CHAPTER VII

  EXPERIMENT AND RANGE

  IN any generalisation about Stevenson, it is of course easy to forget that his work was very varied, in the sense of being very versatile. In one sense, he tried very different styles; and was always very careful only to try one style at a time. The unity of each accentuates the diversity of all. The very fact that he was careful to keep each several study in its own tone or tint, makes the range of his work look more like a patchwork than it really is. It is always a sharp contrast between complete and homogeneous things; when these things are broken up into subdivisions, the whole falls back into a more mixed but a more general pattern. In one sense this is merely a platitude. It would hardly be difficult to point out that the style of Prince Otto is very different from the style of The Wrong Box. It is different with the whole difference between a man working in wax or cardboard or ivory or ebony. Prince Otto is a sort of china shepherdess group, practising arcadian courtliness in an eighteenth-century park; the other is a sort of Aunt Sally pelted with comic misfortunes as if with cocoanuts. Nobody is likely to confuse these forms of art; nobody sets up a china shepherdess to be pelted with cocoanuts; few are so chivalrous as to approach their Aunt Sally with the deferential bows of a courtier. But when we get past this obvious contrast, which nobody could possibly miss, we find that (in a queer manner) there is versatility without variety. What makes those two stories stand out in our memory is a certain spirit with which they are told; yes, and even a certain style as well as spirit. It is not exactly the stories themselves; still less is it any real immersion of the author in the subjects of the stories themselves. We feel, even as we read, that Stevenson would be the last man really to wish to be imprisoned for life in a petty German court or poised for ever amid such very fragile china. We know it, just as we know that Stevenson does not really intend to turn his attention to the leather-business, or even (though here we may fancy the temptation stronger) to become a rowdy solicitor with shady clients, in the manner of the priceless Mr. Michael Finsbury. We remember the treatment more than the subject; because the treatment is really much more alive than the subject. Long after the ghosts in that ornamental garden have faded, and we have completely forgotten Who was Who at the court of Prince Otto, we hear and remember in the depths of that valley, “the solid plunge of the cataract.” And long after the details of the Tontine System have become blurred and all the far less interesting details of our own daily life along with them, when all lesser things have diminished and life itself is fading from my eyes — I shall still see before me the Form called up by that inspired paragraph: “His costume was of a mercantile brilliancy best described as stylish; nor could anything be said against him, except that he was a little too like a wedding guest to be quite a gentleman.”

  Even through these wide divergences of subject, therefore, there runs something which is not only the genius but decidedly the method of Stevenson. In one sense he is careful to vary the style; in another sense the style is never varied. We might say, so to speak, that it is the style within the style that is never varied. But subject to this general understanding, it is only just to him to insist on the wide range that he managed to cover in his short and very much hampered literary life. He once reproached himself with not having enlarged his life by building lighthouses as well as writing books. But the firm of Stevenson and Son might have been mildly convulsed if there had risen on every side lighthouses in seven styles of architecture; a Gothic lighthouse, an ancient Egyptian lighthouse, and a lighthouse like a Chinese pagoda. And that is what he did with the towers of imagination and the light of reason.

  There are indeed, as I have hinted, one or two places where it may be maintained that Stevenson let his style stray; and wandered into other tracks, sometimes older tracks, away from the immediate track of travel. Personally, I have this feeling about the wanderings of the Master of Ballantrae and the Chevalier Burke. They are a sort of adventure story in the wrong place; and though Mr. James Durie was certainly an adventurer in the bad sense, it is impossible to make him one in the good. It is impossible to turn a villain into a hero for the purposes of pure romance; Jim Hawkins could not have gone on his adventures permanently arm-in-arm with Long John Silver. The episode of Blackbeard is a sort of fizzling anticlimax, spluttering like the blue matches in that fool’s hat. Such a shoddy person had no claim to be so much as mentioned in that spiritual tragedy of the terrible twin spirits; the brothers of Durrisdeer. It is almost as if pirates were really a private mania with the author; and he could not keep them out of the tale if he tried; though pirates have really no more business in this tale than pirates in The Wrong Box. But it is curious to note how completely they are discoloured by the white death-ray that shines on that winter’s tale. Their blood and gold were not really red; their seas were not even really blue. This was no occasion for Two-pence Coloured. The very style of Mackeller’s narrative might be shrewdly summed up indeed under the title of A Penny Plain. But this is not only because that worthy steward was addicted to plainness and not averse to pennies. It is also because he is addicted to home and habit and averse to adventure; and the notion of the Master dragging him across half the world has something about it ungainly and grotesque and unworthy of the intensity of their intellectual and spiritual relations. The truth is that the Master of Ballantrae is not only a family demon but also a family ghost; and ought not to haunt any house except his own. Ghosts do not travel like tourists; even for the pleasure of visiting their relatives in the colonies. The story of the Duries is emphatically domestic; like those very domestic stories of home life in which Oedipus butchered his father or Orestes trampled on the body of his mother. These incidents were regrettable, and even painful; but they were all kept in the family. Something tells us that most of them happened behind high barred doors or in terrible unrecorded interviews. They did not wash their bloody linen in public; least of all did they wash it in all the seven seas of the British Empire. But the appearance of the Master first in India and then in America has almost the suggestion of the Prince of Wales on an imperial tour. Now those scenes in The Master of Ballantrae which do take place in the dark house of his fathers, or in the dim and wintry plantations without, do have an indefinable grandeur and even hugeness of outline that recalls Greek tragedies. Nay, they have even that hint of long wanderings and remote places, which is lost when the wanderings and the places are too elaborately followed out. At that unforgotten moment when the stranger first stands up, long and black and slender on the point of rock, and makes a motion with his cane that is like a spoken word of mockery, we do feel that he might have come from the ends of the earth, that he might have strolled from the empire of the Mogul or fallen from the moon. But the irony of the story is in that hateful love, or that pure love of hatred, that is the link between him and his; and makes him as domestic as the roof-tree even when he is as destructive as the battering-ram. It is curious, and perhaps over-curious, to find this rare fault in the work which is in its principal parts so faultless. It may seem still more pedantic to pick another very small hole in it; but it seems to me that Stevenson missed one great chance, in a way he rarely did, when he made even Mackellar such a prig as to write for the last line of the epitaph a phrase like, “With his fraternal enemy.” Surely the words would have stood out with a much more sinister and significant finality, if he had merely written, “And sleeps in the same grave with his brother.”

  But this mixture of two types of tale in one is the very reverse of characteristic. I know not where else in his works it can be found; unless perhaps we might take exception to the slight element of political irritation that makes itself felt, of all places in the world, in the amiable nightmare of The Dynamiter. It is really impossible to use a story in which everything is ridiculous to prove that certain particular Fenians or anarchist agitators are ridiculous. Nor indeed is it tenable that men who risk their lives to commit such crimes are quite so ridiculous as that. But broadly speaking, the characteristic of this writer’s conscientious artistry is that he is very careful to keep the different forms of art in water-tight compartments. It was, of course, a sentiment about technique and material which was very fashionable in the age of Whistler and the world where Stevenson had studied art. And the artist would as soon have stuck a lump of marble into the middle of a bas-relief in terracotta, or applied a coat of paint to a tracery he was making out of ivory, as put a piece of tragedy into the middle of a tea-table comedy or a burst of righteous indignation into a farce. In all this part of Stevenson’s mind, especially as revealed in his letters, most of the critics have missed the very lasting effect of the chatter of craftsmanship, and all the jargon of tricks of the trade, which he heard among the French art students. He had reversed almost the whole philosophy of everything that they wanted to do; but he still retained the dialect in which they talked about how it was done. But he talked it much better than they did; and he had his own knack of using the right word even for the search for the right word. It is typical that he said that a story must have one general tendency; and that in the whole book there must not be a single word “that looks the other way.” There is not a single word that looks the other way in the whole of Prince Otto or in the whole of The Wrong Box.

  But now and then he did something more than this. He created a form of art. He invented a genre which does not really exist outside his work. It may seem a paradox to say that his most original work was a parody. But certainly the notion of The New Arabian Nights is quite as unique in the world as the old Arabian Nights; and it does not owe its real ingenuity to the model which it mocks. Stevenson here wove a singular sort of texture, or mixed a singular sort of atmosphere, which is not like anything else; a medium in which many incongruous things may find a comic congruity. It is partly like the atmosphere of a dream; in which so many incongruous things cause no surprise. It is partly the real atmosphere of London at night; it is partly the unreal atmosphere of Baghdad. The broad and placid presence of Prince Florizel of Bohemia, that mysterious semi-reigning sovereign, is treated with a sort of vast and vague diplomatic reserve; which is like the confused nightmare of an old cosmopolitan courtier. The Prince himself seems to have palaces in every country; and yet the humorous reader suspects, with half his mind, that the man is really only a pompous tobacconist, whom Stevenson happened to find in Rupert Street and chose to make the hero of a standing joke. This double mentality, like that of the true dreamer, is suggested with extraordinary skill without loading with a single question the inimitable lightness of the narrative. The humour of Florizel’s colossal condescension constitutes not only a new character, but a new sort of character. He stands in a new relation to reality and unreality; he is a sort of solid impossibility. Since that time many writers have written such fanciful extravagances about the lights of London; for Stevenson suffered much more than Tennyson from that of which the latter complained when “all had got the seed.” But few of them have really struck those ironical semitones or made the same thing so completely a cockney conspiracy and an Arabian fairy-tale. We have heard much of making the life of the modern town romantic; and many of the attempts in modern poetry seem only to make it more ugly than it really is. We have at the present moment a considerable cult of the fantastic; with the result that the fantastic has become rather a fixed type. It is picked out in crying colours of chrome yellow or magenta; with the result that it is perhaps too obviously a puppet. But Prince Florizel of Bohemia is not a puppet. He is a presence; a person who seems to fill the room and yet to be such stuff as dreams are made of; not simply a thing made of stuffing. The rigid and unreal dolls may fall into dust when the mood changes; but we do not easily imagine anybody kicking the stuffing out of Florizel. I will not say that the New Arabian Nights is the greatest of Stevenson’s works; though a considerable case might be made for the challenge. But I will say that it is probably the most unique; there was nothing like it before, and, I think, nothing equal to it since.

  But it is worth while to remark that even here, where the atmosphere might be expected to be more hazy, the generalisation stands about edges and the exact extravagance of Skelt. However delicate is the air of mockery or mystery, there is very little change in the staccato style. The quarrel with the Suicide Club is “put to the touch of swords” and the phrase tingles like the twin blades of Durrisdeer. Nothing could be more angular than Mr. Malthus, the horrible paralysed man who plays on the brink of the precipice of suicide; he is as hard as a huge beetle. There is all the jerk of the old energetic puppets when he jumps from his seat, losing his disease for an instant at the sight of death. There is more movement in that one paralytic than in crowds of softly moving society figures, in milder or more meditative fiction. The very clatter of his broken bones down the stone steps of Trafalgar Square, of which we hear but an echo, has that almost metallic quality. Jack Vandeleur’s “brutalities of gesture,” his pantomime of opening and shutting the hand, are surely somewhat piratical; he had been Dictator of Paraguay; but I think he had sailed there on the Hispaniola. In short we have here once more the continuity of a style within a style. And the inner thread within the silk is as thin and hard as wire.

  Again, it illustrates this variety of experiment that Stevenson also wrote a detective story; or as he characteristically called it (in a sort of pedantic plain English) a police novel. He wrote it in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne; and I have considered another aspect of it already, in the local colour of The Wrecker. But The Wrecker is ultimately a police novel; and the best sort of police novel, in which the police are never called in. Stevenson explained his reasons for leading up to the problem with studies of social life; and certainly it says much for the liveliness of that life that we do not grow so impatient as to offer the obvious comment. Otherwise we should certainly make one reasonable criticism. The writer may be pardoned if he is a long time getting to the solution, but not when he is such a long time getting to the mystery. It must be confessed that we have to wait for the question to be asked, as well as for it to be answered. Personally I am very glad to wait in the waiting-room of Pinkerton and Dodd. But anyhow when the question is asked, it is with great animation; and the excitement of beginning to piece together a puzzle, which is the essence of a detective story, has seldom been more lively and lifelike than in the cross questions and crooked answers of Captain Nares and his super-cargo. Here, however, the detective story merely illustrates the fact of his having almost as many irons in the fire as Jim Pinkerton. It illustrates the general fact that he tried a great many different styles; and yet his style was not different.

  If there were experiments in which his touch was less happy they were, strangely enough perhaps, those connected with the simple or semi-savage world in which he found so much happiness. The Island Nights’ Entertainments are not quite so entertaining as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, whether New or Old. The explanation may be found, perhaps, in that casual phrase with which he swept the South Seas and swept away a good many imperial or international illusions, probably without knowing it; when he said of all those regions, “It is a large ocean but a narrow world.” He did not really find new types, at least among the white men; he rather found new countries full of old and battered types, white men who no longer looked very conspicuously white. One exception must be allowed; the story of The Ebb-Tide has a very great deal of kick in it; even though we hardly have the full satisfaction of seeing all the characters kicked. Anyhow, it is quite certain that whatever was the cause of the relative ineffectiveness of some of the work done at Vailima, it was not due to his having written himself out or experienced any weakening of power. For the very last days of all were spent in producing what was, or would have been, his most powerful piece of work. I have said something elsewhere, in connection with the Scottish romances, of his last great story, which is unfortunately a great fragment. Actually (I am tempted to say fortunately) that story named after Weir of Hermiston is not mainly about Weir of Hermiston. At least it is not about the first and most famous person of that name; and the best chapters of the book now in existence are concerned with the most sensitive and passionate shades of the Scottish temperament; richer shades of passion than he had ever yet attempted to touch. If ever the grey moor turned purple, it did at the moment when the girl lifted her voice to sing the song of the Elliots. He never forgets his abrupt gesture; and it was never so arresting as when her psalm-book page was rent across.