Robert Louis Stevenson [43]
But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde. The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to KIDNAPPED shows David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.
"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?
"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.
"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ever come right!'
"Shakespeare has shown us - and never so nobly as in his last great creation of THE TEMPEST - that a man has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the enemy - that citadel of his own conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause there.
"We must remember that THE TEMPEST was Shakespeare's last work. The genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before those later years are reached!"
Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself:
"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners; Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." (7)
Stevenson's own verdict on DEACON BRODIE given to a NEW YORK HERALD reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the LUDGATE HILL, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. BUT WE WERE BOTH YOUNG MEN WHEN WE DID THAT, AND I THINK WE HAD AN IDEA THAT BAD-HEARTEDNESS WAS STRENGTH."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the
"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?
"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.
"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ever come right!'
"Shakespeare has shown us - and never so nobly as in his last great creation of THE TEMPEST - that a man has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the enemy - that citadel of his own conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause there.
"We must remember that THE TEMPEST was Shakespeare's last work. The genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before those later years are reached!"
Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself:
"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners; Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." (7)
Stevenson's own verdict on DEACON BRODIE given to a NEW YORK HERALD reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the LUDGATE HILL, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. BUT WE WERE BOTH YOUNG MEN WHEN WE DID THAT, AND I THINK WE HAD AN IDEA THAT BAD-HEARTEDNESS WAS STRENGTH."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the