V
The two essays which conclude Memories and Portraits, respectively entitled A Gossip on Romance and A Humble Remonstrance, are by way of being essays in constructive criticism, showing why the novel of incident (i.e. the romance) is superior to the domestic novel. The former belongs to 1882, the latter to 1884. A Gossip on Romance expresses for “Robinson Crusoe” a greater liking than that held for “Clarissa Harlowe,” and concludes with great praise of Scott; A Humble Remonstrance shows Stevenson entering, with something of the Father Damien manner, into a debate which was at that time taking place between Sir Walter Besant, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. W. D. Howells. Besant’s arguments were contained in an essay on “The Art of Fiction,” which may still be had as a negligible little book; Mr. Henry James’s reply, a wholly delightful performance, is reprinted in “Partial Portraits.” The point was that Besant wanted to express his amiable and workmanlike notions, that Mr. Henry James preferred to talk about the art of fiction, and that Stevenson, who seems never to have felt entire approval of the subject-matter of Mr. James’s books, felt called upon to rally to the defence of his own practices. Unfortunately he could not do this without savaging Mr. James and Mr. Howells, and this, while it makes the essay a rather honest, unaffected piece of work, does not increase its lucidity.
But we may very well turn at this point to notice that Stevenson’s one legitimate book of essays on specifically literary subjects—Familiar Studies of Men and Books—illustrates very well his attitude to the writers in whom he was interested to the point of personal study. The nine subjects of the essays in this book do not seem to us at this time a specially interesting selection; and indeed the essays themselves are not remarkable for originality or insight. It does show, however, some range of understanding to wish to write upon subjects so varied as Hugo, Burns, Whitman, Thoreau, Villon, Charles of Orleans, Pepys, and John Knox. It is true that Stevenson (the Hugo essay is perhaps an exception to this) never gets very far away from his “authorities” or from quotations from the works of his subject; and that his criticism is “safe” rather than personal; but these facts, while they interfere with the value of the essays as essays, give them the interest of being single and without parallel in Stevenson’s output. They show that he was a good enough journeyman critic to stand beside those who write essays on literary subjects for the reviews. They conform, as far as I can tell, to the standard of such work; they are useful and plain, and some of them, but not all, are interesting. In each case the interest is chiefly a moral interest; it is the “teaching” of the various writers, the moral vagaries of the different delinquents, that engage the critic’s attention.
It must be borne in mind that Stevenson was not primarily a literary critic. His flashes of insight were more remarkable than his considered judgments, because, as I have suggested elsewhere in this book, he had not the kind of mind that takes delight in pursuing a subject to its logical conclusion. He had the inventive, but not the constructive mind, and he had the nervous and delicate man’s intolerance of anything requiring sustained intellectual effort. I imagine that in reading books he “read for the story,” and that his perception of qualities in the telling (apart from the excellence of the story) was spasmodic. It may be noticed as a defect in Familiar Studies of Men and Books that no character, apart from traditional character, as in the case of Pepys, emerges from any of the essays: we are given accounts and criticisms of, for example, Burns; but we do not have them flashed out at us as real men. Stevenson, I think, had a very poor sense of character. In all these essays there is the same defect, an air of flatness, of colourlessness, such as we may find in any case where character has not been imagined.
Stevenson also required idiosyncrasy in a character before he could grasp it. There was for him no interest in normality of character, which somehow he did not grasp. Once he apprehended a personality all was different; then, every touch told, as we may see in the picture of old Weir, or even in Silver. If he grasped the character he could see it admirably; but it had to be “knobbly,” for quiet, unpicturesque men baffled his powers of reproduction. He could admire, but he could not draw them. There is a very curious instance of this in the Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, which is worth commenting on here. That memoir is in some ways perfunctory; as a whole it belongs to the same uncharacterised class of portrait-studies as these Men and Books. Jenkin is poorly drawn, so that he might be anybody. But there are passages in the Memoir which are the most moving passages that Stevenson ever wrote. They do not relate to Fleeming Jenkin, who is all out of focus: they relate to the parents of Jenkin and his wife. Jenkin’s personality, it would seem, was never grasped by Stevenson; these vignettes, on the other hand, are quite poignantly real and quite pathetically beautiful.