Chapter 2

Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high decree. His careful choice of epithet and name have even been criticised as lending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive air of deliberation. His daintiness of diction is best seen in his earlier work; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and direct, fitter for its later uses, but never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrill of pleasure to the reader. Of the value of words he had the acutest appreciation. _Virginibus Puerisque_, his first book of essays, is crowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a single word. 'We have all heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England.' You can feel the ground shake and see the volcano tower above you at that word '_tremendous_ neighbourhood.' Something of the same double reference to the original and acquired meanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedate electrician,' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of a city; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the _impassable_.'

The likeness of this last word to a very different word, '_impassive_,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meanings almost leads to punning. In _Across the Plains_ Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes, '_liquidated_ at the bar.' This is perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works of Milton.

His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more stirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In _The Beach of Falesa_ the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang;

'"Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain continued. "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. 'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of stick to him: 'John Adams, _obit_ eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny."

'"What did he die of?" I inquired.

'"Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go--he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again: not strong enough. . . . Poor John!"'

There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in _The Wrecker_; and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose.

But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.' And he quotes a passage from Harrington's _Oceana_:

'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own hand, is herself King People.'

It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable _Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen_. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style.

However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp. This was what Stevenson did, and the very conversations that pass between his characters have an air of distinction that is all his own. His books are full of brilliant talk--talk real and convincing enough in its purport and setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actual commonplace conversation. It is an enjoyment like that to be obtained from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in _A Lodging for the Night_ and _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_. But people do not talk like this in actual life--''tis true, 'tis pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not; in actual life conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to describe each particular twiddle. Or in its more intellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and black--like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them.

There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for another man's. All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.

If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.

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.

III. MORALITY.--His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work--unless the two short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions--in which romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside _The Scarlet Letter_ or _The Marble Faun_ for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories.