Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

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

The two lightest plays--_Beau Austin_ and _Macaire_--are experiments, 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

Finally, in the first division, we have seven stories. _Providence 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.