II
For that reason I shall add that the stories in the third division seem to me to fail for these reasons. The Story of a Lie is obviously prentice work. It is presumably based upon some experience of his own in France; but the action, once transferred from the Continent, is filled with sentimentality. Although written, apparently, much later than The Story of a Lie, The Misadventures of John Nicholson is a protracted anecdote which does not awaken very much interest by its attempt to blend humorous exaggeration with bizarre incidents. The Body-Snatcher is one which Stevenson had to supply in order to satisfy a journal with which he had made a contract. It is meant to shock us, but it loses power before the climax, which thereupon fails to shock. The idea is horrible, and affords scope for much dreadful detail: Stevenson, however, perhaps through ill-health, was unsuccessful with it, and possibly the ugliness of the whole thing is at fault. For The Sire de Malétroit’s Door I must confess to the greatest distaste. It seems to me to have neither historical nor human convincingness; and the phrase at the end of the story, “her falling body” very significantly conveys the pin-cushion substance of the demoiselle whose indiscretion gives rise to the sickly and cloying tale. The last story in this division is one that enjoys great reputation, first because it deals with Villon, second because there is an outburst of Villon’s against the red hair of a murdered man, and last because there is an elaborately written but entirely inconclusive duologue between Villon and his host. The story seems to me to be without point or form.
I believe that popular admiration for A Lodging for the Night is largely founded upon tradition or imitation, like the popular admiration for Shakespeare, without the basis of fact upon which the popular admiration for Shakespeare rests. It is well known that popular appreciation of great things is shallow, and that it rises from a common attempt to emulate the enthusiasm of the apostles of Art. Unfortunately, popular appreciation is more easily aroused by artifice than by art. Accordingly, those who have been taught to cite “Put out the light, and then—Put out the light” as a profundity are ready to cite with equal conviction the saying of Villon in this story that the murdered man had no right to have red hair. It is one of those dreadful æsthetic blunders that quickly pass into unquestionable dogma. If no protest is made, if those who detect an imposture remain supine, the false continues to masquerade as the magnificent; and common opinions are so impervious to proclaimed fact that it is at length impossible to cope with them, save by some such wearisome exposition as this. It should be remembered that common appreciation of art is not guided by principles but by intuitions and imitations. The decay of a thing once widely popular is slow; and it is due, not to any native perception of mistake, but to the sluggard realisation that the old enthusiasm is less ardently canvassed than it was. A Lodging for the Night has enjoyed great repute, because Stevenson “found” Villon at a time when other young men were finding Villon; and now that Villon is quite settled among the young men, Stevenson’s essay on Villon and his story about Villon have reached the larger public that is always some years after the fleeting fashion. The result is that, by imitation of those who ought to have known better, and even by its muddled acceptance of a bad play about Villon (called “If I were King”), the public has been led to esteem A Lodging for the Night as something more than the piece of laboured artifice that it always was.
In the second class I believe that The Rajah’s Diamond, The Dynamiter, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are very efficient pieces of craftsmanship, strong enough in invention to delight that typical person called by Mr. H. G. Wells the “weary giant,” engrossing reading to the accompaniment of cigars and whisky-and-soda, but not, in the way of art, quite what we require from works of creative imagination. The Merry Men, with one striking piece of characterisation, has vigour, but poor form and several superfluities of invention. The Isle of Voices is a pleasant enough fairy tale, but clearly inferior to its companion piece The Bottle Imp. The other three tales, Will o’ the Mill, Markheim, and Olalla are all psychological studies of a kind that is nowadays called arid. That is to say, they have greater elaborateness of treatment than their intrinsic importance quite justifies. 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. It is false, not because it is insincere, but because Stevenson’s knowledge had not the temper and the needle-like capacity to go ever deeper into the subtleties upon which he was engaged. I suspect that he dared not trust his imagination, that his imagination had more ingenuity than courage or strength. The story does not produce æsthetic emotion: it is as though the author had made a fine net to trap a moonbeam, as though, when he thought to have come at the heart of the matter, it had escaped him. 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. That is the weakness of all these three stories.