and the Guitar_ and _The Treasure of Franchard_ are what we may call,
if we wish to do so, sentimental stories. Both are comedies of light
character, both show certain influences; but to both the manner, tender
and amused, is so appropriate that we are pleased as we were meant
to be pleased. Both contain good characterisation and an unstrained
knowledge. Both are so entirely naïve in conception that we do not
question the inspiration by which they were produced. In style and
character dissimilar, but in humour of a like kind, are _The Suicide
Club_ and _The Bottle Imp_. These four stories are all marked with the
whimsical and charming manner which made Stevenson so many friends in
life. All are more or less lifted by fantasy above their common play
with the humours and the pathos of daily affairs. They are founded upon
Stevenson’s natural attitude--_The Suicide Club_, more convincingly
than _The Superfluous Mansion_, in which story the idea appears in
its native ingenuousness, is an example of Stevenson’s constant
wish (a wish not unshared by others) that he might be singled out
mysteriously by the agent for some strange adventure in the manner of
“The White Cat.” The young man in _The Superfluous Mansion_, it will be
remembered, was thrilled by an invitation to enter a carriage in which
a solitary lady sat: his adventure thereafter was more commonplace,
for Stevenson’s wish had in fact gone no further than the invitation
to the carriage. So Prince Florizel embodied a desire for strange safe
experience, such as all lonely children feel; and Stevenson was as much
gratified as we are at the adventure of the young man with the cream
tarts. My own opinion is, that it was the young man with the cream
tarts who mattered; and that in the subsequent intrigues the story
falls away to the level of _The Rajah’s Diamond_. To be accosted by a
young man with cream tarts in a locality so picturesque as Leicester
Square--that is romance: to go to the suicide club, and to participate
in what follows, is to leave romance for picturesque stimulation of
interest by bizarre incident. The young man, I think, is art: the rest
might have been invented by a person without imagination, and so we
might call it craft. Nevertheless, even if the events subsequent to
the young man with the cream tarts take on a more commonplace air,
they have yet an individuality above that of the tales in _The Rajah’s
Diamond_, and the peculiar fantastic bravado of Stevenson’s writing
maintains the quality of surprise with extreme gusto. _The Bottle Imp_
is, to me, comparable in quality with _Thrawn Janet_ alone; and these
two stories offer the two most successful examples of Stevenson’s art
as a short-story writer. Each in its way is perfect, in form and in
manner. _The Beach of Falesá_, more anecdotal, and less fine in form
than any of the other stories in this division, has excellences of
character, emotion, and reality which may elsewhere be considered to
be lacking. In all its details it is possibly more vital and more
worth the telling than _The Pavilion on the Links_, which in form is
superior, but which, in convention, is inferior. I know of nothing
with which to compare _The Beach of Falesá_; and _The Pavilion on the
Links_ is perhaps not wholly outside the range of so accomplished a
craftsman as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or so determined a romancer as
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. That may be so, and very likely both those
gentlemen admire _The Pavilion on the Links_ very much. The fact that
requires to be recorded here of this story is that it sustains its
own note magnificently; and that if we grant this type of story the
right to be described as art _The Pavilion on the Links_ is the best
example of the type known to us. It is continuously exciting; it is not
oppressively false; and it is handled with extreme competence. Possibly
one admires its craftsmanship, its consummate treatment of a theme from
whose reality one withdraws one’s conviction when the story’s grip has
relaxed, more than one admires its quality as a work of imagination.
If that is so, one must certainly regard _The Pavilion on the Links_
as a magnificent example of craft, but on a lower artistic plane than
Stevenson’s best work.
That brings to an end our consideration of the three rough divisions
formulated at the beginning of this chapter. It is possible now to
group the stories into their particular kinds, and to attempt to
obtain, from an examination of these, some more general estimate of
Stevenson’s ability as a writer of short stories. As a preliminary
to this it will be desirable to set forth what may be regarded as
a principle of judgment; and then to tabulate the stories in their
various kinds. Thus we shall be able to eliminate the inferior stories,
and to arrive at certain, I hope reasonable, conclusions as to the
place occupied by the better stories both in Stevenson’s output and in
the art of the short story.
IV
What do we demand of a short story before we are willing to consider
that it deserves the name of art? And is art, as I am sorry to know
that many admirers of Stevenson would at this juncture ask, worth
bothering about? Art is surely the quality which distinguishes some
of these stories from others; and art, to me, is the disinterested
rendering, to perfection, of a theme intensely felt through, and in
accordance with, the artist’s philosophic conception of life. I do not
suggest that art must involve the conscious expression of a consistent
philosophy. I think it should not do that. But unless a writer has a
considerable æsthetic and emotional experience which does directly
inform his work with a wisdom greater than our utilitarian scheme of
conventional morality, no practical experience of life and no sense
of æsthetic form can suffice to make that writer an artist. Mr. Clive
Bell, in his very brilliant and amusing book “Art,” says that “art is
significant form,” which is a very much better and less pretentious
definition than the one I have given. It is also easier to apply; but
I purposely added a reference to the artist’s philosophic conception,
because it seems to me that there can be no art which is not primarily
a thing of unblemished artistic sincerity. A thing pretended
(artistically, not morally pretended) can, I think, no more be art, in
spite of its significant form, than it can be artistically sincere. It
may be retorted that there is nothing in this connection between the
artist and the charlatan; but there is. There is the craftsman, one
who, denied or forgoing the artist’s intellectual basis, makes goods
like unto works of art, which are charged with significance of form,
but not with that consistency with philosophic belief which makes
significant the artistic vision. For the artist’s vision is not merely
executive: it is conceptual. And while significant form means perfect
execution of the artist’s concept, there must be a relative connection
between the concept and the artist’s fundamental, and possibly
inscrutable or inexpressible, “idea.” Otherwise the brilliant men would
have it all their own way, which is obviously not the law of such
things. To take an example. I regard _The Pavilion on the Links_ as
doubtful art. In form it is better than certain stories which seem to
me superior in content, better than, say, _The Beach of Falesá_. But it
seems to me empty, without heart, so that its warmth is like the warmth
of anger, and is chilled when its excitement is done. Ought there not
to remain in one’s mind, when the story is finished, some other emotion
than stale excitement? I think there ought. I think that an æsthetic
emotion remains in the case of all art that is really art; that one
continues to feel, not the immediate clash of will or incident, but
the author’s true emotion, of which the mere incidents of the story
are only the bridge which the author has chosen to bear his emotion by
symbol, or example, into our hearts. If I were to say of _The Pavilion
on the Links_: “It is not _true_,” I should by ninety-nine of every
hundred people be called unimaginative, and told that “nobody ever said
it was.” But of course I should mean, not that the incidents were rare,
but that Stevenson had never _artistically_ believed them, that they
hung suspended in the air only by virtue of their power to interest or
to excite, by means of the “heat of composition.” I should mean that
Stevenson had not first _imagined_ the story, but that he had planned
it in cold blood, saying, “We’ll have an estate, and a pavilion, and
two men who have quarrelled ...” and so on, when he might equally well
have been planning to describe a dairy, or a balloon, or a cataclysm
at St. Malo. If I look for emotion in the story I find none. If I
look for an æsthetic idea I find none. Perhaps that is where Mr. Bell
revives. The story stands there as a piece of virtuosity; and if that
is deliberate virtuosity, if there is no artistic conviction behind
it, then the story is a fake. I think it is a fake. I am quite ready
to think of it as an extraordinary clever piece of business. But if it
is fake, it is not art. Does significant form imply the presence of a
conviction or merely of craft?
On the other hand, I find what I should like to call conceptual
integrity in _Thrawn Janet_ and in _The Beach of Falesá_, and these
stories seem to me to be art. For the same reason, _The Treasure of
Franchard_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Bottle Imp_ seem
to me to be art. In all these stories I am conscious of æsthetic
conviction. I am aware of that delightful emotion also in _The
Young Man with the Cream Tarts_, and in other parts of _The Suicide
Club_, but not in all. I see art baulked by literature in _Will
o’ the Mill_, in _Markheim_, and _Olalla_; and, greatly muddied
by clotted moralising, in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, which as a
whole is suspiciously glib, as though it had been falsified in the
transformation from dream to morality. I do not find art in the other
short stories by Stevenson. They seem all to have been produced, some
from one impulse, some from another, some with painstaking shrewdness,
some from vanity, some even from a want of something better to do. The
artist receives an inspiration, which shapes his work with the fine
glow of vitality (much as a sick person is transformed by mountain
air, until his features shape and colour into a new fleshly verve).
The craftsman waits upon invention, and sedulously cultivates its
friendliness, with a thrifty economy which brings him in the course
of his life much respect from his fellows. _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
was dreamed by an artist; and was written by a craftsman. If Sir J.
M. Barrie had, as Stevenson once wrote, “a journalist at his elbow,”
shall we not admit that, in the same position, Stevenson had an equally
dangerous devil, who goes by the name of a craftsman?
V
If what has been said above has any applicability to this matter, we
have reduced to five the number of Stevenson’s short stories to which
we can give the name of art. In mentioning that number, I have ventured
to eliminate _The Suicide Club_, which contains several episodes,
excluding _The Young Man with the Cream Tarts_ whose particular
character does not seem to me to warrant the use of the term “art.”
That leaves us with _Thrawn Janet_, _The Beach of Falesá_, _The Bottle
Imp_, _Providence and the Guitar_, and _The Treasure of Franchard_. One
of these is a “bogle” story, one is a realistic story of adventure in
the South Seas, one is a fairy tale, and the others are light comedies,
touched with fancy which transfigures without falsifying the underlying
artistic sincerity of their conception. We have eliminated, for what
may in some cases appear to be insufficient reasons, some twenty odd
stories (counting the various episodes of _The Rajah’s Diamond_ and
_The Dynamiter_ as stories). Of the whole number of stories, two
(or, with the little tale in _Catriona_, three) are concerned with
“bogles,” namely _Thrawn Janet_ and _The Body-Snatcher_. Two others
are also concerned with the supernatural: they are _The Bottle Imp_
and _The Isle of Voices_. Three are psychological--_Will o’ the Mill_,
_Markheim_, and _Olalla_. Four are light comedies--_The Story of a
Lie_, _John Nicholson_, _The Treasure of Franchard_, _Providence and
the Guitar_. Two are picturesque or romantic tales of incident--_The
Pavilion on the Links_ and _The Merry Men_. One is a realistic tale
of incident--_The Beach of Falesá_. The rest belong to a class of
fantastic mystery or criminal tale which is not, apart from the
attractiveness of its mayonnaise, intrinsically of great value. It
is from the five tales named at the beginning of this section that
we shall perhaps draw our best material for the appraisement of
Stevenson’s chief success as a short-story writer.
_Thrawn Janet_, then, is an extraordinarily successful tale of the
devil’s entry into the body of an old woman, imagined with great power,
and told with enormous spirit. _The Beach of Falesá_ is the narrative,
by a trader, of his arrival at a South Sea island, his marriage to a
native girl, and his overthrow of a treacherous rival. The character
of the man who tells the story--Wiltshire--is well-sustained, the
character of Uma, the native wife, is amazingly suggested, considering
how little we see her and considering that we receive her, as it
were, through the trader’s report alone. For the rest, the story has
vividness of local colouring, and a good deal of feeling. _The Bottle
Imp_, the fairy tale, is told without fault in a manner of great
simplicity. It relates to the successive purchases and sales, the sales
always, by the conditions of purchase, being made at a figure lower
than that of the purchase, of a magic bottle as potent as Aladdin’s
lamp; and to the certainty of Hell which is involved in the continued
possession of the bottle until the lessee’s death. The story was
written for the Samoan natives, and, as far as I am able to judge, it
bears in a remarkable degree the impress of native ways of thought.
It has, that is to say, the _naïveté_ and gravity of the folk-tale.
_Providence and the Guitar_ is a gay story of the misadventures of some
travelling musicians who receive poor welcome from those whom they seek
to entertain, but who reconcile at length the claims of art and duty as
they find them opposed in the lives of certain disunited hosts. _The
Treasure of Franchard_ is the simple tale of an eccentric philosopher,
his more stolid wife, and of a little boy whose wisdom leads him to
check, by means which are proved legitimate only by their adequacy, the
philosopher’s diversion from the path of happiness. The theft by the
waif of certain treasure which the philosopher has discovered, to the
risk of his immortal soul and the danger of his present happiness; and
the appropriate restoration of that treasure when it will be of vital
service--upon so slight an invention does the story progress.
The point to be observed in all these stories is that they possess
unquestionable unity. Only one of them, _The Beach of Falesá_, is
in any true sense a narrative. The others are examples of situation
imposed upon character. In each there is an absolute relation between
the conception or inspiration and Stevenson’s treatment. Each will
bear the pressure which may legitimately be exerted by the seeking
imagination. In _Providence and the Guitar_ alone is there the least
air of accident; and for this reason _Providence and the Guitar_, which
has this slight air of possible manipulation, is less good than the
others. _The Beach of Falesá_, although a narrative, and although its
perfection of form is thus affected (since, with our consciousness of
narrative, is interrupted the singleness of our æsthetic emotion) has
a strict consistency of action. Whether this consistency is native,
or whether it is aided by the imagined personality of the narrator,
which may thus impose an artificial unity upon the tale, I am unable
to determine. The other three stories, _The Bottle Imp_, _Thrawn
Janet_, and _The Treasure of Franchard_, granting to each story its own
convention, seem to me to be perfect examples of their craft.
VI
To have written three such stories would alone be a sufficient
performance to give Stevenson’s name continued life among our most
distinguished writers. That, in addition to these three stories, he
should have written two others of such considerable value as _The
Beach of Falesá_ and _Providence and the Guitar_, and so many more of
varying degrees of excellence, from _The Pavilion on the Links_ and
_The Suicide Club_ to _The Merry Men_ and _The Isle of Voices_, is,
I think, enough to warrant a very confident claim that Stevenson not
only was at his best in the short story, but that he was among the
best English writers of short stories. His particular aptitude in this
branch of his many-sided talent was due, as I have said, to the fact
that he was here able to see and to perform with a single effort which
did not unduly strain his physical endurance. Whereas, in continuous
effort, he lost the strength of his first impulse in the exhausting
labour which is involved in any lengthy exercise of the imagination, in
the short story he was able to give effect immediately to his impulse
to set out or to create complete his imagined or invented theme. What
fluctuation there is to be observed of talent or performance is due
entirely to the nature of his inspiration. If the idea came unsought,
if some clear and inevitable idea for a short story suggested itself to
him, the result, providing it was suited to his genius, and not merely
to his literary ability, was a short story of distinguished or even of
first-class quality. If, in the pursuance of his business as a literary
craftsman, he “hit-on” a practicable plan for a short story, the result
was almost certain to be distinguished in craftsmanship, acceptable
to the wide and diversified tastes of the educated public, and, in
fact, to be distinguishable from his genuine works of art only by the
application of some test which should call in question the nature of
his preliminary inspiration.
Stevenson was so distinguished a craftsman that he could often deceive
his critics, but for that deception I do not think he can be held
morally responsible. His other habit, of being able to deceive himself
about the nature of his inspiration--exemplified, I believe, in _The
Suicide Club_, for reasons which I have already given--is more serious.
It is a habit illustrated with more force in the longer romances, and
takes the form of beginning a story with a genuine romantic notion (or,
if the reader prefers, inspiration), of finding that inspiration fail,
and of proceeding nevertheless with the work so begun, relying upon
his talent, his invention, or his literary skill to carry through the
remaining performance at a level near enough to that established by his
first inspiration to convince (at its worst, to delude) the reader.
This habit, I am sure, was not indulged in bad faith; it was sometimes,
perhaps nearly always, unconscious, or only partly conscious. It very
likely is the habit of all modern writers whose work is regulated by
the laws of supply and demand. Equally, it was possibly the habit of
all past writers of fiction, because they too were affected in the same
way. But in Stevenson’s case the supply of a commodity took a peculiar
form of falseness which proved much to the taste of his readers. It
took the form of a sort of deliberate romanticism with which I have
dealt at length in the next chapter, and to which I have given the more
exactly descriptive term of picturesqueness. I believe this sort of
romanticism gave rise to such a story as _The Pavilion on the Links_;
and if I am right in regarding such picturesqueness as a bastard form
of art, as, in fact, a particularly cunning form of craft, then its
persistence in Stevenson makes all the more wonderful, and all the more
notable, his magnificent performance in the stories singled out for
praise in the present chapter. It also enforces the desirability of
some very close discrimination between the work of Stevenson which is
the genuine product of his indubitable genius and the work which was
produced by his talent, his invention, and his literary skill.
VIII
NOVELS AND ROMANCES
I
In beginning this chapter upon that section of Stevenson’s work which,
whatever may be one’s impression of its intrinsic merit, has at least
the importance of being the section most considerable in bulk, I should
like, as a matter of convenience, to define several terms in the sense
in which they will be used in the course of the chapter. It should be
clearly understood at the outset that the proposed definitions are to
be given, not with any claim for their ultimate value, but as a mere
precaution against misunderstanding. In each case the term is one which
often is very loosely used; and it seems the most honest thing, as
well perhaps as the most wary, to say very simply what one understands
by such and such words. Many writers who do not define terms have the
irritation of finding those terms counter-glossed by other critics
acting in all good faith, and the consequence is that they seem to be
made responsible for meanings divergent from those which they hold.
By the word “imagination,” then, I mean that power of sympathy which
enables a man to understand (i.e. to put himself in the place of) the
invented figure or scene which he is describing either in words or in
thought. I do not mean by the exercise of will, but by the spontaneous
outflowing of full or partial perception. By “imagination” I mean
nothing galvanic or actively creative; but an emotional translation,
as it were, of the creator’s spirit into the object created. Creation,
the act of bodying forth the imaginations in form either symbolic or
conventional, requires “invention.” “Invention,” whether of incident or
of character, is what is generally meant by writers who use the word
“imagination.” Writers often say that work is “imaginative” because it
has a sort of hectic improbability; but they mean that it exhibits a
riotous or even a logical inventiveness, not that it shows any genuine
power of imaginative sympathy. Invention, one may say, is essential to
a work of imagination: it is the fault of much modern novel-writing
that it is poor in invention, a fact which stultifies the writer’s
imagination and gives an unfortunate air of mediocrity to work which is
essentially imaginative. The creation of an atmosphere is founded upon
imagination; but in the absence of invention the modern imaginative
writer too frequently bathes in atmosphere to a point of tedium, and
then attempts to give vitality to his work by mere violence of incident
or of language. The word “imaginative” (defined by all persons so as
to include their own pet limitations) is often used by unimaginative
writers in descriptions of lonely children, a fact which has led those
who have been lonely in childhood to ascribe to themselves an attribute
so much admired; but Stevenson, I think, has a rather good comment
upon this sort of broody dullness when he describes “one October day
when the rusty leaves were falling and scuttling on the boulevard,
and the minds of impressionable men inclined in about an equal degree
towards sadness and conviviality.” That lowness of spirits which makes
a man respond to external influences is well known; but to describe
susceptibility or impressionability as imagination is misleading.
A cat is very impressionable; but a cat’s apparent intuitions in
the matter of food or even of goodwill are not understanding as the
term has been defined. Imagination, therefore, may be said to be
over-claimed, for the word is loosely used in most cases, even by
practised writers, where “invention” or “fancy” would more properly
fit. In particular it is the habit of all minor critics whatsoever
to use the word “imagination” when they ought rather to use the term
“poetic invention.” It is that confusion which renders valueless so
much criticism of modern fiction, in which the authors, being by
tradition under no compulsion to be poetical, are frequently condemned
as unimaginative because they follow the tradition of their craft.