Chapter II: ROMANCE.--The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered

on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. 'The artistic result of a romance,' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.' He goes on to point out that there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements. With Scott vague influences that qualify a man's personality begin to make a large claim; 'the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.' And the achievements of the great masters since Scott--Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry--have added new realms to the domain of romance.

What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great romance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_? These questions can only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy. But an approach to an answer may be made by illustration.

In his _American Notebooks_ Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down subjects for stories as they struck him. His successive entries are like the souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of them never received; they bring us very near to the workings of the mind of a great master. Here are some of them:

'A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme
doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes
about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of
making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the
appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much
may be made of this idea.'

'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a
street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'

'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against
his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and
a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might
shadow forth his own fate--he having made himself one of the
personages.'

'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two
principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then
passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'

'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'

Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.

'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a
human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the
operation of a certain vice on him.'

M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel called _Le Disciple_. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality.'

'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the
point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'

This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in _Marion Delorme_, and of Captain Flint in _Treasure Island_.

'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being
seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at
length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich man's
mansion, and there dies--assuming state, and striking awe into the
breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'

These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to a romance--of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind's eye. Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance--to the superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality.

Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in _Kidnapped_, and of the disguise of a blind leper in _The Black Arrow_, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'

The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never to be found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception. The main situation in _The Wrecker_ is a splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best passages in the book--the scenes in Paris, for instance--have no business there at all. The story in _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_ wanders on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty in leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James Stewart. _The Master of Ballantrae_ is stamped with a magnificent unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a series of scattered episodes.

That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,' is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this character to the sublime of power.

But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination or contrast. The events that happen within the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in _Treasure Island_ and _The Ebb Tide_, the captivity on the Bass Rock in _Catriona_, the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the island of _The Merry Men_--these imaginations are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in some sort the genius of the place it inhabits.

In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured freely enough into the realm of the supernatural.

When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of _Thrawn Janet_, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in _Catriona_, are grotesque imaginations of the school of _Tam o' Shanter_ rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken. Even _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and the story of _The Bottle Imp_ are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted deeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of _Will o' the Mill_ and the grim history of _Markheim_. Each of these stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:

'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair
(Darkness and the breath of space
Like loud waters everywhere),
Meeting mine own image there
Face to face,
Send it from that place to her!'

but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare before him his motives and history. At the close of that wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imagination quickened and strengthened when it played full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games.