Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) no one who found his works were sympathetic will deny the title of a man of genius. It is unnecessary to dwell on the details of his life; the essence of them is to be gathered from his own essays and from his published correspondence. From his earliest childhood his health was so unstable that he appeared to live on his astonishing intellectual and moral energy rather than on his physical basis. His education was casual and frequently interrupted by recurrent maladies; from childhood a dreamer of dreams and teller of tales, he educated himself, by study of great models mainly in old French and English, in the formation of style and the choice of words. His contributions to magazines, essays and short stories, revealed the last successor of the school of Lamb and Hazlitt, a scholar with a philosophy of life of his own, the philosophy of youth: see the Essays collected and published in "Virginibus Puerisque" (1881), and "Familiar Studies of Men and Books" (1882). At the same time such brief tales of his as "A Lodging for the Night," and "The Sire de Malétroit's Door," and "Thrawn Janet," in periodicals, proved him to be a master of romance, and a master with a thorough understanding of historical characters, surroundings, superstition, and the power of communicating the ancestral thrill of superstition. His interest in history was intense and sympathetic, and was even a danger in his path, as he would willingly have engaged himself in that unpopular study. But he was, as Johnson told Boswell that he was, "longer a boy than other people," and in 1878 he wrote for an obscure periodical "The New Arabian Nights," a fantasy of humour and of perilous adventure, "in a spirit of mockery" like his own "Young Man with the Cream Tarts". In 1881, in a boy's paper, he wrote "Treasure Island," a story meant for boys, but delightful to a critic so little apt to notice his juniors as Mr. Matthew Arnold. "Prince Otto" (1885) is a Court romance of the eighteenth century, full of brilliant passages, but confessedly written and rewritten again and again under the influence of George Meredith. In 1886 "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," a fantasy not uninfluenced, perhaps, by Edgar Poe, but rich in his own philosophy, humour, and style, at last captured public attention, caused "a new shudder," and was rapturously welcomed, as a moral allegory, from the pulpits "of all denominations". The story, or at least the mechanism of the story, came, like "Kubla Khan," to the author in a dream. What is probably his best novel (without a woman in it), "Kidnapped" was suggested by his studies of Highland history after 1745. It was planned on a much larger scale, but now, as sometimes occurred, the pen simply dropped from the author's hand, in one of his many maladies. Such studies of Highland and Lowland character as he gave in "Kidnapped" (though the evil uncle is, in his own phrase, "too steep") are only equalled or excelled in those of Sir Walter Scott, while the pictures of Highland and Lowland life and society at a period (just after Culloden) untouched by Scott, are historically accurate. The same period is again viewed in that bitter study of almost insane fraternal hatred, "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889), supposed to be narrated by a loyal servitor who is also a constitutional coward. There is little relief in this romance except that which comes from one of Prince Charles's Irish officers, the inimitable Chevalier Bourke. In 1893 appeared "Catriona," the sequel to "Kidnapped," in which (for the first time except in the exotic "Prince Otto," and in a short story, "The Pavilion on the Links") Stevenson introduced "the love-interest," and drew an admirably chivalrous and amiable heroine, Catriona herself; with her even more attractive foil, the daring and dominating Barbara Grant. Alan Breck in this sequel is worthy of himself in "Kidnapped," and James More Macgregor is a masterly historical portrait.
"The Wrong Box" (1889) is a humorous fantasy somewhat in the manner of "The New Arabian Nights," with many scenes which provoke laughter unquenchable. "The Wrecker" (1892) is rich in reminiscences of the author's youth in Paris and of Fontainebleau, and the plot, up to a certain point, strongly excites curiosity, but, despite the brilliance of some oceanic adventures, the story is not well constructed, and is rather disappointing. "The Ebb Tide" (1894) was spoken of by the author as "his blooming failure," for his colloquial style was not classical.[2] "St. Ives" (1897), left unfinished, and completed by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, shows signs of fatigue, but the fragment of "Weir of Hermiston," in which his foot is on his native heath, gave all promise of a masterpiece in its many delineations of character. In all his work, in whatever kind, the charm of his style accompanied the reader like the murmur of a burn that runs by the wayside.
Of his verses, "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885) is the most like himself: a few of his serious poems in English have noble effects, but perhaps the best of his poems in the Lowland vernacular are to be preferred. His plays, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, were too literary, or for some other reason were unsuccessful on the stage ("Deacon Brodie," "Beau Austin," "Admiral Guinea").
When we consider the great variety of Stevenson's works, their wide range, their tenderness, their sympathy, their mastery of terror and pity, their gloom and their gaiety; when we remember that his sympathy and knowledge are as conspicuous in his tales of the brown natives of the Pacific ("The Beach of Falesa") as of Highlanders and Lowlanders, and the French of the fifteenth century; we can have little doubt concerning his place in literature.
Minor Novelists.
Among other novelists not hitherto named, the author of Charlotte Brontë's biography, Mrs. Gaskell (née Stevenson) was born at Chelsea, but lived and married in Manchester, and in 1848 rendered the life of a manufacturing population, with their strikes and grimy lives, then a new theme for fiction, in her story of "Mary Barton" (1848). Her "Cranford" (1853), in a very different field, pictures the placid existence of maiden ladies in a quiet village. Her "Sylvia's Lovers," "North and South," and her delightful (unfinished) "Wives and Daughters" (1866) (the author died in 1865), all deservedly hold their place among the classics of our fiction.
With them "a little clan" would place novels unjustly forgotten, "The School for Fathers," by Talbot Gwynne, and "The Initials," by the Baroness Tautphœus.
Charles Reade (1814-1884) was a very prominent and emphatic character of his age, a kind of Lawrence Boythorn, engaged in fiction and the drama. He was a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, a barrister who did not practise, a philanthropist, some of whose novels had a purpose, a combatant whose lance was ever in rest, and as kind and generous as he was pugnacious. For a thoroughly appreciative study of Reade a characteristic essay by Mr. Swinburne should be read. His "Never too Late to Mend," a study, very painful, of the torture of prisoners in jails, and a much more pleasant picture of adventurous life in Australia (Jacky, the black fellow, is a jewel), was most successful (1856), and some reckon "The Cloister and the Hearth," a moving romance of latest mediaeval life in Germany and Italy, a masterpiece of historical fiction. The tone is perhaps too modern and certainly too "robustious". "Peg Woffington" (1852) is perhaps really better as a historical tale. "Griffith Gaunt" and "A Terrible Temptation," with "Foul Play" and "The Wandering Heir" (the claimant in the great Annesley case of 1743) have but few to praise them, and the last mentioned is too manifestly made up of the materials in the never-decided law case; itself stranger than fiction, but destitute of a single sympathetic character.
Space affords room for no more than a grateful mention of Mr. William Black, whose pictures of Scottish characters, sport, and landscape gave much pleasure to his contemporaries; and of Sir Walter Besant whose gift of humour in character and incident was combined, on occasion, with a singular power of fantasy, while his "Dorothy Forster," a tale of the Rising of 1715, is probably the best historical romance of that period after "Rob Roy".