Robert Louis Stevenson [44]
world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the PALL MALL MAGAZINE about the EDINBURGH EDITION, etc. Men are mirrors in which they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious PALL MALL MAGAZINE article than he did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking paltry revenges - writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty grievances - they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things.
R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:- certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in PIPPA PASSES:
"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillsides dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven, All's right with the world.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"All service ranks the same with God, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work - God's puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."
It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him.
CHAPTER XVI - STEVENSON'S GLOOM
THE problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail- fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.
His text and his sermon - which may be shortly summed in the following sentence - be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein
R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:- certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in PIPPA PASSES:
"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillsides dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven, All's right with the world.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"All service ranks the same with God, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work - God's puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."
It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him.
CHAPTER XVI - STEVENSON'S GLOOM
THE problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail- fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.
His text and his sermon - which may be shortly summed in the following sentence - be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein