Part 16

One must remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an 'advance notice.' Still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless affirmation that St. Ives is 'a rudderless hulk.' 'It's a pagoda,' says Stevenson in a letter dated September, 1894, 'and you can just feel--or I can feel--that it might have been a pleasant story if it had only been blessed at baptism.'

He had to rewrite portions of it in consequence of having received what Dr. Johnson would have called 'a large accession of new ideas.' The ideas were historical. The first five chapters describe the experiences of French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle. St. Ives was the only 'gentleman' among them, the only man with ancestors and a right to the 'particle.' He suffered less from ill treatment than from the sense of being made ridiculous. The prisoners were dressed in uniform,--'jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton.' St. Ives thought that 'some malignant genius had found his masterpiece of irony in that dress.' So much is made of this point that one reads with unusual interest the letter in which Stevenson bewails his 'miserable luck' with St. Ives; for he was halfway through it when a book, which he had ordered six months before, arrived, upsetting all his previous notions of how the prisoners were cared for. Now he must change the thing from top to bottom. 'How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week?' All his points had been made on the idea that they were 'unshaved and clothed anyhow.' He welcomes the new matter, however, in spite of the labor it entails. And it is easy to see how he has enriched the earlier chapters by accentuating St. Ives's disgust and mortification over his hideous dress and stubby chin.

The book has a light-hearted note, as a romance of the road should have. The events take place in 1813; they might have occurred fifty or seventy-five years earlier. For the book lacks that convincing something which fastens a story immovably within certain chronological limits. It is the effect which Thomas Hardy has so wonderfully produced in that little tale describing Napoleon's night-time visit to the coast of England; the effect which Stevenson himself was equally happy in making when he wrote the piece called A Lodging for a Night.

St. Ives has plenty of good romantic stuff in it, though on the whole it is romance of the conventional sort. It is too well bred, let us say too observant of the forms and customs which one has learned to expect in a novel of the road. There is an escape from the castle in the sixth chapter, a flight in the darkness towards the cottage of the lady-love in the seventh chapter, an appeal to the generosity of the lady-love's aunt, a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, in the ninth chapter. And so on. We would not imply that all this is lacking in distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which Stevenson could give to his work. Ought one to look for it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a book which was left incomplete?

There is a pretty account of the first meeting between St. Ives and Flora. One naturally compares it with the scene in which David Balfour describes his sensations and emotions when the spell of Catriona's beauty came upon him. Says David:--

'There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man's mind and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted.'

This is quite perfect, and in admirable keeping with the genuine simplicity of David's character:--

'She had wonderful bright eyes like stars; ... and whatever was the cause, I stood there staring like a fool.'

This is more concise than St. Ives's description of Flora; but St. Ives was a man of the world who had read books, and knew how to compare the young Scotch beauty to Diana:--

'As I saw her standing, her lips parted, a divine trouble in her eyes, I could have clapped my hands in applause, and was ready to acclaim her a genuine daughter of the winds.'

The account of the meeting with Walter Scott and his daughter on the moors does not have the touch of reality in it that one would like. Here was an opportunity, however, of the author's own making.

There are flashes of humor, as when St. Ives found himself locked in the poultry-house 'alone with half a dozen sitting hens. In the twilight of the place all fixed their eyes on me severely, and seemed to upbraid me with some crying impropriety.'

There are sentences in which, after Stevenson's own manner, real insight is combined with felicitous expression. St. Ives is commenting upon the fact that he has done a thing which most men learned in the wisdom of this world would have pronounced absurd; he has 'made a confidant of a boy in his teens and positively smelling of the nursery.' But he has no cause to repent it. 'There is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties like mine. To the beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the child's imagination.'

Men have been known to thank God when certain authors died,--not because they bore the slightest personal ill-will, but because they knew that as long as the authors lived nothing could prevent them from writing. In thinking of Stevenson, however, one cannot tell whether he experiences the more a feeling of personal or of literary loss, whether he laments chiefly the man or the author. It is not possible to separate the various cords of love, admiration, and gratitude which bind us to this man. He had a multitude of friends. He appealed to a wider audience than he knew. He himself said that he was read by journalists, by his fellow novelists, and by boys. Envious admiration might prompt a less successful writer to exclaim, 'Well, isn't that enough?' No, for to be truly blest one must have women among one's readers. And there are elect ladies not a few who know Stevenson's novels; yet it is a question whether he has reached the great mass of female novel-readers. Certainly he is not well known in that circle of fashionable maidens and young matrons which justly prides itself upon an acquaintance with Van Bibber. And we can hardly think he is a familiar name to that vast and not fashionable constituency which battens upon the romances of Marie Corelli under the impression that it is perusing literature, while he offers no comfort whatever to that type of reader who prefers that a novel shall be filled with hard thinking, with social riddles, theological problems, and 'sexual theorems.' Stevenson was happy with his journalists and boys. Among all modern British men of letters he was in many ways the most highly blest; and his career was entirely picturesque and interesting. Other men have been more talked about, but the one thing which he did not lack was discriminating praise from those who sit in high critical places.

He was prosperous, too, though not grossly prosperous. It is no new fact that the sales of his books were small in proportion to the magnitude of his contemporary fame. People praised him tremendously, but paid their dollars for entertainment of another quality than that supplied by his fine gifts. An Inland Voyage has never been as popular as Three Men in a Boat, nor Treasure Island and Kidnapped as King Solomon's Mines; while The Black Arrow, which Mr. Lang does not like, and Professor Saintsbury insists is 'a wonderfully good story,' has not met a wide public favor at all. Travels with a Donkey, which came out in 1879, had only reached its sixth English edition in 1887. Perhaps that is good for a book so entirely virtuous in a literary way, but it was not a success to keep a man awake nights.

We have been told that it is wrong to admire Jekyll and Hyde, that the story is 'coarse,' an 'outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive,' and several other things; nay, it is even hinted that this popular tale is evidence of a morbid strain in the author's nature. Rather than dispute the point it is a temptation to urge upon the critic that he is not radical enough, for in Stevenson's opinion all literature might be only a 'morbid secretion.'

The critics, however, agree in allowing us to admire without stint those smaller works in which his characteristic gifts displayed themselves at the best. Thrawn Janet is one of these, and the story of Tod Lapraik, told by Andie Dale in Catriona, is another. Stevenson himself declared that if he had never written anything except these two stories he would still have been a writer. We hope that there would be votes cast for Will o' the Mill, which is a lovely bit of literary workmanship. And there are a dozen besides these.

He was an artist of undoubted gifts, but he was an artist in small literary forms. His longest good novels are after all little books. When he attempted a large canvas he seemed not perfectly in command of his materials, though he could use those materials as they could have been used by no other artist. There is nothing in his books akin to that broad and massive treatment which may be felt in a novel like Rhoda Fleming or in a tragedy like Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Andrew Lang was right when he said of Stevenson: He is a 'Little Master,' but of the Little Masters the most perfect and delightful.

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