Island_ were written in as many days. He explains that he consciously
and intentionally adopted an “easy” style. “I liked the tale myself,”
he says; “it was my kind of picturesque.” Well, it was the simplest
kind of picturesque, a sort of real enjoyment of the thing for its
own sake; and our own enjoyment of it is of the same kind. It is
extraordinarily superior to the imitations which have followed it,
for this reason if for no other, that it was the product of an
enjoying imagination. It is possible to read _Treasure Island_ over
and over again, because it is good fun. There is a constant flow of
checkered incident, there is enough simple character to stand the
treasure-seekers on their legs, and the book is a book in its own
right. It does not need defence or analysis; it sustains its own note,
and it is as natural and jolly an adventure-story as one could wish.
Moreover, the observation throughout is exceedingly good, as well as
unaffected. It is interesting to notice how vividly one catches a
picture from such a brief passage as this (in Chap. XXVII): “As the
water settled I could see him lying huddled together on the clean,
bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides. A fish or two whipped
past his body.” Or again, on the following page, when Jim Hawkins has
thrown overboard another of the mutineers: “He went in with a sounding
plunge; the red cap came off, and remained floating on the surface;
and as soon as the splash subsided I could see him and Israel lying
side by side, both wavering with the tremulous movement of the water.”
Such slight passages really indicate an unusual quality in the book.
They convey a distinct impression of the scene which one may feel
trembling within one’s own vision and hearing. The fact that _Treasure
Island_ has so clear a manner, unaffectedly setting out in simple terms
incidents which have the bare convincingness of real romance, gives
that book a singular position among the romances of Stevenson. The
further fact that the incidents have some more coherence in themselves
than incidents have in some of our author’s romances serves to add
to the book’s effect. Something of this coherence (I except from the
range of this term the doctor’s sudden irruption into authorship,
and the picturesque but arbitrary introduction of the castaway) may
have resulted from the quickness with which the tale was written. For
details of the composition of _Treasure Island_, the reader may see the
essay _My First Book_ in _Essays on the Art of Writing_.
_The Black Arrow_, written later, is a tale of the Wars of the Roses,
and is a much more commonplace piece of work. It is also a less
original kind of story; for serials of a similar character have always
been a feature of boys’ papers, as long as boys’ papers have been
published. There is, indeed, a constant ebb and flow of incident, but
the writing is hardly recognisable as Stevenson’s, and the _dramatis
personæ_ are without character. It might almost, apart from the fact
that the hero and heroine arrange to marry, have been written by the
late G. A. Henty, who perhaps, even if he had made John Matcham really
John Matcham, would have substituted for violent episodes some more
continuous fable.
Next to _Treasure Island_ among the historical romances comes
_Kidnapped_, with its brilliant pictures and its clear, confident
invention. Regarded simply as a tale of adventure, it is exciting,
picturesque, vivid; it has qualities of intensity (that is to say, of
imagination) which make it without question distinguished work. There
are pictures of the country in Chapter XVII which are full of grace and
tenderness; it has a stronger, clearer humour than we find in any of
the novels until we come to those in which Mr. Osbourne collaborated;
the incidents are immediate in their effect. To say so much is to say
little enough; it is to say what must have been said in 1886, at the
time the book was published. The story, however, is incomplete without
_Catriona_, and _Catriona_ in particular has given rise to such a
very bad novel-writing convention that it is difficult to see _The
Adventures of David Balfour_ (which, combined, the two stories relate)
as anything but a malign influence upon the English romantic novel, an
influence which has brought it to a pitch of sterility hard to forgive.
It must be said at once, however, that Stevenson was always better
than his imitators, and so these stories will be found superior to
their imitations. _Catriona_ is manifestly uninspired work, artificial
through and through, a sad sentimental anecdote bringing to chagrin
the reader’s admiration for _Kidnapped_. It is not that _Catriona_ is
unreadable; it is very readable indeed. In fact that is the trouble
about the book, that it has every sort of meretricious attraction, with
so little in it that will honestly bear examination. It is palpable
fake; an obvious attempt to recapture the first fine carelessness of
_Kidnapped_. For _Kidnapped_ is a good book. It has vitality in it, and
it has Alan Breck, who, for all that his vanity has been flattered by
so many adorers, remains on the whole a fine picture of a vain, brave
Scot. Also good is the picture of David’s uncle, which is very dryly
humorous, very shrewd, and exceptionally horrible. These two pieces of
characterisation, as well as some minor ones, are enough to give bones
to a book that is both readable and estimable. It would be enough, I
think, to justify the suggestion that _Kidnapped_ is the best Scottish
historical romance since Scott, and indeed one of the best modern
historical romances written in what we may for the moment call the
English language.
_St. Ives_ belongs to the same order as _Catriona_. It is accomplished
and bad; a fact of which a recently published letter of Stevenson’s
shows that he was fully and contritely aware. Skill marks it; the fable
is poor and irregular; and the narrator is exceedingly unpleasant. It
is worthy of remark that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who completed the
book, is responsible for its most impressive and thrilling moments.
Otherwise it shows the passive acceptance by Stevenson of his own
bad convention, and it is fit only to be popular at the circulating
libraries. It is even tedious, which is a sure passport to the
suffrages of those who benefit by the circulating libraries.
_The Master of Ballantrae_, however, is a different affair. Here we
have a story which, though it is broken and incomplete, has elements
of noble beauty. It loses hold upon the reader in the middle, where
there is a lapse of something like seven years; and the introduction
of Secundra Dass is the ruin of the book as a work of art, although
no doubt, as it supplies a new interest, it may have proved welcome
to those reading for distraction. There are some few pieces of sheer
greatness in the book, drawn with an economy and simplicity which
separates them from the inferior portions as clearly as oil and water
are separated. An instance may be found in the scene where Mr. Henry
strikes the Master. It would be impossible to carry over in a quotation
any hint of the effect which the next sentence, in its due context, has
upon the reader:
“The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I had never
seen the man so beautiful. ‘A blow!’ he cried. ‘I would not take a
blow from God Almighty!’”
In the book that moment seems in some extraordinary way to bring
the scene leaping to the eye. The whole scene of the duel, and
especially of its sequel, is fine. There are other scenes equally
magnificent: even the climax, which is a collapse, does not blind
us to the fact that we had been led, by the remarkable tension of
the preceding narrative, to expect a poignantly tragical, and not
merely a conventionally romantic, conclusion. But the climax throws
up the weakness of the book, its rambling course, its wilful attempts
to follow the wanderings of a central figure so fascinating to Mr.
Mackellar (and to ourselves) as the Master, its lack of framework and
true body of character. The Master is clear; Mr. Mackellar is nicely
touched; the Chevalier de Burke is pleasantly farcical. In one scene,
after the duel, Lord Durrisdeer and Mr. Henry’s wife seem to catch the
infection of life into which the heat of excitement has thrown the
whole book; but they are truly no more than puppets, and relapse before
ever they have stood upright. Even the Master sometimes is no more than
a collection of traits; and if the book were not so finely dressed it
would assuredly cut a poorer figure. Its magnificent passages it is
impossible to forget; its defects are so numerous, and so obvious to
be seized upon, that it seems hard to insist that they are present.
Nevertheless, they are the defects inherent in Stevenson’s romances.
VII
In three novels Stevenson collaborated with his stepson, Mr. Lloyd
Osbourne. The first book, _The Wrong Box_, of which Mr. Osbourne
claims to have written almost the whole, need not long detain us. Its
amusingness is due to repetitions of phrase (e.g. “venal doctor,”
which is the best of them), farcicality of scene, and easy variety of
complication; but it does not succeed in being particularly amusing,
after all, so that we may leave it safely among the novels enjoyably
to be read in railway trains. The other two books, _The Wrecker_ and
_The Ebb Tide_, show much more clearly Stevenson’s hand. The former
touches every now and then a number of his early experiences in France;
and the manipulation is elaborate, wasteful, and ill-considered. But
the book is engrossing. _The Ebb Tide_ is to all seeming a short
story, or rather, two related short stories, since it is under sixty
thousand words in length, and is simplified down to certain swiftly
successive incidents in the lives of four men. Both books are the
result of experience in the South Seas; both seem to show, as far as it
is possible for me to judge, a closer and truer (though a less heroic)
understanding of men than heretofore. In another way, it may be said
that we have been shown previously romantic figures, invented upon
a quite well-recognised and comprehended basis of convention, doing
certain things which were all in the game. Those who prefer this type
of character will possibly say that the Master and Otto and Alan Breck
belong to the grand style in literature, that style which gave us Medea
and Prometheus and Lear. That may be so. It may be that in those novels
which we have yet to consider Stevenson threw aside the grand style,
which, as far as he was concerned, was the style of make-belief, the
style of figure, trope, costume, and the picturesque. But, to me,
Stevenson, in putting aside this grand style, which is an artificial
style if it spring not from the very heart of the writer, came at
last into the field of his experience and tried to show something of
the world he had actually seen. That is why, to me, these last three
novels of his are intrinsically the most interesting, because they
were the most truly personal and original, of all that he wrote. They
are faulty, and they show still at times the glister of picturesque
romance; but _Weir of Hermiston_ is widely recognised as Stevenson’s
finest work, and the other two books have certain substantial merits
which may well be dwelt upon here before we arrive at the general
conclusions of this chapter.
_The Wrecker_, then, after a curious induction, begins with the
education and the artistic career of Loudon Dodd, told with an amiable
spirit, and convincing us by its sketches of various kinds of life.
It then proceeds to San Francisco, where Dodd joins the famous Jim
Pinkerton in wild-cat schemes. At last the story proper, or, if we
may otherwise express it, the story exciting, begins with the sale of
a wrecked ship “The Flying Scud.” Pinkerton and his ally, drawn into
excessive bidding by the thought that only hidden opium can account
for their opponent’s pertinacity, run the price up to fifty thousand
dollars, the raising of which gravely endangers their credit in San
Francisco, and at that price buy “The Flying Scud.” Dodd proceeds to
the wreck. Meanwhile, Pinkerton becomes bankrupt; but Dodd inherits a
small fortune. The “Flying Scud” is a frost. Dodd now plays detective
upon the man who has tried to buy the “Flying Scud,” finds him and
learns the history of the boat in its details. It has been said already
(by Stevenson) that _The Wrecker_ is more of a panorama than a romance,
and “panorama” seems a very good description for the book. This kind of
romance within other romances is written with greater purpose by Mr.
Conrad, who, for all his arbitrary technical clumsinesses, convinces
us more of the integrity of his narrative than Stevenson is able to do
for _The Wrecker_ in his elaborate explanatory epilogue. It reads as
though it had been written with gusto, but with licence, as though the
collaborators had not scrupled to give the tale its head. Its value
to us now, however, is that it gives a good, clear, realistic picture
of the life it describes. The Parisian portion is unexaggerated; the
San Francisco chapters are vivid; the character of Pinkerton, broad
though it is, has organic life; and the voyage in the “Norah Creina,”
if it has not the poignant reality of Mr. Conrad’s descriptions of
the sea, and, if it hardly bears comparison with them, has yet a
bright excitement and rapid motion of great value.[1] Another point
is, that the story was written, as _Treasure Island_ was written, with
simplicity and for the authors’ own delight. Our delight in it partly
reflects their delight. Only partly, however, for our appreciation is
due also to the ease with which experience--of San Francisco and of the
South Seas--is here translated before our eyes into a romance that is
as engrossing as its predecessors, and that retains its hold upon us
without elaboration of pretence.
_The Ebb Tide_, although much slighter, is more firmly handled. It
is in essence an anecdote; but it is closely and penetratingly seen;
its power to transport us (as it were by Herrick’s imagined carpet)
to the South Seas, and above all its quick unobtrusive rendering of a
different moral atmosphere, combine to make it excellent work. If it
is not moving (and very little of Stevenson’s work is moving) it is at
least exciting and convincing within its natural limitations.
It is with _Weir of Hermiston_, however, that Stevenson reached the
height of his powers as a realistic novelist. Excepting in the handling
of Frank Innes, who might almost have been hired out among our dead
writers of fiction as a professional seducer, the precision of _Weir of
Hermiston_, the bite of Stevenson’s continuously vigorous imagination,
is extraordinary. Continuity of narrative there is not: one must not
demand it. But unfailing precision of imagination, a thing of great
rarity, marks almost the whole of that portion of the book which we
have; and is matched by the similar precision of the character drawing.
Kirstie Elliott and the elder Weir are alike in the respect that they
are together, even in the small compass of this fragment, the surest
pieces of character created by Stevenson. The subsequent course of
the fable of _Weir of Hermiston_, as described by Sir Sidney Colvin
in his admirable note to the book, is terrifying to those who admire
the fragment for its intrinsic qualities; but we will not seek too
curiously into plans which might well have been severely modified in
the writing. Certainly the first nine chapters show very few signs
of romantic falsification; and if it were not for Frank Innes, the
novelists’ hireling, we should be disposed to fear nothing for the
future.
VIII
Earlier in this chapter the question was raised of Stevenson’s object
in writing his romances. If we read his _Note on Realism_ we shall
find that he talks of “poignancy of main design,” “the beauty and
significance of the whole,” “the moral or the philosophical design,”
as though that other note to Sir Sidney Colvin was but a partial
exposition of his aim. The one, possibly, was a personal claim; the
essay a public profession; and public confession, we are aware, is apt
to cling to the more desirable aspects of the truth. But the essay has
a relevant value, because it speaks of the author’s rapture at being
able to muster “a dozen or a score” of those essential “facts” of which
“it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven
exclusively.” Thereafter he admits, as most writers would admit, that
any work of art loses its original force as that force is spent in
execution and diverted into channels unforeseen.
Without “facts” the novel cannot be written. Obviously the good novel
is the one that contains significant and primary facts (not to be
perceived by all, but eventually to be acknowledged by all); while
the bad novel is one that contains insignificant and secondary facts
(easily recognisable by all and acceptable to none). It is very easy
indeed to say that. It is more difficult to apply the test; or at
least, if one reads the newspaper criticism of modern novels, one
finds that there seems to exist a difficulty in application. So
it is that what one writer regards as significant, another writer
considers contemptible; and it is very likely that we should get little
satisfaction from an elaborate analysis of Stevenson’s chosen “facts.”
Some of these facts are of the greatest importance; some of them are
useless. What we must rather urge is that Stevenson, for all his talk
of design and the beauty of the whole, had never the physical energy
to carry his conception through on a single plane (or, of course, upon
that inequality of planes which may be dictated by the character of
a book). That is why none of his novels (he said, in speaking of the
difficulty of writing novels, “it is the length that kills”) is on
an ascending plane of interest or on a level plane of performance.
He simply had not the bodily strength to support the continuous
imaginative strain.
Further, it is the mark of the romantic and picturesque novelist that
he is dependent upon that particular form of incident which provides
a prop for his narrative. In a very crude way the writer of serial
stories, who ends an instalment with some ghastly suggestion of coming
crime, is a type of the picturesque novelist in this connection.
Stevenson, in his historical romances, was a picturesque rather than a
romantic novelist; he had an eye, an ear, a nose for an effect; effects
he must have, or his book would stop, since it has rarely a sufficient
impetus to cover the lapse in inventive skill. It was because they
offered no effects that _The Great North Road_, and _Heathercat_, and
_The Young Chevalier_ dried suddenly upon his pen, dead before ever
they were begun. One can see in these fragments the sign of Stevenson’s
weakness. He was “game” enough; but he could not make romance out of
chopped hay, such as _The Young Chevalier_, with its bald, hopeless
attempt to galvanise the Master into life again. It was, again, the
title of _The Great North Road_, the title of _Sophia Scarlet_ that ran
in Stevenson’s head. Titles for stories! Stories to fit such titles!
Is that really the way an artist works? Perhaps it is; perhaps if they
had been written, and had been good stories, we should have found
them appropriate to a degree. But they were never written, save as
fragments; because they never had any life. They never had any _idea_.
And it is in virtue of its unifying idea and its ultimate form, not
its contributive incidents or its more lively occasional properties,
that a novel, as such, is a good novel.
Now the one book of Stevenson’s which has an idea is the one which
may be mistaken for either a tract or a shilling shocker. It is _Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. The other books have ideas, or notions, but
they have behind them no unifying idea. That is why one forgets what
they are about. The idea of _Treasure Island_ is “boy goes on hunt
for pirate’s treasure ... doctor ... wooden-legged boatswain,” and so
on. The idea for _Kidnapped_ may have been “boy kidnapped ... meets
emissary of proscribed Scots ... hides ... Appin murder ... flight
... recovers property.” The genesis of _The Master of Ballantrae_ is
given in a short paper, with those words for title, which is included
in _The Art of Writing_. From this very frank account, we may see
that the book began in a flush of enthusiasm for “The Phantom Ship,”
proceeded to an aged anecdote of resuscitation, and so, piecemeal, and
by the joining together of all sorts of notions old and new, reached
a conception of the Chevalier de Burke. Now this sort of invention,
although it delights us by its resourcefulness and ingenuity, has no
relation to the romance of life as it is lived or as it has ever been
lived. It is picturesque invention pure and simple (the sort of thing
that makes French fairy tales such pretty reading, and that makes
them in the end so empty and so much inferior to the fairy tales of
other nations); and except that men love a lie for its own sake it
can have no importance. Until the lies (or facts) are co-ordinated
and organised to make a whole, to support each other by the new value
gained by their disciplined association, they are nothing but isolated
lies or facts. It is the author’s brooding imagination, which is in
direct relation to, and under the influence of, his own æsthetic and
emotional experience, that supplies that fusion and transfusion which
makes a work of art. Perfect fusion makes a great work of art, such as
we may see in the best of Turgeniev’s work; imperfect fusion makes an
inferior work of art. But there can be no fusion without a basic idea,
a unifying idea. And that unifying idea, without which the invention
and imagination of scenes remains hopelessly episodic, does not arise
in Stevenson’s romances. It shows faintly in _The Ebb Tide_ and _The
Master of Ballantrae_, where both books are tinged with suggestions
of a moral idea; it shows Stevenson struggling in the grip of Jekyll
and Hyde in the book which bears the name of those forces in him. The
one (shall we say Mr. Hyde?) is the tendency to moralise, to preach,
which was inherited from countless Scottish ancestors; the other is
the impulse to invent (an impulse which is too generally lauded by the
great name of imagination). _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, dreamed as a
shocker, and successful as a shocker, became in revision a parable,
a morality. The natural Stevenson dreamed a shocker; and the scribe
said, “Let us be moral!” And that is _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ as we
have it in its bald police-court narratives and letters. Nearer than
a moral idea, Stevenson never approached our philosophical basis.
Adventure blurred his sight; picturesqueness lured him. His object in
writing was not the utterance of piercing thoughts or poignant emotion:
he wrote because of his long Scots tongue, which turned and savoured
all the lively incidents which his brain conjured. Excepting in _The
Master of Ballantrae_, where our hearts are made to leap, and in _Weir
of Hermiston_, which stands alone among all his books, are we ever
moved by Stevenson’s romances? We are stirred by the sense of an open
road, and the inviting hills, and furze and whin that is good cover
for men crawling upon their bellies. We have the sense that a sentry
is round the curve of the hill; but _never that he will discover us
and strike_. There is never any real danger in Stevenson’s books; never
a real broken heart or a real heaven-high splendour of joy. There is
the lure of the road and the heather; but we will be back again in the
bright warm house, by the light of the red fire, with our cigar and
whisky-and-soda (for it seems that is inevitable) before nightfall.
It is true that we shall hear the sea, and the coach’s winding horn,
and some faint combing of the bagpipes; and perhaps we shall see the
lamplighter, and have had scones for tea, and shall read Blackstone
or some old Scots history before we go to bed. But we have not really
been far away; we have been excited and pleased and happily warmed by
the day’s doings in the open air, but we have never seen the naked
soul of man, or heard the haunting music of the syrens, or looked upon
the open face of God. Nor have we truly exercised our energy in some
less conventional rapture of the world’s wonder. The reason may be
traced back to our author: it is not a part of our own shortcomings.
Stevenson, in his romances, played with his inventions; and he played
sometimes splendidly. But he had not the vital assurance, the fierce
trenchant fathoming of adventure that a vigorous man enjoys. “A
certain warmth (tepid enough),” he says, “and a certain dash of the
picturesque are my poor essential qualities.” Well, that is a modest
under-statement; but, as far as the historical romances go, the verdict
is not wholly astray. It is in the latest novels, the realistic novels,
that Stevenson rose to a fuller stature; that was because in the last
years of life he truly for the first time was able to taste the actual
air of physical danger. He had been in genuine physical danger: it
electrified him. It gave him, perhaps, a philosophy that was not made
up of figured casuistries. It enabled him to begin _Weir of Hermiston_
with something of the cold freshness of running water.
IX
CONCLUSION
I