Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

_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.

A second distinction which it is desirable to make in view of what follows is the one between Romance and Realism. The word “romance” is used in a sort of ecstasy by too many conventional people; the word “realism” is by such critics applied to one particular technical method. It has seemed better for the immediate purpose to restrict the word “romance” to a purely technical meaning, since Romance, to have any value whatever, must form a part of our conception of reality. It is the divorce of Romance from Reality which has led to its decay; it is not that Romance has been cruelly done to death by Realism. Romance since Stevenson has become sentimental and unbelievable. That is why Romance has no friends, but only advocates. The word “romance,” then, is in this chapter used to describe a fiction the chief interest in which is supported by varied incidents of an uncommon or obsolete nature. The word “novel” is applied to a fiction in which the chief interest is less that of incident and more the interest awakened by character and by a gradual relation of happenings probable in themselves and growing naturally out of the interplay of character. The word “realism” is used in relation to the critical interpretation of actual things. It must not be regarded as describing here an accumulation of detail or a preference for unpleasant subjects. For that use of the word one may refer to our leading critical journals _passim_. The accumulation of detail belongs to a technical method, and should be treated on its merits as part of a technical method. Realism, as the word is here used, is applied only to work in which the author’s invention and imagination have been strictly disciplined by experience and judgment, and in which his direct aim has been precision rather than the attainment of broad effects. It is used consciously as a word of neither praise nor blame; though it is possible that I may exaggerate the merits of clear perception above some other qualities which I appreciate less.

II

Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from _Treasure Island_, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to _Weir of Hermiston_, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power. _Treasure Island_ is an excellent adventure-story; _Weir of Hermiston_ seemed to have the makings of a considerable novel, incomparably superior to any other novel or romance ever written by Stevenson. Between the two books lie a host of experiments, from _Prince Otto_ to the rather perfunctory _St. Ives_, through _Kidnapped_ and _The Master of Ballantrae_, to _The Wrecker_, _Catriona_, and _The Ebb Tide_. One finds in _The Master of Ballantrae_ the highest point of the romantic novels, not because as a whole it is a great book, but because it has very distinguished scenes; and thereafter follows a perceptible decline in raciness. Stevenson still had the knack, and could still make the supporters of his convention look as clumsy as ghouls, but his zest was impaired. He did now with pains what before had been the easiest part of his work. “Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities,” said Stevenson in _The Day After To-morrow_. From the inexperience of real life which in 1882 led him, by means of a map and some literary inspirations, to make up a tale such as he thought he would himself have liked as a boy, he turned in later years to work more profound. His romance six years later than _Treasure Island_ had, besides its adventures and its pawky narration, a moral theme; ten years later it had no theme at all, but a faint dragging sweetness due to the reintroduction of two old friends and the picture of a conventional heroine; at the end of his life he began three historical romances, none of which was ever finished, and only one of which ever proceeded beyond its first chapters. It is true that the pretty, heavily figured style was still at command; there was no cessation of skill. There never was any cessation of skill. If skill were needed Stevenson had it ever ready. “I have been found short of bread, gold or grace,” says St. Ives; “I was never yet found wanting an answer.” That is a point to note in Stevenson’s equipment, that he was always very apt with the pen. Having turned writer in his youth, he remained a writer to the end. He could not dictate a letter but what the phrases ran in accustomed grooves, half-way to the tropes of his Covenanting manner. So it was that themes too slight, as in _Prince Otto_, and themes very complicated (as in _The Wrecker_), came readily to be embarked upon. He was not sufficiently critical of a theme, so long as it seemed superficially to offer some scope for his skill; which accounts for his abandoned fragments--e.g. _Heathercat_, _The Great North Road_, _Sophia Scarlet_, _The Young Chevalier_--and for the inequalities in even his best romances. Whatever theme he chose he could write upon it with such damnable skill that nothing truly came amiss or really stretched to the full his genuine talent. The theme, such as it was, lay to hand; there wanted nothing but his skill and the labour of composition. That, curiously enough, shadows out the occupation of the literary hack (a sad person who writes for money and only more money, and whose days are circumscribed by the need for continuous work in the field of romance); but although Stevenson claimed to write for money, “a noble deity” (see a humorous but truthful passage in the letter of January, 1886, to Mr. Gosse), he claimed also to write for himself, and in this sense he was, to our relief, and in spite of any misdirected labours, an artist. There is, of course, much cant written and spoken about writing for money, both for and against; but the man who has no preference between the themes upon which he will write for money must be a very professional writer, and the hack is only a base virtuoso. That is why it is worth putting upon record that Stevenson, after saying he wrote, not for the public, but for money, added: “and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble (i.e. than money), but more intelligent and nearer home.” He wrote variously from diversity of taste: a more interesting and tantalising question is that of his object.

III

Mr. Henry James, in criticising a selection of our modern novelists, describes himself as reading their work with, one imagines, continuous interest, and then, in face of all the phenomena which have industriously been gathered for his inspection, asking for something further. Mr. Henry James, apparently, wants to know “why they do it.” It would not be in place here to say that the modern novelists are all to some extent followers of Mr. James; but it is very interesting to put that same question (amounting to a sort of _cui bono?_) to the romantic novelists. One would like to know what Stevenson aimed at in his romances. One does not receive from any one of the romances the thrill given by a perfect work of art. Their interest is broken and episodic; they fall apart in strange places, and show gaps, and (as in the case of works by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Conrad) one or two of them, including _The Master of Ballantrae_, are patched together by means of contributory “narratives” and “stories” which can never, whatever the skill of their interposition, preserve any appearance of vital form, and which, at the best, can be no more than exhibitions of virtuosity. They retain their continuity of interest only by means of the narrator’s continuance; and the use of “narrations” itself is a device throwing into strong relief the incongruities of the tale and its invented scribe. They offend our sense of form by all sorts of changes of scene, lapses of time, discursiveness, and those other faults which are nowadays so much remarked. And, above all, once the last page is turned, we remember one or two characters and one or two incidents, and we wonder about the corollary, or whatever it is that Mr. James wonders about. We have been entertained, excited, amused, sometimes enthralled. In reading the books again, as we are soon, because of our forgetfulness, able to do, we recover something of the first pleasure. But of Stevenson’s aim we can discover no more than we can discover of the aim of the hack-writer. We feel that his work is better, that it has greater skill, that it is graceful, apt, distinguished even. We feel that, of its kind, it is far superior to anything since written. Was there any aim beyond that of giving pleasure? Need we look for another? It is true that the problem-novel is discredited, and it is true that our most commercially successful novelists are those who can “tell a story.” It is also true that our so-called artistic stories are like the needy knife-grinder. I propose to return later to this point, so we will take another one first. “Vital,” says Stevenson, “vital--that’s what I am, at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind’s eye for ever.”

We may well grant the picturesqueness; and we may grant a nervous buoyancy of fluctuating high spirits. Through all the novels there are passages of extreme beauty, to which we may grant the description “lyrical”; and many of the famous scenes have value which it is open to anybody to call epical if they wish to do so. It is the word “vital” that we find difficult to accept, and the “buoyancy of life.” For if there is one thing to be inferred from the contrivances and the slacknesses and the other shortcomings of Stevenson’s romances to which we shall gradually be able to make reference, it is that they lack vitality. They have a fine brag of words, and they have fine scenes and incidents; but where is there any one of them in which the author can sustain the pitch of imagining that will carry us on the wings of a vital romance? I am referring at this moment to this one point only. I am saying nothing about the books as pieces of literary artifice. There is not one of Stevenson’s own original romances that is not made in two or three or even a hundred flights. There is not one that is not pieced together by innumerable inventions, so that it is a sort of patchwork. That is a persistent defect. It is in _Treasure Island_, it is in _The Master_, it is in _The Wrecker_ and it is in _Weir_, patent to the most casual glance. And the cause of that is low vitality--his own and the book’s. Not one of them, not even _Treasure Island_, not even _The Master of Ballantrae_, which falls in two, has any powerful inevitability. These romances are, in fact, the romances of a sick man of tremendous nervous force, but of neither physical nor intellectual nor even imaginative energy. One may see it in the flickering of Alan Breck. Alan Breck is the most famous of all Stevenson’s characters, with the possible exception of Silver: does he remain vivid all the time? He does not. He loses vitality several times in the course of _Kidnapped_; he hardly attains it in _Catriona_. There is no fault there; there is a weakness. Stevenson’s romances were based upon a survival of boyish interests; they are full of fantastic whips and those clever manipulations with which writers sometimes conceal weaknesses; they have a tremendous vain Scots savour of language and retort; they have exciting, impressive, and splendidly vivid scenes. But the quality they have not is the fine careless rich quality of being vital. If we think, in reading them, that they are vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as helpless as boys reading _Treasure Island_. But Stevenson is always telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. There are ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to his death up the dreadful stair; and there is the kidnapping of David, and then the arrival on board of the survivor from a run-down boat, who proves to be Alan; the fight; and the march after Alan; the Appin murder; and the flight of David and Alan--all magnificently described, well invented, well imagined, but all as episodes or incidents, not as a story. Something else, some other things, all sorts of other things, might just as well have happened as those things which make the story as we know it. There is no continuous vitality even in _Kidnapped_; and yet, on that score, it is the best of the romances. It has a greater “buoyancy” (though not precisely, perhaps, the “buoyancy of life”) than any of the other historical romances. It does not compare with _The Master of Ballantrae_ for dignity or even for the distinction of isolated scenes; but for vitality it is superior.

IV

Why Stevenson should have adopted in so many instances the curious and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator could never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives, it is hard to understand. Defoe’s method was simple and laborious; but it was pure narrative, and as far as one recollects, there was none of this making up by interpolated passages. The person of the narrator was maintained all the time. So with the picaresque romances. The narrative, used by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, does indeed offer some analogy; but never a very happy example of what is at best a broken and unbelievable stratagem. Stevenson, of course, used it in a marked way in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_; and in _Treasure Island_ one cheerfully accepts the convention (only protesting that the Doctor’s interference causes a break both irritating and, technically, unscrupulous). With the exception that the Doctor’s portion is somehow brought in about the middle of the book, the way the story came to be written is not allowed to worry us after the first sentence. _Treasure Island_ is not, therefore, a great offender. _Kidnapped_ starts in a similarly abrupt way, and this book and _Catriona_ are kept fairly closely to the convention. But in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and in _The Wrecker_ there are several inter-narratives which, even if in the earlier book they provide certain keys, do seriously affect the form of the story.

The disadvantage of the narrator is manifest enough. Every step outside his probable knowledge must be elaborately explained, or he will become uncomfortably superhuman; he can never be in danger which deprives him of speech or the power to write, but has often lived to a green and unromantic old age by the time his marvellous faculty for remembering things leads him to “take up the pen.” (“They might easily take it in their heads to give us chase,” says the Chevalier de Burke, “and had we been overtaken, _I had never written these memoirs_.”) If he is the hero he risks being a prig or a braggart (in _St. Ives_ he is, somehow, for all his gentility, not a gentleman); and he often succeeds in being rather a ninny, albeit a courageous ninny. It is this fact, possibly, that accounts for Mr. Stanley Weyman’s “gentlemen of France” and the deplorable “heroes” of many another costume romance inspired by Stevenson’s examples. If he is the good old retainer,--as is Mackellar in _The Master_--he must overcome one’s distrust of his sleek literary craft. These are side issues of the main one--which is that such narratives are improbable. Their apparent virtue, which in itself is a snare, lies in the fact that they keep the reader’s eye focussed upon the narrator, and seem thus to give homogeneity to a book. They enable the author to refuse detachment and to mingle with his characters, tapping them upon the arm so that the reader receives their full glance, or bidding them give some little personal exhibition for the naturalness of the book. Stevenson saw, perhaps, that such a method solved some of his difficulties. He loved ease of demeanour. He could use his Covenanting style at will, with the quaint, shrewd twists of language which do not fail to strike us impressively as we read; and he could throw off the task of creating a hero whom we should recognise as such in spite of all things, as we recognise Don Quixote or Cousin Pons or Prince Myshkin. Also, the use of the “I” probably made the tale better fun for himself. It was perhaps part of the make-belief. It avoided formality; it brought him nearer his canvas; it saved him the need of focussing the whole picture. That, constructively, was, as I have suggested earlier in another way, his prime weakness as a novelist. He could not see a book steadily and see it whole. Partly it may have been that by putting himself in the frame he made the picture a panorama--“the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama” is Stevenson’s own admission in the case of _The Wrecker_--but most influentially, I think, it was that he had really not the physical strength and the physical energy to grasp a book entire, or to keep his invention and imagination at any extreme heat for any length of time. Whatever may be the case of this, however, it seems clear that the first person singular is a difficult and a tricky method to employ, abounding in risk of accident, and much inclined to make for improbability, unless the writer is content absolutely to limit the narrator’s knowledge to things experienced, with details only filled out from hearsay, and unless he has superhuman powers of detachment. One is inclined to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto, where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of detachment powerfully appear.

V

Prince Otto, of course, is only one out of the many self-portraits. He is, as it were, Stevenson’s Hamlet, which is not quite as good as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is nearer to Stevenson than David Balfour, because David Balfour is an ideal, while Prince Otto is an apology. All Stevenson’s heroes, in fact, are tinged with the faint complacent self-depreciation which is capable of being made truly heroic, or merely weak, or, possessed of that “something that was scarcely pride or strength, that was perhaps only refinement,” very human. But not one of these heroes is complete. All, as it were, are misty about the edges. The vigorous David Balfour falls into the self-distrust, not of a young man of strength, but of a self-engrossed student; weakness is paramount in the main character in _The Ebb Tide_; the dandiacal St. Ives is at the mercy of circumstance, waiting upon the next thing, reliant only upon Stevenson’s goodwill, horribly unmasculine in his plans to please. Mackellar is a puritanical coward, but magnificently suggested; Loudon Dodd, and even young Archie Weir, being both very moral and, one imagines, very inexperienced in the ways of life, combine courage with weakness most pitiable. They are all feminine, brave in desperation, weak in thought. They are all related to Jack Matcham in _The Black Arrow_. Stevenson admired courage, and he possessed courage, as women admire and possess courage. He loved a brave man, and a tale of adventure, as women love these things. He did not take them for granted, but must hint and nibble at them all the time, thinking, perhaps, that he was making a portrait, but instead of that making what represents for us a tortured ideal. “I should have been a man child,” says Catriona. “In my own thoughts it is so I am always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall and that. Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches all through, like Mr. David Balfour.” That is why _Prince Otto_, long the test of the true Stevensonian, seems to us now, increasingly, a lackadaisical gimcrack, as bloodless as a conceit, losing by its spinning as a tale all the fantastic effect it might have enjoyed as one of the _New Arabian Nights_. It has a great deal of beauty, and a good deal of perception both of character and of situation; but the beauty droops and sickens among the meshes of delicate writing, and the perception is all upon the surface of life, and, even so, abstract and without the impulse of human things.

It is the faint humour of Stevenson that makes the book seem sickly. It is that faint humour which brings so much of his heroic work sliding sand-like to our feet. For it must be realised that if one is going to be romantical one must have either no humour at all (which perhaps is an ideal state) or a strong, transfiguring humour which is capable of exuberance and monstrosity as well as of satiric depreciation. Stevenson’s humour was of that almost imperceptible kind which grows in Scotland, and which has given rise to the legend that Scotsmen “joke wi’ deeficulty.” It was dry, it was nonsensical, it was satiric; it was the humour that depends upon tone, a delicacy of emphasis or pause. It was the humour of a sick man who had high spirits and very little morbidity. Now in _Prince Otto_ there is morbidity; it is not a healthy book. It could not have been written by an active and vigorous man; and I do not think Stevenson could have written it after he went to Samoa. Its literary forbear, “Harry Richmond,” although a very cumbrous and mannered work, has a trenchant vigour which keeps alive our admiration after our interest has dropped. It is elaborate and pompous; but it has power. _Prince Otto_ owes its best moments to a purely literary skit on the English traveller among foreign courts: that skit, it is true, is priceless. Apart from Sir John Crabtree, however, the book depends entirely for its charm upon its faint, almost swooning, beauty of style; and it is indeed surprising that the book should have enjoyed among Stevenson’s male worshippers so much handsome appreciation. It is so quizzical, where it is not sentimental or “conventional,” that it is half the time engaged in self-consumption, which is as though one should say that it is eaten up with vanity.

VI

By Stevenson’s own account, the first fifteen chapters of _Treasure 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.