Pew is a fearsome personage, and a notable example of the triumph of mind over the most serious of all physical disabilities. Theoretically, it seems strange that able-bodied individuals should be afraid of a man who is stone blind. But the appearance of Pew is enough to make anybody take to his heels. He is the very essence of authority and leadership. The tap-tapping of his stick in the moonlight makes one's blood run cold. We are apt to think of blind people as gentle, sweet, pure, and holy; made submissive and tender by misfortune, dependent on the kindness of others. Old Pew has lost his eyes, but not his nerve. To see so black-hearted and unscrupulous a villain, his sight taken away as it were by the hand of God, and yet intent only on desperate wickedness, upsets the moral order; he becomes an uncanny monstrosity; he takes on the hue of a supernatural fiend. John Silver has lost a leg, but he circumvents others by the speed of his mind; amazingly quick in perception, a most astute politician, arrested from no treachery or murder by any moral principle or touch of pity, he has the dark splendour of unflinching depravity. He is no Laodicean. He never lets I dare not wait upon I would. His course seems fickle and changeable, but he is really steering steadily by the compass of self-interest. He can be witty, affectionate, sympathetic, friendly, submissive, flattering, and also a devilish beast. He is the very chameleon of crime. Stevenson simply had not the heart to kill so consummate an artist in villainy. It was no mean achievement to create two heroes so sinister as Pew and Silver, while depriving one of his sight and the other of a leg. One wearies of the common run of romances, where the chief character is a man of colossal size and beautifully proportioned, so that his victories over various rascals are really only athletic records. In Treasure Island, the emphasis is laid in the right place, whence leadership comes; everybody is afraid of Long John, and nobody minds Ben Gunn, dead or alive.[14]
There are scenes in this story, presented with such dramatic power, and with such astonishing felicity of diction, that, once read, they can never pass from the reader's mind. The expression in Silver's face, as he talks with Tom in the marsh, first ingratiatingly friendly, then suspicious, then as implacable as malignant fate. The hurling of the crutch; the two terrific stabs of the knife. "I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows." The boy's struggle on the schooner with Israel Hands; the awful moment in the little boat, while Flint's gunner is training the "long nine" on her, and the passengers can do nothing but await the result of the enemy's skill; the death of the faithful old servant, Redruth, who said he thought somebody might read a prayer.
Much has been written in both prose and verse of the fascination of Stevenson's personality. He was so different in different moods that no two of his friends have ever agreed as to what manner of man he really was. As he chose to express his genius mainly in objective romances, future generations will find in the majority of his works no hint as to the character of the author. From this point of view, compare for a moment The Master of Ballantræ with Joseph Vance! But fortunately, Stevenson elected to write personal essays; and still more fortunately, hundreds of his most intimate letters are preserved in type. Some think that these Letters form his greatest literary work, and that they will outlast his novels, plays, poems, and essays. For they will have a profound interest long after the last person who saw Stevenson on earth has passed away. They are the revelation of a man even more interesting than any of the wonderful characters he created; they show that men like Philip Sidney were as possible in the nineteenth century as in the brilliant age of Elizabeth. The life of Stevenson has added immensely to our happiness and enjoyment of the world, and no literary figure in recent times had more radiance and wholesome charm. His optimism was based on a chronic experience of physical pain and weakness; to him it was a good world, and he made it distinctly better by his presence. He was a combination of the Bohemian and the Covenanter; he had all the graces of one, and the bed-rock moral earnestness of the other. "The world must return some day to the word 'duty,'" said he, "and be done with the word 'reward.'" He was the incarnation of the happy union of virtue and vivacity.
X
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
It is high time that somebody spoke out his mind about Mrs. Humphry Ward. Her prodigious vogue is one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of our day. A roar of approval greets the publication of every new novel from her active pen, and it is almost pathetic to contemplate the reverent awe of her army of worshippers when they behold the solemn announcement that she is "collecting material" for another masterpiece. Even professional reviewers lose all sense of proportion when they discuss her books, and their so-called criticisms sound like publishers' advertisements. Sceptics are warned to remain silent, lest they become unpleasantly conspicuous. When Lady Rose's Daughter appeared, the critic of a great metropolitan daily remarked that whoever did not immediately recognise the work as a masterpiece thereby proclaimed himself as a person incapable of judgement, taste, and appreciation. This is a fair example of the attitude taken by thousands of her readers, and it is this attitude, rather than the value of her work, that we must, first of all, consider.
In the year 1905 an entirely respectable journal said of Mrs. Ward, "There is no more interesting and important figure in the literary world to-day." In comparing this superlative with the actual state of affairs, we find that we were asked to believe that Mrs. Ward was a literary personage not second in importance to Tolstoi, Ibsen, Björnson, Heyse, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Rostand, Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Meredith, Kipling, and Mark Twain. At about the same time a work appeared intended as a text-book for the young, which declared Mrs. Ward to be "the greatest living writer of fiction in English literature," and misspelled her name—an excellent illustration of carelessness in adjectives with inaccuracy in facts. Over and over again we have heard the statement that the "mantle" of George Eliot has fallen on Mrs. Ward. Is it really true that her stories are equal in value to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch?
The object of this essay is not primarily to attack a dignified and successful author; it is rather to enquire, in a proper spirit of humility, and with a full realisation of the danger incurred, whether or not the actual output justifies so enormous a reputation. For in some respects I believe the vogue of Mrs. Ward to be more unfortunate than the vogue of the late lamented Duchess, of Laura Jean Libbey, of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, of Marie Corelli, and of Hall Caine. When we are asked to note that 300,000 copies of the latest novel by any of these have been sold before the book is published, there is no cause for alarm. We know perfectly well what that means. It is what is called a "business proposition"; it has nothing to do with literature. It simply proves that it is possible to make as splendid a fortune out of the trade of book-making, and by equally respectable methods, as is made in other legitimate avenues of business. But the case is quite different with Mrs. Ward. Whatever she is, she is not vulgar, sensational, or cheap; she has never made the least compromise with her moral ideals, nor has she ever attempted to play to the gallery. Her constituency is made up largely of serious-minded, highly respectable people, who live in good homes, who are fairly well read, and who ought to know the difference between ordinary and extraordinary literature. Her books have had a bad effect in blurring this distinction in the popular mind; for while she has never written a positively bad book,—with the possible exception of Bessie Costrell,—I feel confident that she has never written supremely well; that, compared with the great masters of fiction, she becomes immediately insignificant. If there ever was a successful writer whose work shows industry and talent rather than genius, that writer is Mrs. Ward. If there ever was a successful writer whose work is ordinary rather than extraordinary, it is Mrs. Ward.