Robert Louis Stevenson [75]
how unreal a real sheep's heart looked when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance of John Ford's ANNABELLA AND GIOVANNI, and how at the next performance the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say significantly:
"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des fantomes de la verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez en passant que les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."
Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father - a circumstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh - something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote:
"Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life - what he calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten. Mr Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at twenty-five.' In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Saturday and Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa."
Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact. It will be the business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere - the purely egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long whiles content to work.
CHAPTER XXIX - LOVE OF VAGABONDS
WHAT is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams - the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human action - moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and weakening forms of ill- health - should have been so full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser being by no means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover - seeking daily adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive CONFRERES. His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than the TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES or the INLAND VOYAGE. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental Journeys" that have sometimes been the fashion - that
"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des fantomes de la verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez en passant que les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."
Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father - a circumstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh - something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote:
"Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life - what he calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten. Mr Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at twenty-five.' In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Saturday and Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa."
Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact. It will be the business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere - the purely egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long whiles content to work.
CHAPTER XXIX - LOVE OF VAGABONDS
WHAT is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams - the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human action - moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and weakening forms of ill- health - should have been so full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser being by no means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover - seeking daily adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive CONFRERES. His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than the TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES or the INLAND VOYAGE. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental Journeys" that have sometimes been the fashion - that