the one in manner, the other in bizarre or, as it is styled by the
authors, “melodramatic farce.” The manner of _Beau Austin_ is the
manner of the costume play. It is highly sophisticated, and its
keynote is powder and patches. The beau is at his toilet, and one of
the women he has betrayed is in the town, still sick with despair
at her soiled virtue. Her true love hears from the lady’s lips the
story of her betrayal, and, on being forbidden to challenge the beau,
contents himself with demanding a marriage ceremony. His flatteries
are effective, the beau consents, and the formal proposal is made,
only to be rejected by the lady, whose hauteur is aroused. So matters
stand when the lady’s brother, learning by chance of the betrayal,
insults the beau before an important personage. As climax, the beau
proposes publicly, and is as publicly accepted. It will be seen that
the play could not claim, excepting in respect of verbal artifice, to
be more than a pretty jig-saw. It could have no effect of reality: the
effect desired by the authors was one purely of the stage. Verbally
it is exquisitely dexterous. That is its undoing. The attempt is
made to convey in words something more than the action of the piece
would successfully carry: words are to create an atmosphere of the
eighteenth-century fashionable life, to indicate the possibility that
calm picturesque heartless exteriors shielded even then hearts that
beat warmly beneath lace and brocade. The play was a pretence that
nothing was something, a pretty moving picture under the perception
of which, beating out in pianissimo airs from appropriate music, and
the faint throb of an unseen minuet, was the delicate heart of the
period. It was an æsthetic view of the eighteenth century, the century
of Fielding and of Smollett, tinkered about to make a perpetual _bal
masque_, or, shall we say, a picture by Watteau or Fragonard. In
point of fact the play is too slight to bear its weight of intention:
it remains verbal. As drama it is more negligible than “Monsieur
Beaucaire” or “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” because its literary
pretensions are so much more elaborate. It has sometimes fine shades of
close verbal fence that are Meredithian: it is better to read than it
could be to see. But it is an attempt, one might say an almost basely
cunning attempt, to capture the theatre as a place where costumes grace
a barren play. It failed because its authors were two conscientious
literary men, bent upon a superficial perfection undreamed of by
practical dramatists. Just as Cowper, in translating Homer, made an
epic for a tea-party, so Henley and Stevenson made about the rational
and cynical eighteenth century a sophisticated play for a boudoir. They
concentrated upon the superficial, and only said, but did not show,
that the men and women of the eighteenth century had hearts as true
and passionate as those of our day. The play lacked realism, and, more
disastrously, it lacked reality.
On the other hand, _Macaire_ has a thin air of jocularity which almost
carries it through. It has a sententious cleric, a drunken notary, a
repetitious father for the bride, a courteous host, a little mystery
of the bridegroom’s nurseling days, the facetious Macaire and his
companion. It has all these things, and it has an idea, strong enough
for a single act, stretched to its thinnest over several acts which
demand cuts more severe than the authors allow.
Macaire escaping from justice, threatened each moment, in the face
of the audience, with instant arrest, carries himself with unfailing
_sang-froid_ through all his difficulties but the last. Finding a
chance of sport, and possibly of profit, he impersonates an erring
father. The real father appears. Macaire still, after the manner of Mr.
Jingle, is imperturbable. Competition follows, until the desire for
the genuine father’s money becomes too strong for Macaire. Then only
does he show the blackness of his heart, which does not shrink, in such
desperate situations, from murder. So Macaire, still talking, still
watchful and unscrupulous, is brought to bay. Fiercely turning, in a
picturesque situation, upon the stairs, he is shot by a gendarme on the
stage. That is a skeleton of the play; but the play is again a literary
play, so that sensationalism will not redeem it. By repetitions of
catch-phrases and by trivial incidents which (e.g. the exchanging of
the wine-bottles) are not unknown to the humbler kinds of drama, the
story is continued until its idle joking can no longer be suddenly
stirred into flaming melodrama by the noise and zest of bloody crime.
It has many shrewd bids for theatrical effectiveness; but it faints for
want of a fabric upon which its devices might flourish and triumphantly
justify themselves.
III
The fourth play, _Admiral Guinea_, has fine qualities, both literary
and dramatic; it is the least literary and the most dramatically
effective of all the plays. It contains one figure, in Pew, which
might have been, as far as one may judge in reading, a hauntingly
gruesome object; and, in spite of Stevenson’s own subsequent contempt
for this play and for _Macaire_, shows a greater, if conventional,
power of simplification than does any of the other plays. Admiral
Guinea, a retired and penitent slaver, refuses his daughter her lover,
on the ground that the lover is ungodly. Pew, an old associate of
Admiral Guinea, become blind for his sins, and still full of vengeful
wickedness, arrives in the neighbourhood, catches the lover drunk,
leads him back to Admiral Guinea’s cottage, and tries, with his aid,
to rob his old captain of certain riches which he supposes to lie in a
brass-bound chest. The young man’s reaction, their discovery by Admiral
Guinea, the violent death of the unrepentant Pew follow; whereupon the
lovers are suitably blessed by Admiral Guinea.
It has been said, above, that this play shows a greater power of
simplification than the others; the action of it is certainly quicker,
more obvious, less choked with verbal expressiveness, than is the
action of the other plays; and in so far as this is so it would appear
that _Admiral Guinea_ is a considerable advance, technically, upon
them.
The simplification is, to some considerable extent, effected by a
strange poverty of invention, and the play is likest of all to those
nondescripts which Stevenson as a little boy must have performed upon
his toy stage, with paper figures pushed hither and thither in tin
slides upon the boards. In spite of that, _Admiral Guinea_ is the
best of the plays because, in a higher degree than its fellows, it is
truly actable. We cannot regard the confused cramped episodic _Deacon
Brodie_ as theatrically effective. Equally it is impossible, from the
standpoint of public performance, to consider as satisfactory either
_Beau Austin_ or _Macaire_. _Admiral Guinea_, however, even if it
belongs to a class of play which is associated in our minds with such
titles as “Black-Eyed Susan,” has its action very largely comprised in
the material put upon the stage; it has the obvious stage effects of
darkness and the dreadful tapping stick of Pew; and it has picturesque
struggles, death, wounded and reasserted honour, and, for these
plays, a minimum of soliloquy. More it would be impossible to claim
for _Admiral Guinea_ without seeing it performed: again we have types
roughly “mannered” to serve as persons of the play: but they are types
clearly in accordance with tradition, and they preserve their interest
fully until they are done with and put away with the footlight-wicks,
and the tin slides, and the other paraphernalia of the toy stage--paper
figures, a penny plain, and twopence coloured.
IV
For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure
of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in
drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual
sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail
because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much
to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the
dramatist’s formal conventions. We do not, in the theatre, demand that
“King Lear” shall be accompanied by a pandemonium of crackling tin
and iron and artificial whoopings of wind. Those things we prefer to
imagine for ourselves. But somehow the mixture of legitimate convention
and the basest imitation of reality has been confused in the theatre.
The exaggeration regarded as necessary by an effete system of acting
and production has created other unpardonable falsenesses. The stage
has been a place upon which actors disported themselves. It was of
such a stage that Stevenson thought. In each case he hung a play upon
a sensational figure--Brodie, Macaire, Pew, and, in a much lesser
degree, upon the picturesque figure of Beau Austin. To him the drama
was nothing but play. It was an excuse--nay, a demand, for unreality.
He supposed that stage characters really were cardboard figures such
as he had known, moralising ranters, virtuous girls, spouters of Latin
tags, pious brands from the burning, handsome courageous puppet-like
juvenile leads, and so on. It never occurred to him to put a real
figure in a play: he never supposed that a character in a play had any
end but to be put back in the box with the other playthings. That is
really the cause of the shallowness of these four plays. As Stevenson
admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them
acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people
talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception
of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without
developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are
bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson
realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to
realise them. We find them, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically
found Catriona herself, bloodless. Professor Saintsbury found Catriona
full of sawdust, while of the characters in the plays we have used the
word “paper”: very well, the impression of lifelessness is as clearly
felt in each case. And such an impression, carried to its logical end,
explains why, in at least one department of letters, Stevenson from the
first mistook his ground. Not one of the four plays has serious value
as an example of dramatic art; it is clear that not one of them so far
has commended itself to the public or to the actor-managers. Yet the
plays were obviously set to catch the popular taste, and their literary
finish, a confession in itself of an absence of dramatic impulse, does
not succeed in commending them to those who judge by more exacting
standards.
VII
SHORT STORIES
I
Stevenson himself establishes the fact that he found short-story
writing easier than the writing of novels. “It is the length that
kills,” he confessed. But length offered difficulties in the longer
stories because Stevenson, besides lacking the physical endurance for
continuous imaginative effort, had the experimental and inventive mind
rather than the synthetic or the analytical. It was easier for him to
see the whole of a short story. It could be compressed: it had not
to be sustained. And in the writing of a short story his confidence
never slackened. He was then not sailing in uncharted seas. It is for
this reason, in the first place, that Stevenson’s short stories are
better as works of art than his long ones. A little idea, a flash,
it may be, of inspiration; and Stevenson had his story complete,
ready for that scrupulous handling and manipulation which the actual
composition always involved. He did not greatly deal in anecdote;
his psychological studies are inclined to be hollow; but he was
perfectly effective in his not very powerful vein of fantasy, could
tell a fairy tale with distinction, succeeded once without question in
picturesque drama, and, when he fell to anecdote, as in _The Treasure
of Franchard_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Beach of Falesá_,
he was pleasantly triumphant. Moreover, in two of his “bogle” stories,
the one inserted in _Catriona_, and the other famous to all the world
as _Thrawn Janet_, he seems to me to have risen clearly above anecdote
with matter which might have been left as unsatisfactory as it remains
in _The Body-Snatcher_.
In one of his reviews Stevenson speaks of “that compression which
is the mark of a really sovereign style.” Compression is no more
the mark of a sovereign style, of course, than it is of a suit of
clothes. Compression brings with it obscurity, and is a mark of
self-consciousness. What Stevenson meant was possibly a justification
of apophthegm and figure. He rather enjoyed what somebody once
called “minting the arresting phrase.” There is, at any rate, a
palpable connection between our two quotations. But it is certain
that precision, austerity, or, if I may use the word, chastity, of
expression is a sign of good style; and compression, where it takes
the form of heightening and intensification of effect, is the mark of a
good short story. It is the mark of Stevenson’s best stories. It is the
mark of _Thrawn Janet_, of _The Pavilion on the Links_, of _The Bottle
Imp_. Sometimes, after promising well, Stevenson abandons himself, it
is true, to his natural Scottish aptitude, and literally “talks out”
such tales as _Markheim_ and _A Lodging for the Night_; but, quite as
often, his judgment beats his inclination, and the result is a classic
short story in a language not too brilliantly equipped with examples of
the craft.
For the short story is above all a matter of _justesse_, by which word
I mean to suggest delicate propriety of expression to idea. Mr. Henry
James can tell a short story, because Mr. Henry James writes, as it
were, with a very fine pen. Stevenson was not comparable as an artist
with Mr. Henry James; but he wrote in a less rarified atmosphere; and
it is still practically an unsettled question whether a distinguished
artist (one who perfectly expresses a fine conception), such as
Turgenev or Mr. Henry James, is the superior or the inferior of the
writer with more tumultuous sympathies whose sense of form is less than
his sense of life. So that when Stevenson wrote _The Pavilion on the
Links_, or _The Bottle Imp_, or _Thrawn Janet_, or _Markheim_, he was
writing particular stories of which only the last, one supposes, could
ever have occurred to Mr. James as a subject for a short story at all.
Conversely, one sees Stevenson blundering into the bluntnesses and
certainly the ultimate failure of _Olalla_, with the knowledge that his
delicacy of style was more marked than the poignancy of his perception;
and the psychological explorations of _Olalla_ are jejune stumblings
compared with the finished delicacy of “Washington Square.” One does
not think, in reading, of Mr. James; but one may perhaps be permitted
to illustrate a point by a reference to his work, which has no precise
significance as a parallel. That fact, I hope, will excuse a momentary
comparison for the purpose of showing that _Will o’ the Mill_, for
all its stylistic accomplishment, is a barren piece of moralising.
Where Stevenson essayed profundity, as all writers are drawn to essay
profundity, whether it is from natural profoundness or from the
instinct of imitation, he was badly hampered by his inexperience as an
inductive philosopher. Both _Will o’ the Mill_ and _Markheim_ are, as
it were, appendages to that doleful failure _Prince Otto_. They were
experiments for Stevenson in a particular genre for which talent and
his mental training had lent him no aptitude. It was on other work
that he more successfully took his stand as a writer of short stories.
His success--considering that we are now examining his position among
the masters of our literature--can only be attested where his work
stands supreme or, at any rate, is clearly distinguished, in its own
class. It cannot be doubted for one moment that Stevenson wrote some
exceedingly fine short stories, fit to be compared, in their own line,
with any that have been written in English. What follows must be read
in the light of this claim. In their own way, I regard _The Suicide
Club_, _The Pavilion on the Links_, _Providence and the Guitar_,
_Thrawn Janet_, _The Treasure of Franchard_, _The Beach of Falesá_,
and _The Bottle Imp_ as first-class short stories. In a distinct
second class I should place _The Rajah’s Diamond_, some of _The
Dynamiter_ stories, _The Merry Men_, _Will o’ the Mill_, _Markheim_,
_Olalla_, _The Isle of Voices_, and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. The
least successful short stories seem to me to be _The Story of a Lie_,
_A Lodging for the Night_, _The Sire de Malétroit’s Door_, _The
Misadventures of John Nicholson_, and _The Body-Snatcher_. I am aware
that one at least of the stories which I have placed in this third
division--_The Sire de Malétroit’s Door_--has given great pleasure to
many readers, and has even been not without its direct influence upon
Stevenson’s imitators, while another--_A Lodging for the Night_--is
greatly admired, and has been very highly praised; so that it seems
hardly necessary to say that the classification is roughly made,
and that it is only here attempted for reasons of convenience. The
stories will hereafter be grouped according to subject or treatment,
and will be examined individually. Those in the first division are, I
think, completely successful in their own conventions; those in the
second division are either incompletely successful or successful in
conventions which seem to me inferior in artistic value; those in the
third division are, as far as I can see, unsuccessful either because
they fail to impose their conventions upon the reader or because they
fail to convince the reader that Stevenson had mastered the craft of
short-story writing. But, upon the whole, I believe Stevenson’s short
stories to represent more successfully than any other part of his
output the variety and the brilliance of his talent. It is for this
reason that I shall endeavour in some detail to justify the divisions
indicated above, and to emphasise the fact that such tentative
distinctions, even if they prove inaccurate in the case of some one or
two stories, may yet have some value as providing a basis for agreement
or disagreement.
II
For that reason I shall add that the stories in the third division seem
to me to fail for these reasons. _The Story of a Lie_ is obviously
prentice work. It is presumably based upon some experience of his own
in France; but the action, once transferred from the Continent, is
filled with sentimentality. Although written, apparently, much later
than _The Story of a Lie_, _The Misadventures of John Nicholson_ is a
protracted anecdote which does not awaken very much interest by its
attempt to blend humorous exaggeration with bizarre incidents. _The
Body-Snatcher_ is one which Stevenson had to supply in order to satisfy
a journal with which he had made a contract. It is meant to shock us,
but it loses power before the climax, which thereupon fails to shock.
The idea is horrible, and affords scope for much dreadful detail:
Stevenson, however, perhaps through ill-health, was unsuccessful with
it, and possibly the ugliness of the whole thing is at fault. For _The
Sire de Malétroit’s Door_ I must confess to the greatest distaste.
It seems to me to have neither historical nor human convincingness;
and the phrase at the end of the story, “her falling body” very
significantly conveys the pin-cushion substance of the demoiselle
whose indiscretion gives rise to the sickly and cloying tale. The
last story in this division is one that enjoys great reputation, first
because it deals with Villon, second because there is an outburst of
Villon’s against the red hair of a murdered man, and last because there
is an elaborately written but entirely inconclusive duologue between
Villon and his host. The story seems to me to be without point or form.
I believe that popular admiration for _A Lodging for the Night_
is largely founded upon tradition or imitation, like the popular
admiration for Shakespeare, without the basis of fact upon which
the popular admiration for Shakespeare rests. It is well known that
popular appreciation of great things is shallow, and that it rises from
a common attempt to emulate the enthusiasm of the apostles of Art.
Unfortunately, popular appreciation is more easily aroused by artifice
than by art. Accordingly, those who have been taught to cite “Put out
the light, and then--Put out the light” as a profundity are ready to
cite with equal conviction the saying of Villon in this story that the
murdered man had no right to have red hair. It is one of those dreadful
æsthetic blunders that quickly pass into unquestionable dogma. If no
protest is made, if those who detect an imposture remain supine, the
false continues to masquerade as the magnificent; and common opinions
are so impervious to proclaimed fact that it is at length impossible
to cope with them, save by some such wearisome exposition as this. It
should be remembered that common appreciation of art is not guided by
principles but by intuitions and imitations. The decay of a thing once
widely popular is slow; and it is due, not to any native perception
of mistake, but to the sluggard realisation that the old enthusiasm
is less ardently canvassed than it was. _A Lodging for the Night_ has
enjoyed great repute, because Stevenson “found” Villon at a time when
other young men were finding Villon; and now that Villon is quite
settled among the young men, Stevenson’s essay on Villon and his story
about Villon have reached the larger public that is always some years
after the fleeting fashion. The result is that, by imitation of those
who ought to have known better, and even by its muddled acceptance of
a bad play about Villon (called “If I were King”), the public has been
led to esteem _A Lodging for the Night_ as something more than the
piece of laboured artifice that it always was.
In the second class I believe that _The Rajah’s Diamond_, _The
Dynamiter_, and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ are very efficient pieces
of craftsmanship, strong enough in invention to delight that typical
person called by Mr. H. G. Wells the “weary giant,” engrossing reading
to the accompaniment of cigars and whisky-and-soda, but not, in the
way of art, quite what we require from works of creative imagination.
_The Merry Men_, with one striking piece of characterisation, has
vigour, but poor form and several superfluities of invention. _The
Isle of Voices_ is a pleasant enough fairy tale, but clearly inferior
to its companion piece _The Bottle Imp_. The other three tales, _Will
o’ the Mill_, _Markheim_, and _Olalla_ are all psychological studies
of a kind that is nowadays called arid. That is to say, they have
greater elaborateness of treatment than their intrinsic importance
quite justifies. _Will o’ the Mill_ is written with great softness and
delicacy, in a sort of slow and lulling drone very sweet to the ear;
_Markheim_ has great virtuosity, is faint and exquisite in manner,
feeble in perception, and is sometimes, I believe, false in psychology.
Its plan and its manner would only be finally true if its understanding
pierced more sharply and finely to the heart of truth. It lacks
penetration. _Olalla_ is, in many ways, fine, in some, beautiful. It
is, however, as Stevenson came to be aware, false. It is false, not
because it is insincere, but because Stevenson’s knowledge had not
the temper and the needle-like capacity to go ever deeper into the
subtleties upon which he was engaged. I suspect that he dared not trust
his imagination, that his imagination had more ingenuity than courage
or strength. The story does not produce æsthetic emotion: it is as
though the author had made a fine net to trap a moonbeam, as though,
when he thought to have come at the heart of the matter, it had escaped
him. He was perhaps not wise enough in the mysteries of the human soul.
Sensitiveness, and the desire to create a passionate beauty, were
not fit substitutes for that patient and courageous, that fearless
imagination which alone could have given truth to so simple and so
unseizable a problem. More, in his handling of the conclusion of his
tale, Stevenson’s emotion fell to a lower plane, and his talent played
him quite false. He became too intent upon his _rendering_ of the idea;
his literary sense took command when his knowledge failed. That is the
weakness of all these three stories.
III