VIII
NOVELS AND ROMANCES
I
In beginning this chapter upon that section of Stevenson’s work which, whatever may be one’s impression of its intrinsic merit, has at least the importance of being the section most considerable in bulk, I should like, as a matter of convenience, to define several terms in the sense in which they will be used in the course of the chapter. It should be clearly understood at the outset that the proposed definitions are to be given, not with any claim for their ultimate value, but as a mere precaution against misunderstanding. In each case the term is one which often is very loosely used; and it seems the most honest thing, as well perhaps as the most wary, to say very simply what one understands by such and such words. Many writers who do not define terms have the irritation of finding those terms counter-glossed by other critics acting in all good faith, and the consequence is that they seem to be made responsible for meanings divergent from those which they hold.
By the word “imagination,” then, I mean that power of sympathy which enables a man to understand (i.e. to put himself in the place of) the invented figure or scene which he is describing either in words or in thought. I do not mean by the exercise of will, but by the spontaneous outflowing of full or partial perception. By “imagination” I mean nothing galvanic or actively creative; but an emotional translation, as it were, of the creator’s spirit into the object created. Creation, the act of bodying forth the imaginations in form either symbolic or conventional, requires “invention.” “Invention,” whether of incident or of character, is what is generally meant by writers who use the word “imagination.” Writers often say that work is “imaginative” because it has a sort of hectic improbability; but they mean that it exhibits a riotous or even a logical inventiveness, not that it shows any genuine power of imaginative sympathy. Invention, one may say, is essential to a work of imagination: it is the fault of much modern novel-writing that it is poor in invention, a fact which stultifies the writer’s imagination and gives an unfortunate air of mediocrity to work which is essentially imaginative. The creation of an atmosphere is founded upon imagination; but in the absence of invention the modern imaginative writer too frequently bathes in atmosphere to a point of tedium, and then attempts to give vitality to his work by mere violence of incident or of language. The word “imaginative” (defined by all persons so as to include their own pet limitations) is often used by unimaginative writers in descriptions of lonely children, a fact which has led those who have been lonely in childhood to ascribe to themselves an attribute so much admired; but Stevenson, I think, has a rather good comment upon this sort of broody dullness when he describes “one October day when the rusty leaves were falling and scuttling on the boulevard, and the minds of impressionable men inclined in about an equal degree towards sadness and conviviality.” That lowness of spirits which makes a man respond to external influences is well known; but to describe susceptibility or impressionability as imagination is misleading. A cat is very impressionable; but a cat’s apparent intuitions in the matter of food or even of goodwill are not understanding as the term has been defined. Imagination, therefore, may be said to be over-claimed, for the word is loosely used in most cases, even by practised writers, where “invention” or “fancy” would more properly fit. In particular it is the habit of all minor critics whatsoever to use the word “imagination” when they ought rather to use the term “poetic invention.” It is that confusion which renders valueless so much criticism of modern fiction, in which the authors, being by tradition under no compulsion to be poetical, are frequently condemned as unimaginative because they follow the tradition of their craft.
A second distinction which it is desirable to make in view of what follows is the one between Romance and Realism. The word “romance” is used in a sort of ecstasy by too many conventional people; the word “realism” is by such critics applied to one particular technical method. It has seemed better for the immediate purpose to restrict the word “romance” to a purely technical meaning, since Romance, to have any value whatever, must form a part of our conception of reality. It is the divorce of Romance from Reality which has led to its decay; it is not that Romance has been cruelly done to death by Realism. Romance since Stevenson has become sentimental and unbelievable. That is why Romance has no friends, but only advocates. The word “romance,” then, is in this chapter used to describe a fiction the chief interest in which is supported by varied incidents of an uncommon or obsolete nature. The word “novel” is applied to a fiction in which the chief interest is less that of incident and more the interest awakened by character and by a gradual relation of happenings probable in themselves and growing naturally out of the interplay of character. The word “realism” is used in relation to the critical interpretation of actual things. It must not be regarded as describing here an accumulation of detail or a preference for unpleasant subjects. For that use of the word one may refer to our leading critical journals passim. The accumulation of detail belongs to a technical method, and should be treated on its merits as part of a technical method. Realism, as the word is here used, is applied only to work in which the author’s invention and imagination have been strictly disciplined by experience and judgment, and in which his direct aim has been precision rather than the attainment of broad effects. It is used consciously as a word of neither praise nor blame; though it is possible that I may exaggerate the merits of clear perception above some other qualities which I appreciate less.
II
Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from Treasure Island, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to Weir of Hermiston, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power. Treasure Island is an excellent adventure-story; Weir of Hermiston seemed to have the makings of a considerable novel, incomparably superior to any other novel or romance ever written by Stevenson. Between the two books lie a host of experiments, from Prince Otto to the rather perfunctory St. Ives, through Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, to The Wrecker, Catriona, and The Ebb Tide. One finds in The Master of Ballantrae the highest point of the romantic novels, not because as a whole it is a great book, but because it has very distinguished scenes; and thereafter follows a perceptible decline in raciness. Stevenson still had the knack, and could still make the supporters of his convention look as clumsy as ghouls, but his zest was impaired. He did now with pains what before had been the easiest part of his work. “Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities,” said Stevenson in The Day After To-morrow. From the inexperience of real life which in 1882 led him, by means of a map and some literary inspirations, to make up a tale such as he thought he would himself have liked as a boy, he turned in later years to work more profound. His romance six years later than Treasure Island had, besides its adventures and its pawky narration, a moral theme; ten years later it had no theme at all, but a faint dragging sweetness due to the reintroduction of two old friends and the picture of a conventional heroine; at the end of his life he began three historical romances, none of which was ever finished, and only one of which ever proceeded beyond its first chapters. It is true that the pretty, heavily figured style was still at command; there was no cessation of skill. There never was any cessation of skill. If skill were needed Stevenson had it ever ready. “I have been found short of bread, gold or grace,” says St. Ives; “I was never yet found wanting an answer.” That is a point to note in Stevenson’s equipment, that he was always very apt with the pen. Having turned writer in his youth, he remained a writer to the end. He could not dictate a letter but what the phrases ran in accustomed grooves, half-way to the tropes of his Covenanting manner. So it was that themes too slight, as in Prince Otto, and themes very complicated (as in The Wrecker), came readily to be embarked upon. He was not sufficiently critical of a theme, so long as it seemed superficially to offer some scope for his skill; which accounts for his abandoned fragments—e.g. Heathercat, The Great North Road, Sophia Scarlet, The Young Chevalier—and for the inequalities in even his best romances. Whatever theme he chose he could write upon it with such damnable skill that nothing truly came amiss or really stretched to the full his genuine talent. The theme, such as it was, lay to hand; there wanted nothing but his skill and the labour of composition. That, curiously enough, shadows out the occupation of the literary hack (a sad person who writes for money and only more money, and whose days are circumscribed by the need for continuous work in the field of romance); but although Stevenson claimed to write for money, “a noble deity” (see a humorous but truthful passage in the letter of January, 1886, to Mr. Gosse), he claimed also to write for himself, and in this sense he was, to our relief, and in spite of any misdirected labours, an artist. There is, of course, much cant written and spoken about writing for money, both for and against; but the man who has no preference between the themes upon which he will write for money must be a very professional writer, and the hack is only a base virtuoso. That is why it is worth putting upon record that Stevenson, after saying he wrote, not for the public, but for money, added: “and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble (i.e. than money), but more intelligent and nearer home.” He wrote variously from diversity of taste: a more interesting and tantalising question is that of his object.
III
Mr. Henry James, in criticising a selection of our modern novelists, describes himself as reading their work with, one imagines, continuous interest, and then, in face of all the phenomena which have industriously been gathered for his inspection, asking for something further. Mr. Henry James, apparently, wants to know “why they do it.” It would not be in place here to say that the modern novelists are all to some extent followers of Mr. James; but it is very interesting to put that same question (amounting to a sort of cui bono?) to the romantic novelists. One would like to know what Stevenson aimed at in his romances. One does not receive from any one of the romances the thrill given by a perfect work of art. Their interest is broken and episodic; they fall apart in strange places, and show gaps, and (as in the case of works by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Conrad) one or two of them, including The Master of Ballantrae, are patched together by means of contributory “narratives” and “stories” which can never, whatever the skill of their interposition, preserve any appearance of vital form, and which, at the best, can be no more than exhibitions of virtuosity. They retain their continuity of interest only by means of the narrator’s continuance; and the use of “narrations” itself is a device throwing into strong relief the incongruities of the tale and its invented scribe. They offend our sense of form by all sorts of changes of scene, lapses of time, discursiveness, and those other faults which are nowadays so much remarked. And, above all, once the last page is turned, we remember one or two characters and one or two incidents, and we wonder about the corollary, or whatever it is that Mr. James wonders about. We have been entertained, excited, amused, sometimes enthralled. In reading the books again, as we are soon, because of our forgetfulness, able to do, we recover something of the first pleasure. But of Stevenson’s aim we can discover no more than we can discover of the aim of the hack-writer. We feel that his work is better, that it has greater skill, that it is graceful, apt, distinguished even. We feel that, of its kind, it is far superior to anything since written. Was there any aim beyond that of giving pleasure? Need we look for another? It is true that the problem-novel is discredited, and it is true that our most commercially successful novelists are those who can “tell a story.” It is also true that our so-called artistic stories are like the needy knife-grinder. I propose to return later to this point, so we will take another one first. “Vital,” says Stevenson, “vital—that’s what I am, at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind’s eye for ever.”
We may well grant the picturesqueness; and we may grant a nervous buoyancy of fluctuating high spirits. Through all the novels there are passages of extreme beauty, to which we may grant the description “lyrical”; and many of the famous scenes have value which it is open to anybody to call epical if they wish to do so. It is the word “vital” that we find difficult to accept, and the “buoyancy of life.” For if there is one thing to be inferred from the contrivances and the slacknesses and the other shortcomings of Stevenson’s romances to which we shall gradually be able to make reference, it is that they lack vitality. They have a fine brag of words, and they have fine scenes and incidents; but where is there any one of them in which the author can sustain the pitch of imagining that will carry us on the wings of a vital romance? I am referring at this moment to this one point only. I am saying nothing about the books as pieces of literary artifice. There is not one of Stevenson’s own original romances that is not made in two or three or even a hundred flights. There is not one that is not pieced together by innumerable inventions, so that it is a sort of patchwork. That is a persistent defect. It is in Treasure Island, it is in The Master, it is in The Wrecker and it is in Weir, patent to the most casual glance. And the cause of that is low vitality—his own and the book’s. Not one of them, not even Treasure Island, not even The Master of Ballantrae, which falls in two, has any powerful inevitability. These romances are, in fact, the romances of a sick man of tremendous nervous force, but of neither physical nor intellectual nor even imaginative energy. One may see it in the flickering of Alan Breck. Alan Breck is the most famous of all Stevenson’s characters, with the possible exception of Silver: does he remain vivid all the time? He does not. He loses vitality several times in the course of Kidnapped; he hardly attains it in Catriona. There is no fault there; there is a weakness. Stevenson’s romances were based upon a survival of boyish interests; they are full of fantastic whips and those clever manipulations with which writers sometimes conceal weaknesses; they have a tremendous vain Scots savour of language and retort; they have exciting, impressive, and splendidly vivid scenes. But the quality they have not is the fine careless rich quality of being vital. If we think, in reading them, that they are vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as helpless as boys reading Treasure Island. But Stevenson is always telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. There are ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to his death up the dreadful stair; and there is the kidnapping of David, and then the arrival on board of the survivor from a run-down boat, who proves to be Alan; the fight; and the march after Alan; the Appin murder; and the flight of David and Alan—all magnificently described, well invented, well imagined, but all as episodes or incidents, not as a story. Something else, some other things, all sorts of other things, might just as well have happened as those things which make the story as we know it. There is no continuous vitality even in Kidnapped; and yet, on that score, it is the best of the romances. It has a greater “buoyancy” (though not precisely, perhaps, the “buoyancy of life”) than any of the other historical romances. It does not compare with The Master of Ballantrae for dignity or even for the distinction of isolated scenes; but for vitality it is superior.