On R. L. S

Ihave had occasion recently to read a good deal of what has recently been written about Robert Louis Stevenson. I had no need to read what was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, for I have read it all long ago and many times overj and I have remembered it, which does not seem to be the case with some who depreciate it. For I have found the critics not so much criticizing Stevenson as criticizing somebody else and putting it down to the discredit of Steven-son. The strangest things are said on the subject. One distinguished critic said that Stevenson was only an inferior imitator of Poe^ which is like saying that Dickens is only one mass of plagiarism from Byron, or that The Wallet of Kai-Lung is a sort of reprint of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

Stevenson was a man who came out of a world of Puritanism into a world of Pessimism. Or, rather, the point of his story was that he escaped from the first but did not enter the second. That escape was first and last an escape in pursuit of happiness, which seemed to him to be forbidden both by the religion of his ancestors and the irreligion of his contemporaries. He had to patch up a sort of makeshift philosophy of his own, which may not have been

(and indeed was not) very complete or logical, but which had very vital truths in it, of a type neglected in his time. But both the truths and the errors were concerned with this problem of happiness; and not only with a thirst for happiness but with a faith in the possibility of happiness. For this reason they were not really understood then by those who sought their religion in Calvin or those who sought their philosophy in Schopenhauer. For this reason they are not likely to be understood now by people who compare him to Poe or think he only loved his hateful characters. And yet it is in connexion with this last point, and its relation to the problem of happiness, that he really might be criticized — ^by more penetrating critics.

The admirable essay called "The Lantern-Bearers" is an attack on realism, which might be stated thus. A realist was one who described a slum, let us say, as one monochrome grey or drab mass of factories and public-houses. And the realism was unreal j if only in the light of this single fact 3 that the public-houses appeared to be as grimy and greasy as the factories. Whereas, of course, to the people using them there was exactly the same difference that a clerk feels between a late night's work at the office and a pleasant theatre-supper in a restaurant. It is silly to set out to describe the chiaroscuro of a slum and then to call yourself an artist because you are blind to the difference between light and shade. Somewhat in the same spirit Stevenson set himself to pointing out that the amount of pleasure most people got out of life could not be measured, at any rate, in terms of this treatmeant of externals 5 because the externals were unattractive, even in the case of things with a notorious power of attraction. If we want to know why Stevenson liked Skelt's Juvenile Drama we cannot discover it by sending a sheet of Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured to be entered for an examination at the Academy School j if we want to know why the slum-dweller likes the public-house, we cannot know by sending a refined West End critic on a weekly paper to look at it. The principle applies, of course, to many who would be equally disinclined to look at the public-house. A milder sort of realist delighted in describing the dreary life of some spinster in the suburbs, who did nothing but paint in water-colours or wash up the tea-things. And here again it missed the whole point: that she painted in water-colours for pleasure 3 whereas nobody ever washed up tea-things for pleasure. How much pleasure she got out of it is known only to God and not to realistic novelists 3 but it is bad psychology to wash away the water-colours in the common element of water, while entirely ignoring the element of colour. A principle of this sort is applied in "The Lantern-Bearers" to a variety of types of men 5 and even to the type of the miser. Men are represented as generally a race of unreasonably happy ostriches j each man with his head in a hobby, as in a hole in the ground. The view needs correction by complementary truths 3 but so far as it goes it is unquestionably true. In the science of psychology even illusions are facts 5 just as even dreams are data. And it is true in this sense that every man knows what he wants and in that degree knows it to be worth wanting. No man was ever in love with a slut, but only with somebody whom others perceived to be a slut. And it is not even true to say that a man gets drunk in sordid surroundings, since it is the very definition of his drunkenness that they cease to be sordid. I am not here considering the proper limits of this argument, as in the case of the drunkard or the miser. I merely remark that when the realists held up before Stevenson Degas's picture of the two grey-faced dipsomaniacs sitting over their dull green drink and said, "This is the picture of Absinthe," it was his immediate impulse to answer, "That is not even a picture of Absinthe j for men only drink absinthe that things may not look like that."

Fortunately, however, he did not recommend taking refuge in absinthe: he recommended taking refuge in Skeltery. He denied that the heroine of the Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured could never be coloured merely because superficial observers thought her rather plain. He did, in his most characteristic works, set out forthwith to fill up the too plain outlines of the old juvenile melodrama with the colours of carefully selected and discriminating art 3 he sought to bring out what had really been so intensely delightful in those obscure delights j and to interpret them anew to grown-up people, without losing the memory that had made them peculiarly precious to children. It is this psychological experiment— the attempt to find out whether the fantastic pleasure of infancy could be continued through the maturer development of manhood — that is the special interest of Stevenson. Anybody who does not understand that this was the nature of his experiment knows nothing about the matter or the man, and is really criticizing somebody else.

Nevertheless, it is odd that those who seem to have something very like a spite against Stevenson should not have noted the real dangers or difficulties raised by his psychological argument j which is sound enough as far as it goes 5 but might be made to go a great deal too far. Though thoroughly healthy in motive, it is much too subjective to be quite healthy in method. It might indeed be used to justify the miser or even the murderer 5 and, in real life, Steven-son might well have had more sympathy with the murderer than the miser. Exactly what it lacked was something which Stevenson subconsciously sought but never found: a religion in the sense of a rule 5 a real trust in some external standard as a reality. Without that, a sympathy with the child's joy in beholding the dragon may eventually turn into a sympathy with the dragon's joy in eating the child. What is needed is the recognition that there are joys that lead to the highest joy and joys that lead to the lowest despair. For want of a recognition of this, the Stevensonian philosophy might have been counted wanting j though, in fact, Stevenson understood it better than superficial readers might suppose. Yet these critics are such very superficial readers that they have not noted even this superficial example. They have merely called him selfish and not seen that he was objective 5 even when he was unselfishly subjective 5 even when he was subjective for others. But the critics do not blame him for his real defect: that he had not the clear and ultimate idea of truth. The explanation is probably simple: that they have not got it themselves.

Between Stevenson and Poe I confess I can hardly imagine a stranger or more puzzling parallel. I leave aside, in deference to such aesthetic critics, everything except aesthetic criticism. I say nothing of secondary matters like morality and philosophy and a whole outlook on life. I toss aside such trifles as belief, doubt, despair, pessimism, piety, faith, hope, and charity. Considering art simply as a method of calling up certain visions or adumbrating certain atmospheres, it seems to me that no two great artists could possibly be more unlike each other than Steven-son and Poe. The atmospheres they tried to create were quite opposite j the technical tricks by which they tried to create them were quite opposite. It was the purpose of Poe to suggest not merely horror but hopelessness. It was the whole point of Stevenson that he never did suggest hopelessness even when he suggested horror. Or, to put the matter another way, he always suggested a fight, even when it was a hopeless fight. The two brothers of the house of Durrisdeer go down fighting to the last. The people of the house of Usher never begin fighting even from the first. I find it difficult to believe, even in face of the text, that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will not go on fighting, if it were only fighting in hell. But when the other gentleman had his rather one-sided conversation with the raven, that raven did not croak over a battlefield.

As I have said, I did not mean merely the matter of moral atmosphere, but of purely artistic atmosphere. Stevenson's technical method is lean, wiry, taut, and alert. If he seems too much to be picking his words, to be watchful of his style, it is because he is above all things very wide-awake. It is the whole point and pleasure and beauty of the poetry of Poe that he is half asleep. Consider those dreamy melodies, those drowsy repetitions, like everlasting echoes of an endless snore. And compare them with the short-lined, sharply worded verses of "R. L. S.," generally rather too bald and angular to be quite good poetry. Poe was above all things luxuriant. He loved, in the literal sense of the phrase, the luxury of woe. He was at home on rich but sombre cushions "that the lamp-light gloated o'er" 3 but it was not only the lamp-light that gloated. I defy anyone to find one sentence in all the collected works of Robert Louis Stevenson in which it can be said that he gloated. It might be said that he sometimes tasted too fastidiously or that he sometimes snapped up too sharply. But he never wallowed in purple seas of woej and it was the whole point of Stevenson that the seas were infinite and unfathomable. Poe's people are not people who have been made unhappy, like Henry Durie or Robert Herrick, or who have made themselves unhappy, like Dr. Jekyll or Markheimj they are people who never could conceivably have been happy. They are unhappy before they are unfortunate. They are tragic before their tragedy begins. With Poe the mood was the fundamental thing j and it was a mood of incurable melancholy. It was, of course, the essence of the Stevensonian spirit that the melancholy was not incurable even if the misfortune was incurable.

But I am not speaking for the moment of such ethical motives, but merely of artistic methods and artistic effects. And this vigilance and alertness and spirit of choice is in the very style of Stevenson. It is also in the very imagery of Stevenson. He loved above all things what was clean-cut and clearly coloured j nothing could be less like the magnificent monochrome of the other writer's dark libraries and dim corridors. The things that Stevenson liked were things like the chip of hard wood hacked out of the wooden sign of the Admiral Ben Bow by the cutlass of Billy Bones the buccaneer. They were things like the crutch of the horrible cripple, that went flashing in the tropical sun sped on its errand of death. In short, the things he loved were almost always solid and were generally self-evident in the sun. Even when they were not, as in the duel scene of The Master of Ballantraey the starlight seems as hard as the steel and the candle-flames as steady as the swords. Surely nothing could have so little of the dark halls and drowsy odours in which the brain of the other heroes brilliantly decayed. Stevenson afterwards regretted the exaggeration which had made Mrs. Durie wipe the sword-blade by driving it into the frozen soil. But it was a truly Stevensonian exaggeration, for it was an exaggeration of what was hard and acute. He was always working with a sharp blade on a hard ground.

This fact appears in his real failure as well as his real success. Where he failed, as compared with the great Victorian novelists, was in being too severe with himself and with his characters. He described a character in a few strokes where the Victorians described him in a hundred little touches. The strokes were artistically exactly right — almost too right. For while the few strokes only give the impression of being right, the many touches give the impression of being real. Long John Silver's crutch always comes in at the right moment, and is almost too solid to be true. The Colonel's bamboo cane comes in quite casually in Thackeray's novel, and we cannot remember how many times it has been mentioned 5 but we are all the more sure that there really was a cane and that there really was a Colonel. There is no gossip about Steven-son's characters as there is about Thackeray's characters. There is no over-flowing of trivial things^ or, better still, of irrelevant things. There is no halo of hearsay or indirect impressions. Stevenson was relentlessly relevant j he limited himself to words so perfect and so few that his figures were really too clear to be convincing. He knew this well himself, being an admirable critic.

On the moral side the meaning of his position seems also to be entirely missed. Yet it is symbolized in the same imagery of sunbeams and sword-blades. Death in Stevenson is brighter than life in Poe. And the point of his position in history is that he came at the precise moment when he could resist a pessimistic spirit, even in accepting parts of a pessimistic philosophy. Living in that Victorian phase, he accepted the struggle for life as described in terms of natural selection j but declared himself ready to enjoy the struggle like a struggle of pirates and picturesque sailors. When opinion was passing through its most depressing phase, Stevenson, like the men who did not differ except in opinions, refused altogether to despair except in opinion. He resolved to keep the mood militant and sanguine whatever the theories might be. That fine essay, ^^Pulvis et Umhra^^ which was so much misunderstood, was truly the defiance of an optimistic man to a pessimistic world, even if it were a pessimistic universe. I am the last person alive to think it a true and complete view of the universe. But, in order to appreciate it, one must appreciate the period through which the world was passing — the decadent darkness of the 'nineties. I for one remember it very well, for it surrounded my boyhood and early youth, and my first literary impulse was to fight against it. But there are many of my own age to testify with me that they would hardly have been able to fight against it, or even live through it, but for the spirit and the genius of Robert Louis Steven-son.