this chapter upon his essays. As a theoretical writer he gives his
deliberate example in that one essay _On some technical elements of
Style in Literature_; and his theories have aroused bitter comment.
Because Stevenson found certain combinations of consonants recurrent
in selected passages, it was assumed by his critics that he lived in
a state of the dreariest kind of pattern-making. That, of course, was
a mistake on the part of Stevenson’s critics, because Stevenson was a
prolific writer, and could never have afforded the time to be a mere
hanger-on of words. What Stevenson did was first to realise that a
prose style is not the result of accident. He saw that an evil use
of adjective and over-emphasis weakened style; and he realised that
a solved intricacy of sentence was part of the instinctive cunning
by which a good writer lures readers to follow him with ever-growing
interest into the most remote passages of his work. He was a careful
writer, who revised with scrupulous care; and some sentences of
Stevenson, meandering most sweetly past their consonants and syllables
and “knots,” to their destined conclusion, are still, and I suppose
always will be capable of yielding, a pure delight to the ear. Those
who do not take Stevenson’s pains will qualify his denunciation of the
“natural” writer, because a natural writer is one whose ear is quick
and fairly true: he is not necessarily producing “the disjointed
babble of the chronicler,” but he is incapable of the fine point of
exquisite rhythm which we may find in Stevenson’s best writing. That
writing, various though it is (various, I mean, in “styles”), remains
true to its musical principles. It is the result of trained ear and
recognition of language as a conscious instrument. It has innumerable,
most insidious appeals, to disregard which is a task for the barbarian.
It is patterned, it is built of sounds,--“one sound suggests, echoes,
demands, and harmonises with another,”--all in accordance with the
expressed theory of Stevenson. We will grant it the delights, because
they are incontestable. Let us now question whether it has not one
grave defect.
All style which is so intricately patterned, so reliant upon its
music, its rhythm, its balance, gratifies the ear in the way that
old dance music gratifies the ear. The minuet and the saraband,
stately as they are, have their slow phrases, and flow to their clear
resolution with immemorial dignity; they are patterns of closely-woven
figured style, than which we could hardly have an illustration more
fit. They are examples of style less subtle than Stevenson’s; but
in Stevenson’s writing there is no violence to old airs and the old
order. His writing is only “a linkéd sweetness long drawn out,” and
in its differentiation from the old way of writing is to be found,
not a revolution, not anarchy, but a weakness. Stevenson’s style,
graceful, sustained though it is, lacks power. It has finesse; but
it has no vigour. The passages to which one turns are passages of
delicious, stealthy accomplishment. They are passages which suggest
the slow encroaching fingers of the in-coming tide, creeping and
whispering further and further up the sand; and our watchful delight
in the attainment of each sentence is the delight we feel in seeing
the waves come very gently, pushed on by an incalculable necessity,
until their length is reached and their substance is withdrawn. There
is no tempestuous certainty in Stevenson’s writing; there is not
the magnificent wine of Shakespeare’s prose, which has marvellous
strength as well as its delicate precision. Stevenson’s style,
clearly invalidish in his imitators, has in itself the germs of their
consumption. It is quiet, pretty, picturesque, graceful; it has figure
and trope in plenty; but it has no vehemence. You may find in it an
amazing variety of pitch and cadence; but at length the care that has
made it betrays the artificer; at length the reader will look in vain
for the rough word. That is the pity of Stevenson’s style--not that
he should have sought it, and exercised it, and made language quite
the most important thing in his writing; but that his very artfulness
should have yielded him no protection against the demand of nature for
something which no care or cunning can ever put into style that does
not carry its own impetus.
V
POEMS
I
The Scottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely
ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy
and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance.
Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among
all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality,
in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the
same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons.
It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among
the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found
both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a
conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every
meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware
of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very
appreciative of good actions contributed by other persons to that
advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by
encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I
mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or
verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily
moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain
sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the
voice of a singer--especially when the singer happens to be the person
who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities,
although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case
the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes
the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a
certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken
person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is
entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is
simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who
do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned.
It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show
affection or weep: how hard it is that we should weigh in the balance
of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!
This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to
explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to
explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any
impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous
“grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part
of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their
tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears
and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not
vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae
appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and
inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed
because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing
and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman.
Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a
good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans,
whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of
extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems
to me important that we should be slow to charge a race that is
impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we
might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be
a great poet is another matter.
II
Stevenson’s poems are contained in four small volumes--_Underwoods_,
_Ballads_, _Songs of Travel_ (a collection made by himself, but
published posthumously), and _A Child’s Garden of Verses_. Of the
four volumes the one that has enjoyed most popularity, as well as
most critical esteem, is _A Child’s Garden of Verses_, which book,
although, by Stevenson’s account, very easily produced, has the value
of being unique in scheme and contents. The other volumes have less in
them of wide interest, and so they are less generally read. Certain
poems, such as the _Requiem_ (“Under the wide and starry sky”) and _The
Vagabond_ (“Give to me the life I love”) arise whenever the name of
Stevenson is fondly mentioned; they are, as it were, the stock-in-trade
of the conversational anthologist, who, in the same spirit, will have
suggested to him by the name of Meredith the words, “Enter these
enchanted woods, Ye who dare.” These two poems are not the best poems
Stevenson wrote; but they are handy for remembrance. That explains
their frequent employment; that, and their appropriateness to the
conventional idea of Stevenson, which is based upon a sentimental and
mediocre marvel at the unconventionality of the open road.
The best poems Stevenson wrote are his ballads. With a story to tell,
he was keener to represent truly the subject-matter upon which he was
engaged; and this engendered the “heat of composition,” if it did not
always spring from the native heat or intensity of inspiration. The
ballads, especially _Ticonderoga_, have a swift effectiveness and an
adherence to theme which is not so marked in the poems provoked by
occasional events. In these the rhyme and form sometimes lead the way,
and the poems become exercises in friendly versification, without
much feeling, and with only that Scottish affectionateness to which
reference has already been made. Examples of impoverished emotion
may be found in the two poems expressing gladness at visits from Mr.
Henry James. As cheerful little outbursts of pleasure, such poems, in
manuscript, would be interesting, even delightful: as poems they fall
short of complete success, even in their own class, for the reason that
they are as conversational and as fluent as Stevenson’s letters, and
are diffuse as his prose rarely is.
Better than these are some of the dryly humorous Scots dialect poems,
such as _The Spaewife_, with its refrain of “--_It’s gey an’ easy
spierin’_, says the beggar-wife to me.” These again are often purely
experimental versifications; but they are more than the casual rhymings
of the pleased householder, and they have more interest as poetry. Far
and away better even than these, however, because it is the expression
of a personal and, I think, a deep feeling, is that poem, included in
_Songs of Travel_, and quoted in _The Master of Ballantrae_, which is
untitled, but which is written “To the tune of Wandering Willie.”
“Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
Hunger my driver, I go where I must.”
In this poem there seems to be real emotion, as I think there is in the
dedication to Mrs. Stevenson of _Weir of Hermiston_. In other poems
there is a grace and the mellifluous flow of words which Stevenson
could always command; but the verses make a pattern, and a pattern of
only occasional significance. They are thus robbed of any power to move
us æsthetically.
The two long narrative poems, _The Ballad of Rahero_ and _The Feast
of Famine_, are both well-sustained by a body of incident. They
have, in lieu of emotion, a certain vividness of excitement. One is
excited by what is going forward, one must read on for the story. In
the degree, therefore, in which one’s attention is removed from the
versification, these two narratives are good; and those other verses
based on legends--_Heather Ale_ and _Ticonderoga_--would be sufficient
to emphasise the fact that Stevenson loved a story and was always at
his best with a tale to spin. When, however, we reach poems in which
no story is to be told, we are confronted with an absence of emotion
which robs the pages we read of all that exceeds mere pleasurable
line-scanning. Happy lines there are, turns of phrase that perhaps have
given rise to the poem into which they are woven. But they are only, at
best, the amiable pleasantries of one who could handle with dexterity
the words of whose music his mind was full. “The bright ring of words”
is not the phrase of a poet; it is the phrase of a connoisseur, and of
one who used words as a connoisseur uses them. The poet is a singer
first: he does not make a poem out of his craft. And the tendency to
diffuseness which mars many of the longer lyrics is a curious instance
of failure in a writer who regarded compression as an essential of good
style.
III
In _A Child’s Garden of Verses_ Stevenson was doing a thing which
had never really been done before. There are nursery rhymes which
crystallise children’s ideas; but this book actually shows, in what
we must believe to be an extraordinarily happy way, the working of a
particular child mind over a great variety of matters. Its excellence
is due to the fact that Stevenson’s young days, lonely as some of
them had been, had never lacked interest, had always been full of
those simple and direct pleasures of incident and encounter and memory
which happy children enjoy. The world had been full of a number of
things; and the memory of those things had abided. It was the memory
of a fanciful rather than an imaginative childhood, a childhood of
superstitions and sports, of a buried tin soldier and of the pleasant
land of play; but we must not forget that such poems as _My Treasures_,
poor in some of their lines, are finely imaginative reconstructions,
the naïveté of which prevents many readers from estimating their
quality. So with _The Unseen Playmate_, which, although it is a poem
for grown-ups, reveals an understanding of a most important fact in
children’s games far more profound than are the pretentious and
unconvincing lines to R. A. M. Stevenson in _Underwoods_. Even if the
idea of _The Unseen Playmate_ may be the idea of a grown-up pretending,
the writing of this, as of the other verses, is almost without lapse,
charmingly simple and natural. I believe it is a fact that children
appreciate and even delight in _A Child’s Garden of Verses_, not
merely at the bidding of their parents, but as a normal manifestation
of taste. This in itself would be a proof that the book is already a
secondary nursery classic. For our present purpose, if that does not
seem rather an over-bearing way of valuing a book so slight in form,
it is sufficient to say that Stevenson’s success here was due to the
fact that he was legitimately using the memory of actual experience.
Too many of his serious, or grown-up, poems show their models; too many
of them flow undistinguished by any truly poetic quality; too many of
them are experiments in metre or rhyme, such as one may write for fun,
but never for free circulation. _The Child’s Garden of Verses_ alone,
then, of the four volumes, exhibits a strict harmony of design with
performance. Its dedication to Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham,
serves only to make the book more complete.
IV
Implicit in the strictures upon Stevenson’s poetry which have
preceded this paragraph is the assumption that Milton’s requirements
of poetry--that it should be simple, sensuous, passionate--is
fundamentally true as applied to lyrical poetry. It would be
troublesome to apply such a test to many of the minor poets; and it may
be that a few of Stevenson’s poems would stand the test. Not many of
them, however, because none of them shows a depth of emotion uncommon
to the ordinarily sensitive person. Stevenson was sensitive to many
things; without sensitiveness he could not have written _A Child’s
Garden of Verses_ or that very excellent ballad _Ticonderoga_. But
sensitiveness is only a poor substitute for emotion; and Stevenson’s
emotion ran in the few ordinary channels of the normal Scotsman. He
loved home; he loved those around him; he desired to be loved, to be
free of the fear of poverty, to live in comfort and in health. Those
things he felt deeply, as Scotsmen, as most men, do. He loved truth;
but it was a conventional truth; a truth, that is to say, improvised
from ordinary usage, from hearsay, from the dogma of “that station of
life”; a truth such as any man who finds himself born in a little pit
of earth may harden his moral shell and his imagination and stultify
his spiritual curiosity by accepting; and it was a truth out of which
Stevenson was escaping towards the end of his life. But in all this
love of virtues and duties and usages there was never until Stevenson’s
emergence into the greater freedom of life in the South Seas the
passionate love of anything for its own sake. If he loved the open air
it was with a pleasant, “playing” love, a sort of self-indulgence.
Over his heart he kept the watchful guard of a Protestant Scotsman. It
was unmoved, a secret, not to be known. It did not inform his work,
in which there is sometimes a heat of composition, or even a heat of
feeling, but never the cold heat of profound and piercing emotion. That
he was capable of being easily moved, that he loved virtue and hated
cruelty and wrong, these things are true. That he could grow hot at a
calumny, as he did in the defence of Father Damien, is equally true.
But these things are the signs of a prudent man, eagerly interested in
life, rather taking pleasure in the thought that he is hot to attack
injustice; not of a profound thinker or of a poet. They warm us with,
perhaps, affection for Stevenson; they keep alive our admiration
for him as an attractive figure in our literary history. They do
not thrill us, because they appeal to the interest and excitement
and honesty and feeling in us, and not to those more secret, more
passionate reserves which we yield only to the poet.
VI
PLAYS
I
It is a commonplace of dramatic reporting, which in spite of its
frequently doubtful application has the truth of an old saw, that
the novelist cannot write plays. Certainly, it would seem that the
qualities which go to the making of good plays are not precisely those
which make good novels; for while it is possible to conceive a novel
in terms of narrative, descriptions of abounding nature, psychological
analysis, and tableaux, the play has rules more strictly objective
and more definitely rigid. Now if we, for the moment, pass over the
question of Stevenson’s collaborator in the four printed plays with
which his name is associated, and if we, for this occasion, treat
them as though they were his work entirely, we shall be better able
to distinguish certain remarkable characteristics of these plays,
and, anticipating certain general conclusions to be made later, of
Stevenson’s talent.
Stevenson, we are all aware, was never, strictly speaking, in spite
of _Catriona_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, a novelist. He was a writer of
many kinds of stories; but they were not primarily, until we come to
_Weir_, domestic or psychological. Many of them were what no doubt
would commonly be called “dramatic,” in the sense that they contained
scenes of some violence; but for the most part they were narrative
interspersed with tableaux. They were “picturesque,” not because
they were startlingly visual, but because Stevenson had that _flair_
for the odd, the startling, or the vivid effect of contrast which is
generally described by the word “picturesque.” It was the oddness of
_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ that allured him before he became oppressed
by its symbolism. It was, equally, oddness that always attracted
him in character: he had no profound sense of character, for this
reason. Passivity he never understood. His characters must forever be
in action. That, it might be supposed, was in itself a first reason
for turning to the theatre, since, according to modern dramatic
reporters, “drama” is a word synonymous with the word “action.” Action,
something doing--that, by the recipe, is the certain play. But while
action may give a play breathless suspense, while it may provide the
kind of play which, in a specifically theatrical sense, is called a
“drama,” action is not the whole battle. To action, or at least to
the psychological excitement created by a sense of action in progress
and a climax pending, must be added a very powerful sense of what is
effective in the theatre. A pause, a sound, verbal repetition, an
abrupt change--these things are crude examples, chosen at random from
among the obvious instances of what contributes to the sense of the
theatre. If we think of such things as the tapping of Pew’s stick (in
_Admiral Guinea_), and, in _Deacon Brodie_, the appearance of the
masked Deacon at the window by which Leslie is watching for him, we
shall realise that in some degree, in some very obvious and primitive
form, Stevenson was possessed of this attribute. But one thing we
shall infallibly discover him to lack, a thing which Mr. Henry James
missed in _Catriona_, a thing which has vital importance in drama--the
visual sense. These plays show no real power of visualising a scene.
Picturesque they all are; they all have qualities which make them
engrossing--as reading. But they are not focussed for the eyes, and
they are not well constructed for real dramatic effect.
_Deacon Brodie_ is in five acts and eight tableaux, and its effects
are indescribably broken, so that irrelevancies are numerous,
distracting side issues over-emphasised, and so that the Deacon is
almost a minor character. It is hard to realise that there are only a
dozen persons in the play, for their comings and goings are so frequent
as to give the effect of a confused number of straggling participants
in desultory action. The play itself centres round an historical
figure--Deacon Brodie--who was an honest man before the world by day,
and by night an expert cracksman. His name is familiar both in criminal
history and in the annals of Edinburgh, where his activities became,
after his death, notorious. In the play, Brodie at last is eager for
reform; but one of his cronies, tempted by a Bow Street runner, and
the only one of Brodie’s friends to yield to temptation, betrays him.
Though Brodie escapes, his absence from home has been discovered in
the excitement consequent upon his father’s death, and, when arrest
is imminent, he takes his own life. Stevenson had found the details
of Brodie’s life while he was preparing the sketches collected under
the title _Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes_; and it is conceivable that
in some measure the play’s technique was a little influenced by a
reading of some eighteenth-century episodic plays, such, for example,
as Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which is similarly broken in construction,
though more permissibly so, because “The Beggar’s Opera” is no more
than a skein in which ballads and satire may be found to provide our
entertainment. This mention of “The Beggar’s Opera” must not be taken
too seriously, however, because although that play deals with the
life of highwaymen and pickpurses and thief-takers in the eighteenth
century, as _Deacon Brodie_ does, it is profoundly real, whereas
_Deacon Brodie_ is only too obviously modern fake. Macheath and Polly
Peachum are infinitely more real than Brodie and his doxy. Moreover
the ensemble in _Deacon Brodie_ is on the whole poorly conceived. The
minor persons are mere figures, introduced to stand here or there, or
do this or that, and are labelled with names and idiosyncrasies. The
major persons, though more detailed, have an equal lack of vitality. It
is necessary to add the further explanation that _Deacon Brodie_ is the
first of the plays, and that it dates from 1880. It is easily the least
coherent of them all. Stevenson was to improve upon _Deacon Brodie_ in
that respect, at least.
II