Robert Louis Stevenson: a record, an estimate, and a memorial Part 9

Mr Baildon says:

"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality. Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is. He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness. But Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae. In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet breadth of Scott."

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he criticises Stevenson for the faux pas artistically of resorting to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of The Master of Ballantrae, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few cases-certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in Catriona and in not a few in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The fault of that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am." That too mars the Merry Men, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and Prince Otto would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L. Stevenson. If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, Prince Otto remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the piracy, and treasure-hunting of The Master of Ballantrae.

"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a firmer grip on his reader." And that is exactly what I, wis.h.i.+ng to do all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see. His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't-never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped style of thing and do something new." But there are things in life and human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are. No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away. That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.

CHAPTER XXI-UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES

The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal courage, audacity, and doggedness, and, in the second place, to his theory of life, his philosophy, his moral view. He produces an artificial atmosphere. Everything then has to be worked up to this-kept really in accordance with it, and he shows great art in the doing of this. Hence, though, a quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere-at once really a lack of spontaneity and of freedom. He is freest when he pretends to nothing but adventure-when he aims professedly at nothing save to let his characters develop themselves by action. In this respect the most successful of his stories is yet Treasure Island, and the least successful perhaps Catriona, when just as the ambitious aim compels him to pause in incident, the first-person form creates a cold stiffness and artificiality alien to the full impression he would produce upon the reader. The two stories he left unfinished promised far greater things in this respect than he ever accomplished. For it is an indisputable fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary types of men and women have little or no attraction for Stevenson, nor their commonplace pa.s.sions either. Yet precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of this very interest. Nothing else will supply the place. The ordinary pa.s.sion of love to the end he s.h.i.+es, and must invent no end of expedients to supply the want. The devotion of the ordinary type, as Thomas Hardy has over and over exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson wants, to impart to his novels the full sense of reality. The secret of morals, says Sh.e.l.ley, is a going out of self. Stevenson was only on the way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive. His characters, in a way, are all already like himself, romantic, but the highest is when the ordinary and commonplace is so apprehended that it becomes romantic, and may even, through the artist's deeper perception and unconscious grasp and vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing. The very atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien to this; and, so far as he went, his most successful revelations were but records of his own limitations. It is something that he was to the end so much the youth, with fine impulses, if sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and that, too, in such a way as to render his work cold and artificial, else he might have turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or Fielding. Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause mainly complete failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,-a farce, felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human being too icily perfect whom he had met.

On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final, that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:

"From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard, affection, and esteem of his wife. He goes eavesdropping among the peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coa.r.s.ely impugned. After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails... . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject. The music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this genteel comedy Princess. A touch of Offenbach would seem more appropriate. Then even in comedy the hero must not be the b.u.t.t." And it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest-it is to make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style and mere external technical art.

CHAPTER XXII-PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM

Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson, who, like a youth, was all for Heiterkeit, cheerfulness, taking and giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a story like The Master of Ballantrae-all in a grave, grey, sombre tone, not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is conceived to aim at-the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence." A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth. This is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone which can exult in its power of acc.u.mulating shadows and dwelling on the dark side-it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with suns.h.i.+ne-hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief-rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure pa.s.sion-the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of their tendency to pa.s.s into this other and apparently opposite. But here, too, there is nothing single or separate. The device of piracy, etc., at close of Ballantrae, is one of the poorest expedients for relief in all fiction.

Will in Will o' the Mill presents another. When at the last moment he decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then rather incontinent philosophy-which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act on-spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr Gwynn thus writing:

"The love scenes in Weir of Hermiston are almost unsurpa.s.sable; but the central interest of the story lies elsewhere-in the relations between father and son. Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life. Before this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled family group, the result was what we see in The Master of Ballantrae."

In a word, between this work and Weir of Hermiston we have the pa.s.sage from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and workable. He was less the egotist now and more the realist. He was not so p.r.o.ne to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated; concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme was a wee out of ordinary nature. Enough is left to prove that Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and intensity unsurpa.s.sed in our prose literature, and to create characters not unworthy of his greatest predecessors. The blind stroke of fate had nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward-the triumph of successful execution.

CHAPTER XXIII-EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK

From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the autobiographic vein-the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the quaint, genial, yet really child-like egotistic and even dreamy element that lies like an amalgam, behind all Stevenson's work. Some have even said, that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not by his stories. That is extreme, and is not critically based or justified, because, however true it may be up to a certain point, it is not true of Stevenson's quite latest fictions where we see a decided breaking through of the old limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader sphere of interest and character altogether. But these ideas set down truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a certain date, are wrong and falsely directed in view of Stevenson's latest work and what it promised. For instance, what a discerning and able writer in the Edinburgh Review of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly inapplicable to the whole of the work of the last years, for in it there was grasp, wide and deep, of new possibilities-promise of clear insight, discrimination, and contrast of character, as well as firm hold of new and great human interest under which the egotistic or autobiographic vein was submerged or weakened. The Edinburgh Reviewer wrote:

"There was irresistible fascination in what it would be unfair to characterise as egotism, for it came natural to him to talk frankly and easily of himself... . He could never have dreamed, like Pepys, of locking up his confidence in a diary. From first to last, in inconsecutive essays, in the records of sentimental touring, in fiction and in verse, he has embodied the outer and the inner autobiography. He discourses-he prattles-he almost babbles about himself. He seems to have taken minute and habitual introspection for the chief study in his a.n.a.lysis of human nature, as a subject which was immediately in his reach, and would most surely serve his purpose. We suspect much of the success of his novels was due to the fact that as he seized for a substructure on the scenery and situations which had impressed him forcibly, so in the characters of the most different types, there was always more or less of self-portraiture. The subtle touch, eminently and unmistakably realistic, gave life to what might otherwise have seemed a lay-figure... . He hesitated again and again as to his destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted his chances, as a story-writer, even after Treasure Island had enjoyed its special success... . We venture to think that, with his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all. But there comes in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty workmans.h.i.+p. Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that seemed to come without an effort. Even when racked with pains, and groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at a high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible instinct. Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that inspiriting afflatus. He did his painstaking work conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased, he revised, and he was hard to satisfy. In short, it was his weird-and he could not resist it-to set style and form before fire and spirit."

CHAPTER XXIV-MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS

More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane and true and disinterested view of Stevenson's claims, was that article of his erewhile "friend," Mr W. E. Henley, published on the appearance of the Memoir by Mr Graham Balfour, in the Pall Mall Magazine. It was well that Mr Henley there acknowledged frankly that he wrote under a keen sense of "grievance"-a most dangerous mood for the most soberly critical and self-restrained of men to write in, and that most certainly Mr W. E. Henley was not-and that he owned to having lost contact with, and recognition of the R. L. Stevenson who went to America in 1887, as he says, and never came back again. To do bare justice to Stevenson it is clear that knowledge of that later Stevenson was essential-essential whether it was calculated to deepen sympathy or the reverse. It goes without saying that the Louis he knew and hobn.o.bbed with, and nursed near by the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh could not be the same exactly as the Louis of Samoa and later years-to suppose so, or to expect so, would simply be to deny all room for growth and expansion. It is clear that the W. E. Henley of those days was not the same as the W. E. Henley who indited that article, and if growth and further insight are to be allowed to Mr Henley and be pleaded as his justification c.u.m spite born of sense of grievance for such an onslaught, then clearly some allowance in the same direction must be made for Stevenson. One can hardly think that in his case old affection and friends.h.i.+p had been so completely submerged, under feelings of grievance and paltry pique, almost always bred of grievances dwelt on and nursed, which it is especially bad for men of genius to acknowledge, and to make a basis, as it were, for clearer knowledge, insight, and judgment. In other cases the pleading would simply amount to an immediate and complete arrest of judgment. Mr Henley throughout writes as though whilst he had changed, and changed in points most essential, his erewhile friend remained exactly where he was as to literary position and product-the Louis who went away in 1887 and never returned, had, as Mr W. E. Henley, most unfortunately for himself, would imply, retained the mastery, and the Louis who never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained in statu quo, and was so only to be judged. It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely celebrated-only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only sympathy can secure. If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to the Louis who went away in 1887 and never came back.

"At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and pa.s.sionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he pa.s.sed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself. Withal, if he wanted a thing, he went after it with an entire contempt of consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechism was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful."

Notice here, how undiscerning the mentor becomes. The words put in "italics," unqualified as they are, would fit and admirably cover the character of the greatest criminal. They would do as they stand, for Wainwright, for Dr Dodd, for Deeming, for Neil Cream, for Canham Read, or for Dougal of Moat Farm fame. And then the touch that, in the Shorter Catechism, Stevenson would have found a cover or justification for it somehow! This comes of writing under a keen sense of grievance; and how could this be truly said of one who was "at bottom an excellent fellow." W. Henley's ethics are about as clear-obscure as is his reading of character. Listen to him once again-more directly on the literary point.

"To tell the truth, his books are none of mine; I mean that if I wanted reading, I do not go for it to the Edinburgh Edition. I am not interested in remarks about morals; in and out of letters. I have lived a full and varied life, and my opinions are my own. So, if I crave the enchantment of romance, I ask it of bigger men than he, and of bigger books than his: of Esmond (say) and Great Expectations, of Redgauntlet and Old Mortality, of La Reine Margot and Bragelonne, of David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities; while if good writing and some other things be in my appet.i.te, are there not always Hazlitt and Lamb-to say nothing of that globe of miraculous continents; which is known to us as Shakespeare? There is his style, you will say, and it is a fact that it is rare, and in the last times better, because much simpler than in the first. But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved that the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets obvious, is it not by way of becoming uninteresting? And is there not something to be said for the person who wrote that Stevenson always reminded him of a young man dressed the best he ever saw for the Burlington Arcade? [10] Stevenson's work in letters does not now take me much, and I decline to enter on the question of his immortality; since that, despite what any can say, will get itself settled soon or late, for all time. No-when I care to think of Stevenson it is not of R. L. Stevenson-R. L. Stevenson, the renowned, the accomplished-executing his difficult solo, but of the Lewis that I knew and loved, and wrought for, and worked with for so long. The successful man of letters does not greatly interest me. I read his careful prayers and pa.s.s on, with the certainty that, well as they read, they were not written for print. I learn of his nameless prodigalities, and recall some instances of conduct in another vein. I remember, rather, the unmarried and irresponsible Lewis; the friend, the comrade, the charmeur. Truly, that last word, French as it is, is the only one that is worthy of him. I shall ever remember him as that. The impression of his writings disappears; the impression of himself and his talk is ever a possession... . Forasmuch as he was primarily a talker, his printed works, like these of others after his kind, are but a sop for posterity. A last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day."

Just a month or two before Mr Henley's self-revealing article appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine, Mr Chesterton, in the Daily News, with almost prophetic forecast, had said:

"Mr Henley might write an excellent study of Stevenson, but it would only be of the Henleyish part of Stevenson, and it would show a distinct divergence from the finished portrait of Stevenson, which would be given by Professor Colvin."

And it were indeed hard to reconcile some things here with what Mr Henley set down of individual works many times in the Scots and National Observer, and elsewhere, and in literary judgments as in some other things there should, at least, be general consistency, else the search for an honest man in the late years would be yet harder than it was when Diogenes looked out from his tub!

Mr James Douglas, in the Star, in his half-playful and suggestive way, chose to put it as though he regarded the article in the Pall Mall Magazine as a hoax, perpetrated by some clever, unscrupulous writer, intent on provoking both Mr Henley and his friends, and Stevenson's friends and admirers. This called forth a letter from one signing himself "A Lover of R. L. Stevenson," which is so good that we must give it here.

A LITERARY HOAX.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR.

Sir-I fear that, despite the charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas, there is no doubt that Mr Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening Depreciation of Stevenson which has been published over his name.

What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley's conscience tell him; but permit me to remind him of two or three things which R. L. Stevenson has written concerning W. E. Henley.

First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh:

"(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him."

Secondly, this pa.s.sage from Stevenson's dedication of Virginibus Puerisque to "My dear William Ernest Henley":

"These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual a.s.sistance, shall survive these little revolutions, undiminished, and, with G.o.d's help, unite us to the end."

Thirdly, two sc.r.a.ps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to show that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L. Stevenson's work:

"1. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had... . To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans-sich is my aspiration.

"2. Dear lad,-If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think-(the editor who had pruned down Mr Henley's review of Stevenson's Prince Otto) has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat... . Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself."

And, lastly, this extract from the very last of Stevenson's letters to Henley, published in the two volumes of Letters:

"It is impossible to let your new volume pa.s.s in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.'s Joy of Earth volume, and Love in a Valley; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep... . I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S."

It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary friends.h.i.+p lies the true modesty and magnanimity? I had rather be the author of the last message of R. L. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, than of the last words of W. E. Henley concerning R. L. Stevenson.

CHAPTER XXV-MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS

Mr Christie Murray, writing as "Merlin" in our handbook in the Referee at the time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by us:

"Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is conceived. 'If he wanted a thing he went after it with an entire contempt for consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful.' Now if Mr Henley does not mean that for the very express picture of a rascal without a conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in his choice of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a profession of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take him au pied de la lettre. A man who goes after whatever he wants with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel, and the man who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and cheerful, whatever his conduct may have been, and justifies himself on the principles of the Shorter Catechism, is a hypocrite to boot. This is not the report we have of Robert Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him. It is a most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr Henley's acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow. We all know the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in debate. In Victor Hugo's tremendous indictment of Napoleon le Pet.i.t we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemans.h.i.+p. It spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo's pages. It is meant to do that. An insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and even with a touch of reluctance.

"Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of "Tis' and 'it were,' is a fairly competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to make a plain man's plain meaning an evident thing if he chose to do it. But if for the friend for whom 'first and last he did share' he can only show us the figure of one 'who was at bottom an excellent fellow,' and who had 'an entire contempt' for the consequences of his own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be obscured... .

"All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned from his books, and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he wrote to me years ago in friendly recognition of my own work. I add the testimonies of friends who may have been of less actual service to him than Mr Henley, but who surely loved him better and more lastingly. These do not represent him as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter Catechism. The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues... .

"To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling to mere existence. The basest of us can do that. But it is a heroism to maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness in the face of death. For my own part, I never bowed at the literary shrine Mr Henley and his friends were at so great pains to rear. I am not disposed to think more loftily than I ever thought of their idol. But the Man-the Man was made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will keep him alive when his detractors are dead and buried."

As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was christened Robert Lewis-the Lewis being after his maternal grandfather-Dr Lewis Balfour. Some attempt has been made to show that the Louis was adopted because so many cousins and relatives had also been so christened; but the most likely explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the name to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any notion of a.s.sociation with a very prominent noisy person of the name of Lewis, in Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt dislike, if not positive animosity. Anyhow, it is clear from the entries in the register of pupils at the Edinburgh Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was there, that in early youth he was called Robert only; for in the school list for 1862 the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis, while in the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson. Clearly if in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and elsewhere, called Robert, there could have then arisen no risk of confusion with any of his relatives who bore the name of Lewis; and all this goes to support the view which I have given above. Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert at home, and ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list, and became Lewis Robert. Whether my view is right or not, he was thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name uniformly spelt Louis. What blame on Stevenson's part could be attached to this family determination it is hard to see-people are absolutely free to spell their names as they please, and the matter would not be worth a moment's attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley chosen to be very nasty about the name, and in the Pall Mall Magazine article persisted in printing it Lewis as though that were worthy of him and of it. That was not quite the unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as it was trumpery. Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery spite of this in the following pa.s.sage:

"Stevenson, it appears, according to his friend's judgment, was 'incessantly and pa.s.sionately interested in Stevenson,' but most of us are incessantly and pa.s.sionately interested in ourselves. 'He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he pa.s.sed it.' I remember that George Sala, who was certainly under no illusion as to his own personal aspect, made public confession of an identical foible. Mr Henley may not have an equal affection for the looking-gla.s.s, but he is a very poor and unimaginative reader who does not see him gloating over the G.o.d-like proportions of the shadow he sends sprawling over his own page. I make free to say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does not live. 'The best and most interesting part of Stevenson's life will never get written-even by me,' says Mr Henley.

"There is one curious little mark of animus, or one equally curious affectation-I do not profess to know which, and it is most probably a compound of the two-in Mr Henley's guardedly spiteful essay which asks for notice. The dead novelist signed his second name on his t.i.tle-pages and his private correspondence 'Louis.' Mr Henley spells it 'Lewis.' Is this intended to say that Stevenson took an ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal appellation? If so, why not say the thing and have done with it? Or is it one of Mr Henley's wilful ridiculosities? It seems to stand for some sort of meaning, and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small spitefulness which might go for nothing if it were not so well borne out by the general tone of Mr Henley's article. It is a small matter enough, G.o.d knows, but it is precisely because it is so very small that it irritates."

CHAPTER XXVI-HERO-VILLAINS

In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason he himself gave about Deacon Brodie utterly fails in that healthy hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently dilated. Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply. Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional. Admitting that such natures, say as Huish, the c.o.c.kney, in the Ebb-Tide on the one side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely demanded that they should not stand alone, but have their due complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to tell on them in the action. If "a knave or villain," as George Eliot aptly said, is but a fool with a circ.u.mbendibus, this not only wants to be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and effective sense. It is here that Stevenson fails-fails absolutely in most of his work, save the very latest-fails, as has been shown, in The Master of Ballantrae, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his sympathy with them or for them. Thus he fails to give his readers the proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given. The highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely, outwardly, and inwardly defeated. It is here the same in the melodrama of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare. "The evening brings a' 'hame'" and the end ought to show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of elevated impression, acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true denouement and the sense of any moral rect.i.tude or law remain as felt or acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.