R. L. Stevenson

by Frank Swinnerton

In A Child’s Garden of Verses Stevenson was doing a thing which had never really been done before. There are nursery rhymes which crystallise children’s ideas; but this book actually shows, in what we must believe to be an extraordinarily happy way, the working of a particular child mind over a great variety of matters. Its excellence is due to the fact that Stevenson’s young days, lonely as some of them had been, had never lacked interest, had always been full of those simple and direct pleasures of incident and encounter and memory which happy children enjoy. The world had been full of a number of things; and the memory of those things had abided. It was the memory of a fanciful rather than an imaginative childhood, a childhood of superstitions and sports, of a buried tin soldier and of the pleasant land of play; but we must not forget that such poems as My Treasures, poor in some of their lines, are finely imaginative reconstructions, the naïveté of which prevents many readers from estimating their quality. So with The Unseen Playmate, which, although it is a poem for grown-ups, reveals an understanding of a most important fact in children’s games far more profound than are the pretentious and unconvincing lines to R. A. M. Stevenson in Underwoods. Even if the idea of The Unseen Playmate may be the idea of a grown-up pretending, the writing of this, as of the other verses, is almost without lapse, charmingly simple and natural. I believe it is a fact that children appreciate and even delight in A Child’s Garden of Verses, not merely at the bidding of their parents, but as a normal manifestation of taste. This in itself would be a proof that the book is already a secondary nursery classic. For our present purpose, if that does not seem rather an over-bearing way of valuing a book so slight in form, it is sufficient to say that Stevenson’s success here was due to the fact that he was legitimately using the memory of actual experience. Too many of his serious, or grown-up, poems show their models; too many of them flow undistinguished by any truly poetic quality; too many of them are experiments in metre or rhyme, such as one may write for fun, but never for free circulation. The Child’s Garden of Verses alone, then, of the four volumes, exhibits a strict harmony of design with performance. Its dedication to Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham, serves only to make the book more complete.

IV

Implicit in the strictures upon Stevenson’s poetry which have preceded this paragraph is the assumption that Milton’s requirements of poetry—that it should be simple, sensuous, passionate—is fundamentally true as applied to lyrical poetry. It would be troublesome to apply such a test to many of the minor poets; and it may be that a few of Stevenson’s poems would stand the test. Not many of them, however, because none of them shows a depth of emotion uncommon to the ordinarily sensitive person. Stevenson was sensitive to many things; without sensitiveness he could not have written A Child’s Garden of Verses or that very excellent ballad Ticonderoga. But sensitiveness is only a poor substitute for emotion; and Stevenson’s emotion ran in the few ordinary channels of the normal Scotsman. He loved home; he loved those around him; he desired to be loved, to be free of the fear of poverty, to live in comfort and in health. Those things he felt deeply, as Scotsmen, as most men, do. He loved truth; but it was a conventional truth; a truth, that is to say, improvised from ordinary usage, from hearsay, from the dogma of “that station of life”; a truth such as any man who finds himself born in a little pit of earth may harden his moral shell and his imagination and stultify his spiritual curiosity by accepting; and it was a truth out of which Stevenson was escaping towards the end of his life. But in all this love of virtues and duties and usages there was never until Stevenson’s emergence into the greater freedom of life in the South Seas the passionate love of anything for its own sake. If he loved the open air it was with a pleasant, “playing” love, a sort of self-indulgence. Over his heart he kept the watchful guard of a Protestant Scotsman. It was unmoved, a secret, not to be known. It did not inform his work, in which there is sometimes a heat of composition, or even a heat of feeling, but never the cold heat of profound and piercing emotion. That he was capable of being easily moved, that he loved virtue and hated cruelty and wrong, these things are true. That he could grow hot at a calumny, as he did in the defence of Father Damien, is equally true. But these things are the signs of a prudent man, eagerly interested in life, rather taking pleasure in the thought that he is hot to attack injustice; not of a profound thinker or of a poet. They warm us with, perhaps, affection for Stevenson; they keep alive our admiration for him as an attractive figure in our literary history. They do not thrill us, because they appeal to the interest and excitement and honesty and feeling in us, and not to those more secret, more passionate reserves which we yield only to the poet.

VI
PLAYS

I

It is a commonplace of dramatic reporting, which in spite of its frequently doubtful application has the truth of an old saw, that the novelist cannot write plays. Certainly, it would seem that the qualities which go to the making of good plays are not precisely those which make good novels; for while it is possible to conceive a novel in terms of narrative, descriptions of abounding nature, psychological analysis, and tableaux, the play has rules more strictly objective and more definitely rigid. Now if we, for the moment, pass over the question of Stevenson’s collaborator in the four printed plays with which his name is associated, and if we, for this occasion, treat them as though they were his work entirely, we shall be better able to distinguish certain remarkable characteristics of these plays, and, anticipating certain general conclusions to be made later, of Stevenson’s talent.

Stevenson, we are all aware, was never, strictly speaking, in spite of Catriona and Weir of Hermiston, a novelist. He was a writer of many kinds of stories; but they were not primarily, until we come to Weir, domestic or psychological. Many of them were what no doubt would commonly be called “dramatic,” in the sense that they contained scenes of some violence; but for the most part they were narrative interspersed with tableaux. They were “picturesque,” not because they were startlingly visual, but because Stevenson had that flair for the odd, the startling, or the vivid effect of contrast which is generally described by the word “picturesque.” It was the oddness of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that allured him before he became oppressed by its symbolism. It was, equally, oddness that always attracted him in character: he had no profound sense of character, for this reason. Passivity he never understood. His characters must forever be in action. That, it might be supposed, was in itself a first reason for turning to the theatre, since, according to modern dramatic reporters, “drama” is a word synonymous with the word “action.” Action, something doing—that, by the recipe, is the certain play. But while action may give a play breathless suspense, while it may provide the kind of play which, in a specifically theatrical sense, is called a “drama,” action is not the whole battle. To action, or at least to the psychological excitement created by a sense of action in progress and a climax pending, must be added a very powerful sense of what is effective in the theatre. A pause, a sound, verbal repetition, an abrupt change—these things are crude examples, chosen at random from among the obvious instances of what contributes to the sense of the theatre. If we think of such things as the tapping of Pew’s stick (in Admiral Guinea), and, in Deacon Brodie, the appearance of the masked Deacon at the window by which Leslie is watching for him, we shall realise that in some degree, in some very obvious and primitive form, Stevenson was possessed of this attribute. But one thing we shall infallibly discover him to lack, a thing which Mr. Henry James missed in Catriona, a thing which has vital importance in drama—the visual sense. These plays show no real power of visualising a scene. Picturesque they all are; they all have qualities which make them engrossing—as reading. But they are not focussed for the eyes, and they are not well constructed for real dramatic effect.

Deacon Brodie is in five acts and eight tableaux, and its effects are indescribably broken, so that irrelevancies are numerous, distracting side issues over-emphasised, and so that the Deacon is almost a minor character. It is hard to realise that there are only a dozen persons in the play, for their comings and goings are so frequent as to give the effect of a confused number of straggling participants in desultory action. The play itself centres round an historical figure—Deacon Brodie—who was an honest man before the world by day, and by night an expert cracksman. His name is familiar both in criminal history and in the annals of Edinburgh, where his activities became, after his death, notorious. In the play, Brodie at last is eager for reform; but one of his cronies, tempted by a Bow Street runner, and the only one of Brodie’s friends to yield to temptation, betrays him. Though Brodie escapes, his absence from home has been discovered in the excitement consequent upon his father’s death, and, when arrest is imminent, he takes his own life. Stevenson had found the details of Brodie’s life while he was preparing the sketches collected under the title Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes; and it is conceivable that in some measure the play’s technique was a little influenced by a reading of some eighteenth-century episodic plays, such, for example, as Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which is similarly broken in construction, though more permissibly so, because “The Beggar’s Opera” is no more than a skein in which ballads and satire may be found to provide our entertainment. This mention of “The Beggar’s Opera” must not be taken too seriously, however, because although that play deals with the life of highwaymen and pickpurses and thief-takers in the eighteenth century, as Deacon Brodie does, it is profoundly real, whereas Deacon Brodie is only too obviously modern fake. Macheath and Polly Peachum are infinitely more real than Brodie and his doxy. Moreover the ensemble in Deacon Brodie is on the whole poorly conceived. The minor persons are mere figures, introduced to stand here or there, or do this or that, and are labelled with names and idiosyncrasies. The major persons, though more detailed, have an equal lack of vitality. It is necessary to add the further explanation that Deacon Brodie is the first of the plays, and that it dates from 1880. It is easily the least coherent of them all. Stevenson was to improve upon Deacon Brodie in that respect, at least.

II

The two lightest plays—Beau Austin and Macaire—are experiments, the one in manner, the other in bizarre or, as it is styled by the authors, “melodramatic farce.” The manner of Beau Austin is the manner of the costume play. It is highly sophisticated, and its keynote is powder and patches. The beau is at his toilet, and one of the women he has betrayed is in the town, still sick with despair at her soiled virtue. Her true love hears from the lady’s lips the story of her betrayal, and, on being forbidden to challenge the beau, contents himself with demanding a marriage ceremony. His flatteries are effective, the beau consents, and the formal proposal is made, only to be rejected by the lady, whose hauteur is aroused. So matters stand when the lady’s brother, learning by chance of the betrayal, insults the beau before an important personage. As climax, the beau proposes publicly, and is as publicly accepted. It will be seen that the play could not claim, excepting in respect of verbal artifice, to be more than a pretty jig-saw. It could have no effect of reality: the effect desired by the authors was one purely of the stage. Verbally it is exquisitely dexterous. That is its undoing. The attempt is made to convey in words something more than the action of the piece would successfully carry: words are to create an atmosphere of the eighteenth-century fashionable life, to indicate the possibility that calm picturesque heartless exteriors shielded even then hearts that beat warmly beneath lace and brocade. The play was a pretence that nothing was something, a pretty moving picture under the perception of which, beating out in pianissimo airs from appropriate music, and the faint throb of an unseen minuet, was the delicate heart of the period. It was an æsthetic view of the eighteenth century, the century of Fielding and of Smollett, tinkered about to make a perpetual bal masque, or, shall we say, a picture by Watteau or Fragonard. In point of fact the play is too slight to bear its weight of intention: it remains verbal. As drama it is more negligible than “Monsieur Beaucaire” or “The Adventure of Lady Ursula,” because its literary pretensions are so much more elaborate. It has sometimes fine shades of close verbal fence that are Meredithian: it is better to read than it could be to see. But it is an attempt, one might say an almost basely cunning attempt, to capture the theatre as a place where costumes grace a barren play. It failed because its authors were two conscientious literary men, bent upon a superficial perfection undreamed of by practical dramatists. Just as Cowper, in translating Homer, made an epic for a tea-party, so Henley and Stevenson made about the rational and cynical eighteenth century a sophisticated play for a boudoir. They concentrated upon the superficial, and only said, but did not show, that the men and women of the eighteenth century had hearts as true and passionate as those of our day. The play lacked realism, and, more disastrously, it lacked reality.