but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare before him his motives and history. At the close of that wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author’s achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson’s imagination quickened and strengthened when it played full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games.
III. Morality.—His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work—unless the two short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions—in which romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside The Scarlet Letter or The Marble Faun for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories.
A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be broken by the fall of china—the morality without which life would be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society. For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imagination are necessary. Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for the murderer—the sympathy of intelligence. These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion of homily. In The Black Arrow, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke of Gloucester, who, in his own words, ‘loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers,’ yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster.
‘“Come,” said Dick, “a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say you forgive me, for if your life is worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish.”
‘“An I had my ship,” said Arblaster, “I would ’a’ been forth and safe on the high seas—I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I’m a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down, ‘Murrain,’ quoth he, and spake never again. ‘Murrain’ was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. ’A will never sail no more, will my Tom.”
‘Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper’s hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch.
‘“Nay,” said he, “let be. Y’ have played the devil with me, and let that content you.”
‘The words died in Richard’s throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.’
A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.
‘“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine, and feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself.”’
The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that he has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the purposes of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his works is very small indeed. In the golden glow of romance, character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described his emotions and aspirations. Something of the same disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, ‘lived for an idea.’ Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of Treasure Island, breathes out its soul in a creed:
‘“For thirty years,” he said, “I’ve sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views—Amen, so be it.”’
John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in The Ebb Tide.
Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with an intuition of one another’s hearts, although why, if woman was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the other sex. Stevenson’s curiosity was late in awaking; the heroine of The Black Arrow is dressed in boy’s clothes throughout the course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in The Master of Ballantrae, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of Kidnapped are real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the book;—but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must stand over until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous passes.