One can believe that Stevenson was a boy with tastes and ambitions like Rowley. But for that matter Rowley stands for universal boy-nature.
Criticism of St. Ives becomes both easy and difficult by reason of the fact that we know so much about the book from the author’s point of view. He wrote it in trying circumstances, and never completed it; the last six chapters are from the pen of a practiced story-teller, who follows the author’s known scheme of events. Stevenson was almost too severe in his comment upon his book. He says of St. Ives:—
‘It is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in themselves, I believe, but none of them bildende, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics, and all out of drawing. Here and there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it’s not…. If it has a merit to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. ’Tis my most prosaic book.’
One must remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an ‘advance notice.’ Still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless affirmation that St. Ives is ‘a rudderless hulk.’ ‘It’s a pagoda,’ says Stevenson in a letter dated September, 1894, ‘and you can just feel—or I can feel—that it might have been a pleasant story if it had only been blessed at baptism.’
He had to rewrite portions of it in consequence of having received what Dr. Johnson would have called ‘a large accession of new ideas.’ The ideas were historical. The first five chapters describe the experiences of French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle. St. Ives was the only ‘gentleman’ among them, the only man with ancestors and a right to the ‘particle.’ He suffered less from ill treatment than from the sense of being made ridiculous. The prisoners were dressed in uniform,—‘jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton.’ St. Ives thought that ‘some malignant genius had found his masterpiece of irony in that dress.’ So much is made of this point that one reads with unusual interest the letter in which Stevenson bewails his ‘miserable luck’ with St. Ives; for he was halfway through it when a book, which he had ordered six months before, arrived, upsetting all his previous notions of how the prisoners were cared for. Now he must change the thing from top to bottom. ‘How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week?’ All his points had been made on the idea that they were ‘unshaved and clothed anyhow.’ He welcomes the new matter, however, in spite of the labor it entails. And it is easy to see how he has enriched the earlier chapters by accentuating St. Ives’s disgust and mortification over his hideous dress and stubby chin.
The book has a light-hearted note, as a romance of the road should have. The events take place in 1813; they might have occurred fifty or seventy-five years earlier. For the book lacks that convincing something which fastens a story immovably within certain chronological limits. It is the effect which Thomas Hardy has so wonderfully produced in that little tale describing Napoleon’s night-time visit to the coast of England; the effect which Stevenson himself was equally happy in making when he wrote the piece called A Lodging for a Night.
St. Ives has plenty of good romantic stuff in it, though on the whole it is romance of the conventional sort. It is too well bred, let us say too observant of the forms and customs which one has learned to expect in a novel of the road. There is an escape from the castle in the sixth chapter, a flight in the darkness towards the cottage of the lady-love in the seventh chapter, an appeal to the generosity of the lady-love’s aunt, a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, in the ninth chapter. And so on. We would not imply that all this is lacking in distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which Stevenson could give to his work. Ought one to look for it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a book which was left incomplete?
There is a pretty account of the first meeting between St. Ives and Flora. One naturally compares it with the scene in which David Balfour describes his sensations and emotions when the spell of Catriona’s beauty came upon him. Says David:—
‘There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man’s mind and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted.’
This is quite perfect, and in admirable keeping with the genuine simplicity of David’s character:—