II
Much has been written about the eternal boy in Stevenson. I confess that this does not strike me as a particularly happy criticism. In a superficial sort of way it is, of course, obvious enough; he was fond of “make-believe”; took a boyish delight in practical joking; was ever ready for an adventure. But so complex and diverse his temperament that it is dangerous to seize on one aspect and say, “There is the real Stevenson.” Ariel, Hamlet, and the Shorter Catechist cross and recross his pages as we read them. Probably each reader of Stevenson retains most clearly one special phase. It is the Ariel in Stevenson that outlasts for
me the other moods. If any one phase can be said to strike the keynote of his temperament, it is the whimsical, freakish, but kindly Ariel—an Ariel bound in service to the Prospero of fiction—never quite happy, longing for his freedom, yet knowing that he must for a while serve his master. One can well understand why John Addington Symonds dubbed Stevenson “sprite.” This elfish dement in Stevenson is most apparent in his letters and stories.
The figures in his stories are less flesh-and-blood persons than the shapes—some gracious, some terrifying—that the Ariel world invoke. It is not that Stevenson had no grip on reality; his grip-hold on life was very firm and real. Beneath the light badinage, the airy, graceful wit that plays over his correspondence, there is a steel-like tenacity. But in his stories he leaves the solid earth for a phantastic world of his own. He does so deliberately: he turns his back on reality, has dealings with phantom passions. His historical romances are like ghostly editions of Scott. There is light, but little heat in his fictions. They charm our fancy, but do not seize upon our imagination. Stevenson’s novels remind one of an old Punch joke about the man who chose a wife to match his furniture. Stevenson chooses his personages to match his furniture—his cunningly-woven tapestries of style; and the result is that we are too conscious of the tapestry on the wall, too little conscious of the people who move about the rooms. If only Stevenson had suited his style to his matter, as he does in his letters, which are written in fine Vagabond spirit—his romances would have seemed less
artificial. I say seemed, for it was the stylist that stood in the way of the story-teller. Stevenson’s sense of character was keen enough, particularly in his ripe, old “disreputables.” But much of his remarkable psychology was lost, it seems to me, by the lack of dramatic presentment.
Borrow’s characters do not speak Borrow so emphatically as do Stevenson’s characters speak Stevenson. And with Stevenson it matters more. Borrow’s picturesque, vivid, but loose, loquacious style, fits his subject-matter on the whole very well. But Stevenson’s delicate, nervous, mannerized style suits but ill some of the scenes he is describing. If it suits, it suits by a happy accident, as in the delightful sentimentality, Providence and the Guitar.
To appraise Stevenson’s merits as a Romantic one has to read him after reading Scott, Dumas, Victor Hugo; or, better still, to peruse these giants after dallying with Ariel.
We realize then what it is that we had vaguely missed in Stevenson—the human touch. These men believe in the figments of their imagination, and make us believe in them.
Stevenson is obviously sceptical as to their reality; we can almost see a furtive smile upon his lip as he writes. But there is nothing unreal about the man, whatever we feel of the Artist.
In his critical comments on men and matters, especially when Hamlet and the Shorter Catechist come into view, we shall find a vigorous sanity, a shrewd yet genial outlook, that seems to say there is no make-believe
here; here I am not merely amusing myself; here, honestly and heartily admitted, you may find the things that life has taught me.