Frank Swinnerton

“ Excepting in The Master of Ballantrae, where our hearts are made to leap, and in Weir of Hermiston, which stands alone among all his books, are we ever moved by Stevenson’s romances? We are stirred by the sense of an open road, and the inviting hills, and furze and whin that is good cover for men crawling upon their bellies. ”

“ I do not wish to pretend that the artist is such a mere instrument; particularly as the writer who claims to be no more than a medium is generally no less than a charlatan. But I cannot help remarking how entirely absent from any [193] declaration by Stevenson is the sense of an artist’s profound disinterested imagining. So far from being profoundly disinterested, he seems to have followed here the custom he admits following in childhood, that of reading and watching everything for the sake of wrinkles subsequently to be used in play. ”

“ He was perhaps not wise enough in the mysteries of the human soul. Sensitiveness, and the desire to create a passionate beauty, were not fit substitutes for that patient and courageous, that fearless imagination which alone could have given truth to so simple and so unseizable a problem. More, in his handling of the conclusion of his tale, Stevenson’s emotion fell to a lower plane, and his talent played him quite false. He became too intent upon his rendering of the idea; his literary sense took command when his knowledge failed. ”

“ If a travel-book is an exploitation of the traveller’s self, we can be charmed with it: let us not, therefore, because we find less charm in In the South Seas, find [60] the later book dull. Stevenson is duller because he is older: the bloom is going: he is not equal intellectually to the task he has set himself. But there is a greater sincerity in the later travel-books, an honest looking upon the world. It is surely better to look straight with clear eyes than to dress life up in a bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard mountain. ”

“ We talk of elusive charm when we cannot remember a single thing that has aroused in us the impression of having been charmed. Exactly in that way was Stevenson remembered by those he met—as a vivid butterfly is remembered; something indescribably strange and curious, not to be caught and held, for its brilliant and wayward fluttering. The charm was the thing that attracted men kinder, more staid, more truly genial, wiser than himself ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This book, Virginibus Puerisque, has been a favourite for many years, sanguine, gentle, musical, in the deepest sense unoriginal. It is the most [74] quoted; it is the one which most certainly may be regarded as the typical book of Stevenson’s early period. Surely it is because a half-truth, a truth that may be gobbled up in a phrase and remembered only as a phrase, is easier to accept than a whole truth, upon which the reader must engage his attention? It must, I mean, be the trope that lures readers of Virginibus Puerisque into acceptance of thought so threadbare and ill-nourished. ”

“ To be accosted by a young man with cream tarts in a locality so picturesque as Leicester Square—that is romance: to go to the suicide club, and to participate in what follows, is to leave romance for picturesque stimulation of interest by bizarre incident. The young man, I think, is art: the rest might have been invented by a person without imagination, and so we might call it craft. ”

“ Stevenson loved courage, and he thought that courage should have trappings. To his mind the bravest actions were the better for a bit of purple. But when we penetrate beyond this crust of happy truism there is little that will reward us for the search. There is no thought, and little enough feeling in the essays: their charm lies in the fact that they dress prettily, and sometimes beautifully, the rather obvious philosophical small-change which most people cherish as their private wisdom. The essays flatter the reader by mirroring his own mind and giving it an odd twist of grace. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stevenson from the first saw himself as the central object in his essay: it is amusing to watch how soon he begins to make himself count as an effective central object. At first the personality is thin: it has not carried. Later it develops with the development of style: the use of words becomes firmer, and with that firmness comes greater confidence, greater ease, in the projection of the author’s self. It is perhaps not until we reach the familiar essays that we find Stevenson fully master of himself, for literary purposes; but the growth provides matter for rather ingenious study. ”

“ It is a world seen, not with rich vitality, but with the friendly interest of one in a fair haven, whose imagination is not fierce enough to be a torture to him. Stevenson heard, saw, and really felt his surroundings; his descriptions of sudden beauties here at Silverado, as later in Samoa, have the quiet religious character which distinguished all his truest intuitions of beauty. ”

“ That is why Stevenson’s best work is, relatively speaking, neglected in favour of work that tarnishes with the passing of youth. And it is all because of the insatiable desire of mediocrity for the picturesque. We must be surprised and startled, and have our senses titillated by savours and perfumes; we must have the strange and the new; we must have a fashion to follow and to forget. Stevenson has been a fashionable traveller, and his sober maturity is too dull; he has lost his charm. Well, we must make a new fashion. Interest in a figure must give place to interest in the work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As Stevenson admitted to Mr. Henry James, he heard people talking, and felt them acting, and that seemed to him to be fiction. But to hear people talking and to feel them acting bespeaks a very unmaterial conception of them: if a character in a play talks, however monotonously, without developing any personality save that of verbal mannerism, we are bound to feel that he has not been realised. And just as Stevenson realised none of the characters in his plays, so we are powerless to realise them. We find [115] them, as Professor Saintsbury pathetically found Catriona herself, bloodless. ”

“ 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. [145] 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. ”

“ What we, as readers endeavouring patiently to trace the growth of Stevenson’s knowledge, must, however, remember above all things, is that the book is really a finer and a more distinguished work than An Inland Voyage or Travels with a Donkey. It has not the grimaces of the first, or the pleasing delicacy of the second. It is a better book than The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. It is fuller and richer than The Silverado Squatters. What, then, do we ask of a book of travel? ”

“ The art of gloating innocently over his own power to gloat; the power to delight consciously in his own delight at being able to play—these, I believe, are naturally Scots pleasures, and profoundly Stevensonian pleasures. I hope that no reader will deny Stevenson the right to such enjoyments, for Stevenson’s not very complex nature is really bound up in them. If we take from him the satisfaction of seeing himself in every conceivable posture, we take from him a vanity which permeates his whole life-work, and which, properly regarded, is harmless to offend our taste. ”

“ No need for him to admit it: the fact is [209] patent. “It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text.” That is what Stevenson was doing; that is what Stevenson’s imitators have been doing ever since. And if romance rests upon no better base than this, if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. ”

“ Will o’ the Mill is written with great softness and delicacy, in a sort of slow and lulling drone very sweet to the ear; Markheim has great virtuosity, is faint and exquisite in manner, feeble in perception, and is sometimes, I believe, false in psychology. Its plan and its manner would only be finally true if its understanding pierced more sharply and finely to the heart of truth. It lacks penetration. Olalla is, in many ways, fine, in some, beautiful. It is, however, as Stevenson came to be aware, false. ”

“ For that brings us to the pathetic final explanation of the failure of the Henley-Stevenson plays. We may say that they are deficient in drama, or that they are trivial in theme, or that they have no visual sense to illumine them for our eyes; but the truth is that they fail because they are false. The theatre has in it much that is false, much to which we deliberately shut our eyes in order that we may accept the dramatist’s formal conventions. ”

“ Sense of style, I think, is a much greater point in Stevenson’s equipment than the actual “style.” The style varies; the sense of style is constant, as it must be in any writer who is not a Freeman. Alison Cunningham, being herself possessed of this sense, or of the savour of words, impressed it upon “her boy”; and the result we may see. All Stevenson’s subsequent “learning” was so much exercise: no man learns how to write solely by observation and imitation. ”

“ There is no difficulty of style. It is easy to read, because it has so much grace; but it is also easy to understand, because it is in a high degree explicit. It is essentially a prose style; as I think Stevenson was essentially a prose-writer. His poems have this same clearness (though surely he was never a master of poetic form to the extent to which he was a master of prose) , and clearness in poetry is a less notable virtue than clearness in prose. Unless poetry expresses something that could not properly be expressed in prose it clearly has no claim upon our attention. ”

“ Hyde, which as a whole is suspiciously glib, as though it had been falsified in the transformation from dream to morality. I do not find art in the other short stories by Stevenson. They seem all to have been produced, some from one impulse, some from another, some with painstaking shrewdness, some from vanity, some even from a want of something better to do. The artist receives an inspiration, which shapes his work with the fine glow of vitality (much as a sick person is transformed by mountain air, until his features shape and colour into a new fleshly verve) . ”

“ Above all, very persuasively; and above even his persuasiveness, the deprecating sense of charm, the use of personal anecdote to give the sermon an authentic air of confession.
The nervous, vivid buoyancy of his characteristic manner was a part of his lack of health. He was, it is known, rarely in actual pain; and it is very often the case that delicate persons have this nervous exuberance of temperament, which has almost the show of [32] vitality. It has the show; but when the person is no longer before us, our memory is a vague, fond dream of something intangible—what we call, elusive. ”

“ Ives with earlier and more triumphant experiments in that field; but it opens the path for the sober realism (if that word may here be used without sinister connotation) of the torso known as Weir of Hermiston, a fragment in which it is usual to find the greatest promise of all. This is all of a piece with the increasing purpose of Stevenson’s way in life. It is a good sign when a professional author forsakes romance in favour of reality; for romance may be conjured for bread-and-butter, while reality withstands the most persuasive cajollery. ”

“ Instinctively a girl learns the better side of her face, the particular irresistible turn of her head, the perfect cadence of voice. So does the man who has this personal charm. So, too, does he realise instinctively the value of the external details of friendship. In only one point does the knowledge of such externals fail. The kind thing makes friends (in the sense of cordial strangers) ; but it does not make anything more subtle than cordial strangeness; and it does not seem to me that anybody really ever knew Stevenson very well. ”

“ One is excited by what is going forward, one must read on for the story. In the degree, therefore, in which one’s attention is removed from the versification, these two narratives are good; and those other verses based on legends—Heather Ale and Ticonderoga—would be sufficient to emphasise the fact that Stevenson loved a story and was always at his best with a tale to spin. When, however, we reach poems in which no story is to be told, we are confronted with an absence of emotion which robs the pages we read of all that exceeds mere pleasurable line-scanning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But they are only, at best, the amiable pleasantries of one who could handle with dexterity the words of whose music his mind was full. “The bright ring of words” is not the phrase of a poet; it is the phrase of a connoisseur, and of one who used words as a connoisseur uses them. The poet is a singer first: he does not make a poem out of his craft. And the tendency to diffuseness which mars many of the longer lyrics is a curious instance of failure in a writer who regarded compression as an essential of good style. ”

“ But we have not really been far away; we have been excited and pleased and happily warmed by the day’s doings in the open air, but we have never seen the naked soul of man, or heard the haunting music of the syrens, or looked upon the open face of God. Nor have we truly exercised our energy in some less conventional rapture of the world’s wonder. ”