R. L. Stevenson

by Frank Swinnerton

IV

What do we demand of a short story before we are willing to consider that it deserves the name of art? And is art, as I am sorry to know that many admirers of Stevenson would at this juncture ask, worth bothering about? Art is surely the quality which distinguishes some of these stories from others; and art, to me, is the disinterested rendering, to perfection, of a theme intensely felt through, and in accordance with, the artist’s philosophic conception of life. I do not suggest that art must involve the conscious expression of a consistent philosophy. I think it should not do that. But unless a writer has a considerable æsthetic and emotional experience which does directly inform his work with a wisdom greater than our utilitarian scheme of conventional morality, no practical experience of life and no sense of æsthetic form can suffice to make that writer an artist. Mr. Clive Bell, in his very brilliant and amusing book “Art,” says that “art is significant form,” which is a very much better and less pretentious definition than the one I have given. It is also easier to apply; but I purposely added a reference to the artist’s philosophic conception, because it seems to me that there can be no art which is not primarily a thing of unblemished artistic sincerity. A thing pretended (artistically, not morally pretended) can, I think, no more be art, in spite of its significant form, than it can be artistically sincere. It may be retorted that there is nothing in this connection between the artist and the charlatan; but there is. There is the craftsman, one who, denied or forgoing the artist’s intellectual basis, makes goods like unto works of art, which are charged with significance of form, but not with that consistency with philosophic belief which makes significant the artistic vision. For the artist’s vision is not merely executive: it is conceptual. And while significant form means perfect execution of the artist’s concept, there must be a relative connection between the concept and the artist’s fundamental, and possibly inscrutable or inexpressible, “idea.” Otherwise the brilliant men would have it all their own way, which is obviously not the law of such things. To take an example. I regard The Pavilion on the Links as doubtful art. In form it is better than certain stories which seem to me superior in content, better than, say, The Beach of Falesá. But it seems to me empty, without heart, so that its warmth is like the warmth of anger, and is chilled when its excitement is done. Ought there not to remain in one’s mind, when the story is finished, some other emotion than stale excitement? I think there ought. I think that an æsthetic emotion remains in the case of all art that is really art; that one continues to feel, not the immediate clash of will or incident, but the author’s true emotion, of which the mere incidents of the story are only the bridge which the author has chosen to bear his emotion by symbol, or example, into our hearts. If I were to say of The Pavilion on the Links: “It is not true,” I should by ninety-nine of every hundred people be called unimaginative, and told that “nobody ever said it was.” But of course I should mean, not that the incidents were rare, but that Stevenson had never artistically believed them, that they hung suspended in the air only by virtue of their power to interest or to excite, by means of the “heat of composition.” I should mean that Stevenson had not first imagined the story, but that he had planned it in cold blood, saying, “We’ll have an estate, and a pavilion, and two men who have quarrelled ...” and so on, when he might equally well have been planning to describe a dairy, or a balloon, or a cataclysm at St. Malo. If I look for emotion in the story I find none. If I look for an æsthetic idea I find none. Perhaps that is where Mr. Bell revives. The story stands there as a piece of virtuosity; and if that is deliberate virtuosity, if there is no artistic conviction behind it, then the story is a fake. I think it is a fake. I am quite ready to think of it as an extraordinary clever piece of business. But if it is fake, it is not art. Does significant form imply the presence of a conviction or merely of craft?

On the other hand, I find what I should like to call conceptual integrity in Thrawn Janet and in The Beach of Falesá, and these stories seem to me to be art. For the same reason, The Treasure of Franchard, Providence and the Guitar, and The Bottle Imp seem to me to be art. In all these stories I am conscious of æsthetic conviction. I am aware of that delightful emotion also in The Young Man with the Cream Tarts, and in other parts of The Suicide Club, but not in all. I see art baulked by literature in Will o’ the Mill, in Markheim, and Olalla; and, greatly muddied by clotted moralising, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which as a whole is suspiciously glib, as though it had been falsified in the transformation from dream to morality. I do not find art in the other short stories by Stevenson. They seem all to have been produced, some from one impulse, some from another, some with painstaking shrewdness, some from vanity, some even from a want of something better to do. The artist receives an inspiration, which shapes his work with the fine glow of vitality (much as a sick person is transformed by mountain air, until his features shape and colour into a new fleshly verve). The craftsman waits upon invention, and sedulously cultivates its friendliness, with a thrifty economy which brings him in the course of his life much respect from his fellows. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was dreamed by an artist; and was written by a craftsman. If Sir J. M. Barrie had, as Stevenson once wrote, “a journalist at his elbow,” shall we not admit that, in the same position, Stevenson had an equally dangerous devil, who goes by the name of a craftsman?

V

If what has been said above has any applicability to this matter, we have reduced to five the number of Stevenson’s short stories to which we can give the name of art. In mentioning that number, I have ventured to eliminate The Suicide Club, which contains several episodes, excluding The Young Man with the Cream Tarts whose particular character does not seem to me to warrant the use of the term “art.” That leaves us with Thrawn Janet, The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp, Providence and the Guitar, and The Treasure of Franchard. One of these is a “bogle” story, one is a realistic story of adventure in the South Seas, one is a fairy tale, and the others are light comedies, touched with fancy which transfigures without falsifying the underlying artistic sincerity of their conception. We have eliminated, for what may in some cases appear to be insufficient reasons, some twenty odd stories (counting the various episodes of The Rajah’s Diamond and The Dynamiter as stories). Of the whole number of stories, two (or, with the little tale in Catriona, three) are concerned with “bogles,” namely Thrawn Janet and The Body-Snatcher. Two others are also concerned with the supernatural: they are The Bottle Imp and The Isle of Voices. Three are psychological—Will o’ the Mill, Markheim, and Olalla. Four are light comedies—The Story of a Lie, John Nicholson, The Treasure of Franchard, Providence and the Guitar. Two are picturesque or romantic tales of incident—The Pavilion on the Links and The Merry Men. One is a realistic tale of incident—The Beach of Falesá. The rest belong to a class of fantastic mystery or criminal tale which is not, apart from the attractiveness of its mayonnaise, intrinsically of great value. It is from the five tales named at the beginning of this section that we shall perhaps draw our best material for the appraisement of Stevenson’s chief success as a short-story writer.

Thrawn Janet, then, is an extraordinarily successful tale of the devil’s entry into the body of an old woman, imagined with great power, and told with enormous spirit. The Beach of Falesá is the narrative, by a trader, of his arrival at a South Sea island, his marriage to a native girl, and his overthrow of a treacherous rival. The character of the man who tells the story—Wiltshire—is well-sustained, the character of Uma, the native wife, is amazingly suggested, considering how little we see her and considering that we receive her, as it were, through the trader’s report alone. For the rest, the story has vividness of local colouring, and a good deal of feeling. The Bottle Imp, the fairy tale, is told without fault in a manner of great simplicity. It relates to the successive purchases and sales, the sales always, by the conditions of purchase, being made at a figure lower than that of the purchase, of a magic bottle as potent as Aladdin’s lamp; and to the certainty of Hell which is involved in the continued possession of the bottle until the lessee’s death. The story was written for the Samoan natives, and, as far as I am able to judge, it bears in a remarkable degree the impress of native ways of thought. It has, that is to say, the naïveté and gravity of the folk-tale. Providence and the Guitar is a gay story of the misadventures of some travelling musicians who receive poor welcome from those whom they seek to entertain, but who reconcile at length the claims of art and duty as they find them opposed in the lives of certain disunited hosts. The Treasure of Franchard is the simple tale of an eccentric philosopher, his more stolid wife, and of a little boy whose wisdom leads him to check, by means which are proved legitimate only by their adequacy, the philosopher’s diversion from the path of happiness. The theft by the waif of certain treasure which the philosopher has discovered, to the risk of his immortal soul and the danger of his present happiness; and the appropriate restoration of that treasure when it will be of vital service—upon so slight an invention does the story progress.

The point to be observed in all these stories is that they possess unquestionable unity. Only one of them, The Beach of Falesá, is in any true sense a narrative. The others are examples of situation imposed upon character. In each there is an absolute relation between the conception or inspiration and Stevenson’s treatment. Each will bear the pressure which may legitimately be exerted by the seeking imagination. In Providence and the Guitar alone is there the least air of accident; and for this reason Providence and the Guitar, which has this slight air of possible manipulation, is less good than the others. The Beach of Falesá, although a narrative, and although its perfection of form is thus affected (since, with our consciousness of narrative, is interrupted the singleness of our æsthetic emotion) has a strict consistency of action. Whether this consistency is native, or whether it is aided by the imagined personality of the narrator, which may thus impose an artificial unity upon the tale, I am unable to determine. The other three stories, The Bottle Imp, Thrawn Janet, and The Treasure of Franchard, granting to each story its own convention, seem to me to be perfect examples of their craft.

VI

To have written three such stories would alone be a sufficient performance to give Stevenson’s name continued life among our most distinguished writers. That, in addition to these three stories, he should have written two others of such considerable value as The Beach of Falesá and Providence and the Guitar, and so many more of varying degrees of excellence, from The Pavilion on the Links and The Suicide Club to The Merry Men and The Isle of Voices, is, I think, enough to warrant a very confident claim that Stevenson not only was at his best in the short story, but that he was among the best English writers of short stories. His particular aptitude in this branch of his many-sided talent was due, as I have said, to the fact that he was here able to see and to perform with a single effort which did not unduly strain his physical endurance. Whereas, in continuous effort, he lost the strength of his first impulse in the exhausting labour which is involved in any lengthy exercise of the imagination, in the short story he was able to give effect immediately to his impulse to set out or to create complete his imagined or invented theme. What fluctuation there is to be observed of talent or performance is due entirely to the nature of his inspiration. If the idea came unsought, if some clear and inevitable idea for a short story suggested itself to him, the result, providing it was suited to his genius, and not merely to his literary ability, was a short story of distinguished or even of first-class quality. If, in the pursuance of his business as a literary craftsman, he “hit-on” a practicable plan for a short story, the result was almost certain to be distinguished in craftsmanship, acceptable to the wide and diversified tastes of the educated public, and, in fact, to be distinguishable from his genuine works of art only by the application of some test which should call in question the nature of his preliminary inspiration.

Stevenson was so distinguished a craftsman that he could often deceive his critics, but for that deception I do not think he can be held morally responsible. His other habit, of being able to deceive himself about the nature of his inspiration—exemplified, I believe, in The Suicide Club, for reasons which I have already given—is more serious. It is a habit illustrated with more force in the longer romances, and takes the form of beginning a story with a genuine romantic notion (or, if the reader prefers, inspiration), of finding that inspiration fail, and of proceeding nevertheless with the work so begun, relying upon his talent, his invention, or his literary skill to carry through the remaining performance at a level near enough to that established by his first inspiration to convince (at its worst, to delude) the reader. This habit, I am sure, was not indulged in bad faith; it was sometimes, perhaps nearly always, unconscious, or only partly conscious. It very likely is the habit of all modern writers whose work is regulated by the laws of supply and demand. Equally, it was possibly the habit of all past writers of fiction, because they too were affected in the same way. But in Stevenson’s case the supply of a commodity took a peculiar form of falseness which proved much to the taste of his readers. It took the form of a sort of deliberate romanticism with which I have dealt at length in the next chapter, and to which I have given the more exactly descriptive term of picturesqueness. I believe this sort of romanticism gave rise to such a story as The Pavilion on the Links; and if I am right in regarding such picturesqueness as a bastard form of art, as, in fact, a particularly cunning form of craft, then its persistence in Stevenson makes all the more wonderful, and all the more notable, his magnificent performance in the stories singled out for praise in the present chapter. It also enforces the desirability of some very close discrimination between the work of Stevenson which is the genuine product of his indubitable genius and the work which was produced by his talent, his invention, and his literary skill.