, inasmuch as in _Kidnapped_ he has put into a fable worthy of that
inventor a closeness of notation with which Dumas never had anything to
do. He makes us say, Let the tradition live, by all means, since it was
delightful; but at the same time he is the cause of our perceiving
afresh that a tradition is kept alive only by something being added to
it. In this particular case--in _Doctor Jekyll_ and _Kidnapped_--Mr.
Stevenson has added psychology.
_The New Arabian Nights_ offer us, as the title indicates, the wonderful
in the frankest, most delectable form. Partly extravagant and partly
very specious, they are the result of a very happy idea, that of
placing a series of adventures which are pure adventures in the setting
of contemporary English life, and relating them in the placidly
ingenuous tone of Scheherezade. This device is carried to perfection in
_The Dynamiter_, where the manner takes on more of a kind of high-flown
serenity in proportion as the incidents are more “steep.” In this line
_The Suicide Club_ is Mr. Stevenson’s greatest success, and the first
two pages of it, not to mention others, live in the memory. For reasons
which I am conscious of not being able to represent as sufficient, I
find something ineffaceably impressive--something really haunting--in
the incident of Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, who, one evening
in March, are “driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the
immediate neighbourhood of Leicester Square,” and there have occasion to
observe the entrance of a young man followed by a couple of
commissionaires, each of whom carries a large dish of cream tarts under
a cover--a young man who “pressed these confections on every one’s
acceptance with exaggerated courtesy.” There is no effort at a picture
here, but the imagination makes one of the lighted interior, the London
sleet outside, the company that we guess, given the locality, and the
strange politeness of the young man, leading on to circumstances
stranger still. This is what may be called putting one in the mood for a
story. But Mr. Stevenson’s most brilliant stroke of that kind is the
opening episode of _Treasure Island_, the arrival of the brown old
seaman with the sabre-cut at the “Admiral Benbow,” and the advent, not
long after, of the blind sailor, with a green shade over his eyes, who
comes tapping down the road, in quest of him, with his stick. _Treasure
Island_ is a “boy’s book” in the sense that it embodies a boy’s vision
of the extraordinary, but it is unique in this, and calculated to
fascinate the weary mind of experience, that what we see in it is not
only the ideal fable but, as part and parcel of that, as it were, the
young reader himself and his state of mind: we seem to read it over his
shoulder, with an arm around his neck. It is all as perfect as a
well-played boy’s game, and nothing can exceed the spirit and skill, the
humour and the open-air feeling with which the thing is kept at the
palpitating pitch. It is not only a record of queer chances, but a study
of young feelings: there is a moral side in it, and the figures are not
puppets with vague faces. If Jim Hawkins illustrates successful daring,
he does so with a delightful rosy good-boyishness and a conscious,
modest liability to error. His luck is tremendous, but it does not make
him proud, and his manner is refreshingly provincial and human. So is
that, even more, of the admirable John Silver, one of the most
picturesque and indeed in every way most genially presented villains in
the whole literature of romance. He has a singularly distinct and
expressive countenance, which of course turns out to be a grimacing
mask. Never was a mask more knowingly, vividly painted. _Treasure
Island_ will surely become--it must already have become and will
remain--in its way a classic: thanks to this indescribable mixture of
the prodigious and the human, of surprising coincidences and familiar
feelings. The language in which Mr. Stevenson has chosen to tell his
story is an admirable vehicle for these feelings: with its humorous
braveries and quaintnesses, its echoes of old ballads and yarns, it
touches all kinds of sympathetic chords.
Is _Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ a work of high philosophic intention, or
simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the
stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in
different ways; but I suppose it would generally be called the most
serious of the author’s tales. It deals with the relation of the baser
parts of man to his nobler, of the capacity for evil that exists in the
most generous natures; and it expresses these things in a fable which is
a wonderfully happy invention. The subject is endlessly interesting, and
rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be
congratulated on having touched the core of it. I may do him injustice,
but it is, however, here, not the profundity of the idea which strikes
me so much as the art of the presentation--the extremely successful
form. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a
fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being
bad; but what there is above all is a singular ability in holding the
interest. I confess that that, to my sense, is the most edifying thing
in the short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece
of concision. There is something almost impertinent in the way, as I
have noticed, in which Mr. Stevenson achieves his best effects without
the aid of the ladies, and _Doctor Jekyll_ is a capital example of his
heartless independence. It is usually supposed that a truly poignant
impression cannot be made without them, but in the drama of Mr. Hyde’s
fatal ascendency they remain altogether in the wing. It is very
obvious--I do not say it cynically--that they must have played an
important part in his development. The gruesome tone of the tale is, no
doubt, deepened by their absence: it is like the late afternoon light of
a foggy winter Sunday, when even inanimate objects have a kind of wicked
look. I remember few situations in the pages of mystifying fiction more
to the purpose than the episode of Mr. Utterson’s going to Doctor
Jekyll’s to confer with the butler when the Doctor is locked up in his
laboratory, and the old servant, whose sagacity has hitherto encountered
successfully the problems of the sideboard and the pantry, confesses
that this time he is utterly baffled. The way the two men, at the door
of the laboratory, discuss the identity of the mysterious personage
inside, who has revealed himself in two or three inhuman glimpses to
Poole, has those touches of which irresistible shudders are made. The
butler’s theory is that his master has been murdered, and that the
murderer is in the room, personating him with a sort of clumsy
diabolism. “Well, when that masked thing like a monkey jumped from
among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine
like ice.” That is the effect upon the reader of most of the story. I
say of most rather than of all, because the ice rather melts in the
sequel, and I have some difficulty in accepting the business of the
powders, which seems to me too explicit and explanatory. The powders
constitute the machinery of the transformation, and it will probably
have struck many readers that this uncanny process would be more
conceivable (so far as one may speak of the conceivable in such a case),
if the author had not made it so definite.
I have left Mr. Stevenson’s best book to the last, as it is also the
last he has given (at the present speaking) to the public--the tales
comprising _The Merry Men_ having already appeared; but I find that on
the way I have anticipated some of the remarks that I had intended to
make about it. That which is most to the point is that there are parts
of it so fine as to suggest that the author’s talent has taken a fresh
start, various as have been the impulses in which it had already
indulged, and serious the hindrances among which it is condemned to
exert itself. There would have been a kind of perverse humility in his
keeping up the fiction that a production so literary as _Kidnapped_ is
addressed to immature minds, and, though it was originally given to the
world, I believe, in a “boy’s paper,” the story embraces every occasion
that it meets to satisfy the higher criticism. It has two weak spots,
which need simply to be mentioned. The cruel and miserly uncle, in the
first chapters, is rather in the tone of superseded tradition, and the
tricks he plays upon his ingenuous nephew are a little like those of
country conjurers. In these pages we feel that Mr. Stevenson is thinking
too much of what a “boy’s paper” is expected to contain. Then the
history stops without ending, as it were; but I think I may add that
this accident speaks for itself. Mr. Stevenson has often to lay down his
pen for reasons that have nothing to do with the failure of inspiration,
and the last page of David Balfour’s adventures is an honourable plea
for indulgence. The remaining five-sixths of the book deserve to stand
by _Henry Esmond_ as a fictive autobiography in archaic form. The
author’s sense of the English idiom of the last century, and still more
of the Scotch, has enabled him to give a gallant companion to
Thackeray’s _tour de force_. The life, the humour, the colour of the
central portions of _Kidnapped_ have a singular pictorial virtue: these
passages read like a series of inspired footnotes on some historic page.
The charm of the most romantic episode in the world, though perhaps it
would be hard to say why it is the most romantic, when it was associated
with so much stupidity, is over the whole business, and the forlorn hope
of the Stuarts is revived for us without evoking satiety. There could be
no better instance of the author’s talent for seeing the familiar in
the heroic, and reducing the extravagant to plausible detail, than the
description of Alan Breck’s defence in the cabin of the ship and the
really magnificent chapters of “The Flight in the Heather.” Mr.
Stevenson has in a high degree (and doubtless for good reasons of his
own) what may be called the imagination of physical states, and this has
enabled him to arrive at a wonderfully exact translation of the miseries
of his panting Lowland hero, dragged for days and nights over hill and
dale, through bog and thicket, without meat or drink or rest, at the
tail of an Homeric Highlander. The great superiority of the book resides
to my mind, however, in the fact that it puts two characters on their
feet with admirable rectitude. I have paid my tribute to Alan Breck, and
I can only repeat that he is a masterpiece. It is interesting to observe
that though the man is extravagant, the author’s touch exaggerates
nothing: it is throughout of the most truthful, genial, ironical kind;
full of penetration, but with none of the grossness of moralising
satire. The figure is a genuine study, and nothing can be more charming
than the way Mr. Stevenson both sees through it and admires it. Shall I
say that he sees through David Balfour? This would be perhaps to
under-estimate the density of that medium. Beautiful, at any rate, is
the expression which this unfortunate though circumspect youth gives to
those qualities which combine to excite our respect and our objurgation
in the Scottish character. Such a scene as the episode of the quarrel
of the two men on the mountain-side is a real stroke of genius, and has
the very logic and rhythm of life; a quarrel which we feel to be
inevitable, though it is about nothing, or almost nothing, and which
springs from exasperated nerves and the simple shock of temperaments.
The author’s vision of it has a profundity which goes deeper, I think,
than _Doctor Jekyll_. I know of few better examples of the way genius
has ever a surprise in its pocket--keeps an ace, as it were, up its
sleeve. And in this case it endears itself to us by making us reflect
that such a passage as the one I speak of is in fact a signal proof of
what the novel can do at its best, and what nothing else can do so well.
In the presence of this sort of success we perceive its immense value.
It is capable of a rare transparency--it can illustrate human affairs in
cases so delicate and complicated that any other vehicle would be
clumsy. To those who love the art that Mr. Stevenson practises he will
appear, in pointing this incidental moral, not only to have won a
particular triumph, but to have given a delightful pledge.
1887.
VI
MISS WOOLSON