This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in Marion Delorme, and of Captain Flint in Treasure Island.
‘The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich man’s mansion, and there dies—assuming state, and striking awe into the breasts of those who had looked down upon him.’
These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to a romance—of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind’s eye. Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind’s eye, others are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and sympathy in things that is man’s oldest inheritance—to the superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality.
Stevenson’s work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,—all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter’s art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primæval fear. The cry of the parrot—‘Pieces of eight’—the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in Kidnapped, and of the disguise of a blind leper in The Black Arrow, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of Admiral Guinea, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian’s scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being silently watched, is indeed ‘the horrors come alive.’
The animating principle or idea of Stevenson’s longer stories is never to be found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception. The main situation in The Wrecker is a splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best passages in the book—the scenes in Paris, for instance—have no business there at all. The story in Kidnapped and Catriona wanders on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader feels and sympathises with the author’s obvious difficulty in leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James Stewart. The Master of Ballantrae is stamped with a magnificent unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a series of scattered episodes.
That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have made him a great and good man but for ‘the malady of not wanting,’ is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this character to the sublime of power.
But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination or contrast. The events that happen within the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in Treasure Island and The Ebb Tide, the captivity on the Bass Rock in Catriona, the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the island of The Merry Men—these imaginations are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in some sort the genius of the place it inhabits.
In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured freely enough into the realm of the supernatural.
When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of Thrawn Janet, and Black Andy’s story of Tod Lapraik in Catriona, are grotesque imaginations of the school of Tam o’ Shanter rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken. Even The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the story of The Bottle Imp are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted deeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of Will o’ the Mill and the grim history of Markheim. Each of these stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will’s inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory’s death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the stranger’s carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it like plumes. And Will o’ the Mill makes the acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:
‘Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair
(Darkness and the breath of space
Like loud waters everywhere),
Meeting mine own image there
Face to face,
Send it from that place to her!’