If he ever fell into one of these—which may perhaps be doubted—it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. ‘I remember Uzzah and am afraid,’ said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church; ‘it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.’ And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson’s letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father Damien’s defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson’s letter. The curse spoken in Eden, ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,’ surely covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.
II. Romance.—The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered on Stevenson’s cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with Stevenson’s romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the embodiment of ‘character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye.’ His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. ‘The artistic result of a romance,’ says Stevenson, ‘what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.’ He goes on to point out that there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements. With Scott vague influences that qualify a man’s personality begin to make a large claim; ‘the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills pile themselves upon each other’s shoulders.’ And the achievements of the great masters since Scott—Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those in Stevenson’s direct line of ancestry—have added new realms to the domain of romance.
What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great romance—The Bride of Lammermoor, Monte Cristo, Les Misérables, The Scarlet Letter, The Master of Ballantrae? These questions can only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy. But an approach to an answer may be made by illustration.
In his American Notebooks Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down subjects for stories as they struck him. His successive entries are like the souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of them never received; they bring us very near to the workings of the mind of a great master. Here are some of them:
‘A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much may be made of this idea.’
‘The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.’
‘A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.’
‘Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.’
‘A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.’
Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.
‘A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the operation of a certain vice on him.’
M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel called Le Disciple. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher’s experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of ‘problem morality.’
‘A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.’