Chapter 3

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be broken by the fall of china--the morality without which life would be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society. For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imagination are necessary. Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for the murderer--the sympathy of intelligence. These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion of homily. In _The Black Arrow_, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke of Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers,' yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster.

'"Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say you forgive me, for if your life is worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish."

'"An I had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas--I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down, 'Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again. 'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. 'A will never sail no more, will my Tom."

'Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch.

'"Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and let that content you."

'The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.'

A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.

'"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine, and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself."'

The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that he has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the purposes of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his works is very small indeed. In the golden glow of romance, character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described his emotions and aspirations. Something of the same disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived for an idea.' Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of _Treasure Island_, breathes out its soul in a creed:

'"For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views--Amen, so be it."'

John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in _The Ebb Tide_.

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the heroine of _The Black Arrow_ is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in _The Master of Ballantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of _Kidnapped_ are real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the book;--but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must stand over until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous passes.

One character must never be passed over in an estimate of Stevenson's work. The hero of his longest work is not David Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself. But Alan Breek Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild Highland clansman. 'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and as vain and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable characters in all literature; and his penetration--a great part of which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle 'through a throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his tail'--blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and things.

The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. To combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in perfect style,--this thing has never yet been done. A great part of Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest outlet in his essays. In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the vision of most writers and thinkers. He has an unerring instinct for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his lately published _Amateur Emigrant_ he describes one of his fellow-passengers to America:

'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide.'

This sense of the realities of the world,--laughter, happiness, the simple emotions of childhood, and others,--makes Stevenson an admirable critic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of the heart. The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on _Beggars_ is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is it untrue?

'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever; that he has the money, and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where to find--note this phrase--the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take a more than merely human secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:--and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor.'

An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force of a natural law to the pathos of _Old Mortality_, that essay in which Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who 'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.' The whole description, down to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign passages of modern literature; the pathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the legions commanded by

'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord, That all the misbelieving and black Horde Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.'

Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of a writer who has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at what is perhaps the most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost test, where it is successfully encountered, of nobility,--the practice, namely, of self- revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing,--the shores of the sea of literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect trust and perfect fluency to the man. He shares with Goldsmith and Montaigne, his own favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers. 'To be the most beloved of English writers--what a title that is for a man!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith. In such matters, a dispute for pre- eminence in the captivation of hearts would be unseemly; it is enough to say that Stevenson too has his lovers among those who have accompanied him on his _Inland Voyage_, or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes in the wake of Modestine. He is loved by those that never saw his face; and one who has sealed that dizzy height of ambition may well be content, without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese have taken London and revised the contents of the British Museum, the yellow scribes whom they shall set to produce a new edition of the _Biographie Universelle_ will include in their entries the following item:--'_Stevenson_, _R. L._ _A prolific writer of stories among the aborigines_. _Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese_. _His works are lost_.'

THE END

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