V
Prince Otto, of course, is only one out of the many self-portraits. He is, as it were, Stevenson’s Hamlet, which is not quite as good as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 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; weakness is paramount in the main character in The Ebb Tide; the dandiacal St. Ives is at the mercy of circumstance, waiting upon the next thing, reliant only upon Stevenson’s goodwill, horribly unmasculine in his plans to please. Mackellar is a puritanical coward, but magnificently suggested; Loudon Dodd, and even young Archie Weir, being both very moral and, one imagines, very inexperienced in the ways of life, combine courage with weakness most pitiable. They are all feminine, brave in desperation, weak in thought. They are all related to Jack Matcham in The Black Arrow. Stevenson admired courage, and he possessed courage, as women admire and possess courage. He loved a brave man, and a tale of adventure, as women love these things. He did not take them for granted, but must hint and nibble at them all the time, thinking, perhaps, that he was making a portrait, but instead of that making what represents for us a tortured ideal. “I should have been a man child,” says Catriona. “In my own thoughts it is so I am always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall and that. Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches all through, like Mr. David Balfour.” That is why Prince Otto, long the test of the true Stevensonian, seems to us now, increasingly, a lackadaisical gimcrack, as bloodless as a conceit, losing by its spinning as a tale all the fantastic effect it might have enjoyed as one of the New Arabian Nights. It has a great deal of beauty, and a good deal of perception both of character and of situation; but the beauty droops and sickens among the meshes of delicate writing, and the perception is all upon the surface of life, and, even so, abstract and without the impulse of human things.
It is the faint humour of Stevenson that makes the book seem sickly. It is that faint humour which brings so much of his heroic work sliding sand-like to our feet. For it must be realised that if one is going to be romantical one must have either no humour at all (which perhaps is an ideal state) or a strong, transfiguring humour which is capable of exuberance and monstrosity as well as of satiric depreciation. Stevenson’s humour was of that almost imperceptible kind which grows in Scotland, and which has given rise to the legend that Scotsmen “joke wi’ deeficulty.” It was dry, it was nonsensical, it was satiric; it was the humour that depends upon tone, a delicacy of emphasis or pause. It was the humour of a sick man who had high spirits and very little morbidity. Now in Prince Otto there is morbidity; it is not a healthy book. It could not have been written by an active and vigorous man; and I do not think Stevenson could have written it after he went to Samoa. Its literary forbear, “Harry Richmond,” although a very cumbrous and mannered work, has a trenchant vigour which keeps alive our admiration after our interest has dropped. It is elaborate and pompous; but it has power. Prince Otto owes its best moments to a purely literary skit on the English traveller among foreign courts: that skit, it is true, is priceless. Apart from Sir John Crabtree, however, the book depends entirely for its charm upon its faint, almost swooning, beauty of style; and it is indeed surprising that the book should have enjoyed among Stevenson’s male worshippers so much handsome appreciation. It is so quizzical, where it is not sentimental or “conventional,” that it is half the time engaged in self-consumption, which is as though one should say that it is eaten up with vanity.