III
Mr. Henry James, in criticising a selection of our modern novelists, describes himself as reading their work with, one imagines, continuous interest, and then, in face of all the phenomena which have industriously been gathered for his inspection, asking for something further. Mr. Henry James, apparently, wants to know “why they do it.” It would not be in place here to say that the modern novelists are all to some extent followers of Mr. James; but it is very interesting to put that same question (amounting to a sort of cui bono?) to the romantic novelists. One would like to know what Stevenson aimed at in his romances. One does not receive from any one of the romances the thrill given by a perfect work of art. Their interest is broken and episodic; they fall apart in strange places, and show gaps, and (as in the case of works by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Conrad) one or two of them, including The Master of Ballantrae, are patched together by means of contributory “narratives” and “stories” which can never, whatever the skill of their interposition, preserve any appearance of vital form, and which, at the best, can be no more than exhibitions of virtuosity. They retain their continuity of interest only by means of the narrator’s continuance; and the use of “narrations” itself is a device throwing into strong relief the incongruities of the tale and its invented scribe. They offend our sense of form by all sorts of changes of scene, lapses of time, discursiveness, and those other faults which are nowadays so much remarked. And, above all, once the last page is turned, we remember one or two characters and one or two incidents, and we wonder about the corollary, or whatever it is that Mr. James wonders about. We have been entertained, excited, amused, sometimes enthralled. In reading the books again, as we are soon, because of our forgetfulness, able to do, we recover something of the first pleasure. 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. I propose to return later to this point, so we will take another one first. “Vital,” says Stevenson, “vital—that’s what I am, at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind’s eye for ever.”
We may well grant the picturesqueness; and we may grant a nervous buoyancy of fluctuating high spirits. Through all the novels there are passages of extreme beauty, to which we may grant the description “lyrical”; and many of the famous scenes have value which it is open to anybody to call epical if they wish to do so. It is the word “vital” that we find difficult to accept, and the “buoyancy of life.” For if there is one thing to be inferred from the contrivances and the slacknesses and the other shortcomings of Stevenson’s romances to which we shall gradually be able to make reference, it is that they lack vitality. They have a fine brag of words, and they have fine scenes and incidents; but where is there any one of them in which the author can sustain the pitch of imagining that will carry us on the wings of a vital romance? I am referring at this moment to this one point only. 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. Not one of them, not even Treasure Island, not even 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. Stevenson’s romances were based upon a survival of boyish interests; they are full of fantastic whips and those clever manipulations with which writers sometimes conceal weaknesses; they have a tremendous vain Scots savour of language and retort; they have exciting, impressive, and splendidly vivid scenes. But the quality they have not is the fine careless rich quality of being vital. If we think, in reading them, that they are vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as helpless as boys reading Treasure Island. But Stevenson is always telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. There are ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to his death up the dreadful stair; and there is the kidnapping of David, and then the arrival on board of the survivor from a run-down boat, who proves to be Alan; the fight; and the march after Alan; the Appin murder; and the flight of David and Alan—all magnificently described, well invented, well imagined, but all as episodes or incidents, not as a story. Something else, some other things, all sorts of other things, might just as well have happened as those things which make the story as we know it. There is no continuous vitality even in Kidnapped; and yet, on that score, it is the best of the romances. It has a greater “buoyancy” (though not precisely, perhaps, the “buoyancy of life”) than any of the other historical romances. It does not compare with The Master of Ballantrae for dignity or even for the distinction of isolated scenes; but for vitality it is superior.