VIII
Earlier in this chapter the question was raised of Stevenson’s object in writing his romances. If we read his Note on Realism we shall find that he talks of “poignancy of main design,” “the beauty and significance of the whole,” “the moral or the philosophical design,” as though that other note to Sir Sidney Colvin was but a partial exposition of his aim. The one, possibly, was a personal claim; the essay a public profession; and public confession, we are aware, is apt to cling to the more desirable aspects of the truth. But the essay has a relevant value, because it speaks of the author’s rapture at being able to muster “a dozen or a score” of those essential “facts” of which “it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven exclusively.” Thereafter he admits, as most writers would admit, that any work of art loses its original force as that force is spent in execution and diverted into channels unforeseen.
Without “facts” the novel cannot be written. Obviously the good novel is the one that contains significant and primary facts (not to be perceived by all, but eventually to be acknowledged by all); while the bad novel is one that contains insignificant and secondary facts (easily recognisable by all and acceptable to none). It is very easy indeed to say that. It is more difficult to apply the test; or at least, if one reads the newspaper criticism of modern novels, one finds that there seems to exist a difficulty in application. So it is that what one writer regards as significant, another writer considers contemptible; and it is very likely that we should get little satisfaction from an elaborate analysis of Stevenson’s chosen “facts.” Some of these facts are of the greatest importance; some of them are useless. What we must rather urge is that Stevenson, for all his talk of design and the beauty of the whole, had never the physical energy to carry his conception through on a single plane (or, of course, upon that inequality of planes which may be dictated by the character of a book). That is why none of his novels (he said, in speaking of the difficulty of writing novels, “it is the length that kills”) is on an ascending plane of interest or on a level plane of performance. He simply had not the bodily strength to support the continuous imaginative strain.
Further, it is the mark of the romantic and picturesque novelist that he is dependent upon that particular form of incident which provides a prop for his narrative. In a very crude way the writer of serial stories, who ends an instalment with some ghastly suggestion of coming crime, is a type of the picturesque novelist in this connection. Stevenson, in his historical romances, was a picturesque rather than a romantic novelist; he had an eye, an ear, a nose for an effect; effects he must have, or his book would stop, since it has rarely a sufficient impetus to cover the lapse in inventive skill. It was because they offered no effects that The Great North Road, and Heathercat, and The Young Chevalier dried suddenly upon his pen, dead before ever they were begun. One can see in these fragments the sign of Stevenson’s weakness. He was “game” enough; but he could not make romance out of chopped hay, such as The Young Chevalier, with its bald, hopeless attempt to galvanise the Master into life again. It was, again, the title of The Great North Road, the title of Sophia Scarlet that ran in Stevenson’s head. Titles for stories! Stories to fit such titles! Is that really the way an artist works? Perhaps it is; perhaps if they had been written, and had been good stories, we should have found them appropriate to a degree. But they were never written, save as fragments; because they never had any life. They never had any idea. And it is in virtue of its unifying idea and its ultimate form, not its contributive incidents or its more lively occasional properties, that a novel, as such, is a good novel.
Now the one book of Stevenson’s which has an idea is the one which may be mistaken for either a tract or a shilling shocker. It is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other books have ideas, or notions, but they have behind them no unifying idea. That is why one forgets what they are about. The idea of Treasure Island is “boy goes on hunt for pirate’s treasure ... doctor ... wooden-legged boatswain,” and so on. The idea for Kidnapped may have been “boy kidnapped ... meets emissary of proscribed Scots ... hides ... Appin murder ... flight ... recovers property.” The genesis of The Master of Ballantrae is given in a short paper, with those words for title, which is included in The Art of Writing. From this very frank account, we may see that the book began in a flush of enthusiasm for “The Phantom Ship,” proceeded to an aged anecdote of resuscitation, and so, piecemeal, and by the joining together of all sorts of notions old and new, reached a conception of the Chevalier de Burke. Now this sort of invention, although it delights us by its resourcefulness and ingenuity, has no relation to the romance of life as it is lived or as it has ever been lived. It is picturesque invention pure and simple (the sort of thing that makes French fairy tales such pretty reading, and that makes them in the end so empty and so much inferior to the fairy tales of other nations); and except that men love a lie for its own sake it can have no importance. Until the lies (or facts) are co-ordinated and organised to make a whole, to support each other by the new value gained by their disciplined association, they are nothing but isolated lies or facts. It is the author’s brooding imagination, which is in direct relation to, and under the influence of, his own æsthetic and emotional experience, that supplies that fusion and transfusion which makes a work of art. Perfect fusion makes a great work of art, such as we may see in the best of Turgeniev’s work; imperfect fusion makes an inferior work of art. But there can be no fusion without a basic idea, a unifying idea. And that unifying idea, without which the invention and imagination of scenes remains hopelessly episodic, does not arise in Stevenson’s romances. It shows faintly in The Ebb Tide and The Master of Ballantrae, where both books are tinged with suggestions of a moral idea; it shows Stevenson struggling in the grip of Jekyll and Hyde in the book which bears the name of those forces in him. The one (shall we say Mr. Hyde?) is the tendency to moralise, to preach, which was inherited from countless Scottish ancestors; the other is the impulse to invent (an impulse which is too generally lauded by the great name of imagination). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, dreamed as a shocker, and successful as a shocker, became in revision a parable, a morality. The natural Stevenson dreamed a shocker; and the scribe said, “Let us be moral!” And that is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as we have it in its bald police-court narratives and letters. Nearer than a moral idea, Stevenson never approached our philosophical basis. Adventure blurred his sight; picturesqueness lured him. His object in writing was not the utterance of piercing thoughts or poignant emotion: he wrote because of his long Scots tongue, which turned and savoured all the lively incidents which his brain conjured. Excepting in The Master of Ballantrae, where our hearts are made to leap, and in Weir of Hermiston, which stands alone among all his books, are we ever moved by Stevenson’s romances? We are stirred by the sense of an open road, and the inviting hills, and furze and whin that is good cover for men crawling upon their bellies. We have the sense that a sentry is round the curve of the hill; but never that he will discover us and strike. There is never any real danger in Stevenson’s books; never a real broken heart or a real heaven-high splendour of joy. There is the lure of the road and the heather; but we will be back again in the bright warm house, by the light of the red fire, with our cigar and whisky-and-soda (for it seems that is inevitable) before nightfall. It is true that we shall hear the sea, and the coach’s winding horn, and some faint combing of the bagpipes; and perhaps we shall see the lamplighter, and have had scones for tea, and shall read Blackstone or some old Scots history before we go to bed. But we have not really been far away; we have been excited and pleased and happily warmed by the day’s doings in the open air, but we have never seen the naked soul of man, or heard the haunting music of the syrens, or looked upon the open face of God. Nor have we truly exercised our energy in some less conventional rapture of the world’s wonder. The reason may be traced back to our author: it is not a part of our own shortcomings. Stevenson, in his romances, played with his inventions; and he played sometimes splendidly. But he had not the vital assurance, the fierce trenchant fathoming of adventure that a vigorous man enjoys. “A certain warmth (tepid enough),” he says, “and a certain dash of the picturesque are my poor essential qualities.” Well, that is a modest under-statement; but, as far as the historical romances go, the verdict is not wholly astray. It is in the latest novels, the realistic novels, that Stevenson rose to a fuller stature; that was because in the last years of life he truly for the first time was able to taste the actual air of physical danger. He had been in genuine physical danger: it electrified him. It gave him, perhaps, a philosophy that was not made up of figured casuistries. It enabled him to begin Weir of Hermiston with something of the cold freshness of running water.