IV
Why Stevenson should have adopted in so many instances the curious and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator could never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives, it is hard to understand. Defoe’s method was simple and laborious; but it was pure narrative, and as far as one recollects, there was none of this making up by interpolated passages. The person of the narrator was maintained all the time. So with the picaresque romances. The narrative, used by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, does indeed offer some analogy; but never a very happy example of what is at best a broken and unbelievable stratagem. Stevenson, of course, used it in a marked way in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and in Treasure Island one cheerfully accepts the convention (only protesting that the Doctor’s interference causes a break both irritating and, technically, unscrupulous). With the exception that the Doctor’s portion is somehow brought in about the middle of the book, the way the story came to be written is not allowed to worry us after the first sentence. Treasure Island is not, therefore, a great offender. Kidnapped starts in a similarly abrupt way, and this book and Catriona are kept fairly closely to the convention. But in The Master of Ballantrae and in The Wrecker there are several inter-narratives which, even if in the earlier book they provide certain keys, do seriously affect the form of the story.
The disadvantage of the narrator is manifest enough. Every step outside his probable knowledge must be elaborately explained, or he will become uncomfortably superhuman; he can never be in danger which deprives him of speech or the power to write, but has often lived to a green and unromantic old age by the time his marvellous faculty for remembering things leads him to “take up the pen.” (“They might easily take it in their heads to give us chase,” says the Chevalier de Burke, “and had we been overtaken, I had never written these memoirs.”) If he is the hero he risks being a prig or a braggart (in St. Ives he is, somehow, for all his gentility, not a gentleman); and he often succeeds in being rather a ninny, albeit a courageous ninny. It is this fact, possibly, that accounts for Mr. Stanley Weyman’s “gentlemen of France” and the deplorable “heroes” of many another costume romance inspired by Stevenson’s examples. If he is the good old retainer,—as is Mackellar in The Master—he must overcome one’s distrust of his sleek literary craft. These are side issues of the main one—which is that such narratives are improbable. Their apparent virtue, which in itself is a snare, lies in the fact that they keep the reader’s eye focussed upon the narrator, and seem thus to give homogeneity to a book. They enable the author to refuse detachment and to mingle with his characters, tapping them upon the arm so that the reader receives their full glance, or bidding them give some little personal exhibition for the naturalness of the book. Stevenson saw, perhaps, that such a method solved some of his difficulties. He loved ease of demeanour. He could use his Covenanting style at will, with the quaint, shrewd twists of language which do not fail to strike us impressively as we read; and he could throw off the task of creating a hero whom we should recognise as such in spite of all things, as we recognise Don Quixote or Cousin Pons or Prince Myshkin. Also, the use of the “I” probably made the tale better fun for himself. It was perhaps part of the make-belief. It avoided formality; it brought him nearer his canvas; it saved him the need of focussing the whole picture. That, constructively, was, as I have suggested earlier in another way, his prime weakness as a novelist. He could not see a book steadily and see it whole. Partly it may have been that by putting himself in the frame he made the picture a panorama—“the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama” is Stevenson’s own admission in the case of The Wrecker—but most influentially, I think, it was that he had really not the physical strength and the physical energy to grasp a book entire, or to keep his invention and imagination at any extreme heat for any length of time. Whatever may be the case of this, however, it seems clear that the first person singular is a difficult and a tricky method to employ, abounding in risk of accident, and much inclined to make for improbability, unless the writer is content absolutely to limit the narrator’s knowledge to things experienced, with details only filled out from hearsay, and unless he has superhuman powers of detachment. One is inclined to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto, where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of detachment powerfully appear.
V
Prince Otto, of course, is only one out of the many self-portraits. He is, as it were, Stevenson’s Hamlet, which is not quite as good as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is nearer to Stevenson than David Balfour, because David Balfour is an ideal, while Prince Otto is an apology. All Stevenson’s heroes, in fact, are tinged with the faint complacent self-depreciation which is capable of being made truly heroic, or merely weak, or, possessed of that “something that was scarcely pride or strength, that was perhaps only refinement,” very human. But not one of these heroes is complete. All, as it were, are misty about the edges. The vigorous David Balfour falls into the self-distrust, not of a young man of strength, but of a self-engrossed student; weakness is paramount in the main character in The Ebb Tide; the dandiacal St. Ives is at the mercy of circumstance, waiting upon the next thing, reliant only upon Stevenson’s goodwill, horribly unmasculine in his plans to please. Mackellar is a puritanical coward, but magnificently suggested; Loudon Dodd, and even young Archie Weir, being both very moral and, one imagines, very inexperienced in the ways of life, combine courage with weakness most pitiable. They are all feminine, brave in desperation, weak in thought. They are all related to Jack Matcham in The Black Arrow. Stevenson admired courage, and he possessed courage, as women admire and possess courage. He loved a brave man, and a tale of adventure, as women love these things. He did not take them for granted, but must hint and nibble at them all the time, thinking, perhaps, that he was making a portrait, but instead of that making what represents for us a tortured ideal. “I should have been a man child,” says Catriona. “In my own thoughts it is so I am always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall and that. Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches all through, like Mr. David Balfour.” That is why Prince Otto, long the test of the true Stevensonian, seems to us now, increasingly, a lackadaisical gimcrack, as bloodless as a conceit, losing by its spinning as a tale all the fantastic effect it might have enjoyed as one of the New Arabian Nights. It has a great deal of beauty, and a good deal of perception both of character and of situation; but the beauty droops and sickens among the meshes of delicate writing, and the perception is all upon the surface of life, and, even so, abstract and without the impulse of human things.
It is the faint humour of Stevenson that makes the book seem sickly. It is that faint humour which brings so much of his heroic work sliding sand-like to our feet. For it must be realised that if one is going to be romantical one must have either no humour at all (which perhaps is an ideal state) or a strong, transfiguring humour which is capable of exuberance and monstrosity as well as of satiric depreciation. Stevenson’s humour was of that almost imperceptible kind which grows in Scotland, and which has given rise to the legend that Scotsmen “joke wi’ deeficulty.” It was dry, it was nonsensical, it was satiric; it was the humour that depends upon tone, a delicacy of emphasis or pause. It was the humour of a sick man who had high spirits and very little morbidity. Now in Prince Otto there is morbidity; it is not a healthy book. It could not have been written by an active and vigorous man; and I do not think Stevenson could have written it after he went to Samoa. Its literary forbear, “Harry Richmond,” although a very cumbrous and mannered work, has a trenchant vigour which keeps alive our admiration after our interest has dropped. It is elaborate and pompous; but it has power. Prince Otto owes its best moments to a purely literary skit on the English traveller among foreign courts: that skit, it is true, is priceless. Apart from Sir John Crabtree, however, the book depends entirely for its charm upon its faint, almost swooning, beauty of style; and it is indeed surprising that the book should have enjoyed among Stevenson’s male worshippers so much handsome appreciation. It is so quizzical, where it is not sentimental or “conventional,” that it is half the time engaged in self-consumption, which is as though one should say that it is eaten up with vanity.
VI
By Stevenson’s own account, the first fifteen chapters of Treasure Island were written in as many days. He explains that he consciously and intentionally adopted an “easy” style. “I liked the tale myself,” he says; “it was my kind of picturesque.” Well, it was the simplest kind of picturesque, a sort of real enjoyment of the thing for its own sake; and our own enjoyment of it is of the same kind. It is extraordinarily superior to the imitations which have followed it, for this reason if for no other, that it was the product of an enjoying imagination. It is possible to read Treasure Island over and over again, because it is good fun. There is a constant flow of checkered incident, there is enough simple character to stand the treasure-seekers on their legs, and the book is a book in its own right. It does not need defence or analysis; it sustains its own note, and it is as natural and jolly an adventure-story as one could wish. Moreover, the observation throughout is exceedingly good, as well as unaffected. It is interesting to notice how vividly one catches a picture from such a brief passage as this (in Chap. XXVII): “As the water settled I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides. A fish or two whipped past his body.” Or again, on the following page, when Jim Hawkins has thrown overboard another of the mutineers: “He went in with a sounding plunge; the red cap came off, and remained floating on the surface; and as soon as the splash subsided I could see him and Israel lying side by side, both wavering with the tremulous movement of the water.” Such slight passages really indicate an unusual quality in the book. They convey a distinct impression of the scene which one may feel trembling within one’s own vision and hearing. The fact that Treasure Island has so clear a manner, unaffectedly setting out in simple terms incidents which have the bare convincingness of real romance, gives that book a singular position among the romances of Stevenson. The further fact that the incidents have some more coherence in themselves than incidents have in some of our author’s romances serves to add to the book’s effect. Something of this coherence (I except from the range of this term the doctor’s sudden irruption into authorship, and the picturesque but arbitrary introduction of the castaway) may have resulted from the quickness with which the tale was written. For details of the composition of Treasure Island, the reader may see the essay My First Book in Essays on the Art of Writing.
The Black Arrow, written later, is a tale of the Wars of the Roses, and is a much more commonplace piece of work. It is also a less original kind of story; for serials of a similar character have always been a feature of boys’ papers, as long as boys’ papers have been published. There is, indeed, a constant ebb and flow of incident, but the writing is hardly recognisable as Stevenson’s, and the dramatis personæ are without character. It might almost, apart from the fact that the hero and heroine arrange to marry, have been written by the late G. A. Henty, who perhaps, even if he had made John Matcham really John Matcham, would have substituted for violent episodes some more continuous fable.
Next to Treasure Island among the historical romances comes Kidnapped, with its brilliant pictures and its clear, confident invention. Regarded simply as a tale of adventure, it is exciting, picturesque, vivid; it has qualities of intensity (that is to say, of imagination) which make it without question distinguished work. There are pictures of the country in Chapter XVII which are full of grace and tenderness; it has a stronger, clearer humour than we find in any of the novels until we come to those in which Mr. Osbourne collaborated; the incidents are immediate in their effect. To say so much is to say little enough; it is to say what must have been said in 1886, at the time the book was published. The story, however, is incomplete without Catriona, and Catriona in particular has given rise to such a very bad novel-writing convention that it is difficult to see The Adventures of David Balfour (which, combined, the two stories relate) as anything but a malign influence upon the English romantic novel, an influence which has brought it to a pitch of sterility hard to forgive. It must be said at once, however, that Stevenson was always better than his imitators, and so these stories will be found superior to their imitations. Catriona is manifestly uninspired work, artificial through and through, a sad sentimental anecdote bringing to chagrin the reader’s admiration for Kidnapped. It is not that Catriona is unreadable; it is very readable indeed. In fact that is the trouble about the book, that it has every sort of meretricious attraction, with so little in it that will honestly bear examination. It is palpable fake; an obvious attempt to recapture the first fine carelessness of Kidnapped. For Kidnapped is a good book. It has vitality in it, and it has Alan Breck, who, for all that his vanity has been flattered by so many adorers, remains on the whole a fine picture of a vain, brave Scot. Also good is the picture of David’s uncle, which is very dryly humorous, very shrewd, and exceptionally horrible. These two pieces of characterisation, as well as some minor ones, are enough to give bones to a book that is both readable and estimable. It would be enough, I think, to justify the suggestion that Kidnapped is the best Scottish historical romance since Scott, and indeed one of the best modern historical romances written in what we may for the moment call the English language.