Robert Louis Stevenson [55]
though there, happily for him and for us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.
Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago - "a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him - victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency - he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way, do not succeed - the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect. Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air - in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson do his very best - let him adopt all the artificial disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly called off to the man who is actually writing the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below. This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work, not in its essential being - the spirit does not so to us go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks.
This is essentially the character of the MYSTIC; and hence the justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr Chesterton and others.
"The inner life like rings of light Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."
The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something which tells of childish influences - of boyish perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism - any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the outside - see him merely in dress and outer oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in this - the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint
Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago - "a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him - victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency - he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way, do not succeed - the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect. Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air - in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson do his very best - let him adopt all the artificial disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly called off to the man who is actually writing the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below. This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work, not in its essential being - the spirit does not so to us go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks.
This is essentially the character of the MYSTIC; and hence the justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr Chesterton and others.
"The inner life like rings of light Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."
The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something which tells of childish influences - of boyish perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism - any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the outside - see him merely in dress and outer oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in this - the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint