Critical Woodcuts/R. L. S. Encounters the "Modern" Writers on Their Own Ground
THE publication of a popular and complete edition gives me a desired occasion to inquire a little into the relations between Stevenson and the "modern" school of novelists and essayists. At the present moment those relations are decidedly strained. My own notion, briefly stated, is that spokesmen of "the modern school" are, as Hamlet remarked of the little eyases, exclaiming "against their own succession." They ought, I think, to be saluting Stevenson as a valiant forerunner in their own movement toward that sharper self-knowledge and that more candid self-acknowledgment which animate the important writers of all periods.
But the "moderns" seem to miss this vital link between their efforts and the effort of Stevenson. They are rather bent on drawing a line than upon establishing a connection. For example, that delightful cockney novelist and shrewd disciple of Gissing, Mr. Frank Swinnerton, strains the relation between Stevenson and his heirs to the breaking point. He expresses the asperity and the condescension of the heirs in a critical study of the testator, bristling with such distinctions as these:
The modern school of novelists . . . provides little enough material for loving hearts. The modern school
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says to its readers: "You are wicked, selfish, diseased, but horribly fascinating, and I'm going to set you right by diagnosis"; and the reader feels a sting in the fascination. Stevenson says, "We are all mighty fine fellows; and life is a field of battle; but it is better to be a fool than to be dead; and the true success is to labor"; and the reader feels that Stevenson is One of Us! He is not austere; he does not ask uncomfortable questions; he makes no claims upon his readers' judgment, but only upon their self-esteem and their gratified assent.[1]
I think that this distinction between Stevenson and the modern school is false.
Stevenson begins, just as the moderns do, just as Llewelyn Powys, for example, does: he begins with austere diagnosis. He makes all the fundamental admissions which they make: he admits the wickedness, selfishness, disease, and horrible fascination at the heart of life. But he recognizes also that mere diagnosis does not "set you right." A diagnosis such as that of Llewelyn Powys, which I have just discussed, is not the end, but only the starting point, of a personal philosophy which is to be truly realistic.
The real distinction between Stevenson and the moderns is that, while they devote themselves to elaborating diagnosis, he devoted himself to the elaboration of therapy. Or, to shift from Mr. Swinnerton's clinical images, let us say: At the age of twenty-five, Stevenson had definitely ascertained what was the matter with him and with life. He had looked into all the abysses which Mr. Powys is astonishingly fathoming at forty-two. And then, never oblivious of his darker vision, he turned to the task of fashioning, on the verge of the abyss, a dance and a music as heartening as the sound of bagpipes.
The grimmer members of the modern school say, in effect: "We are going to exclude from the audience of significant modern art the following classes: children, nice young girls and boys, old maids, old fogies, the entire ruck of the bourgeoisie, and all people who insanely insist that they are happy and contented. We shall address only stern, unblinking adults, such as are at least theoretically pessimists and we intend to give them their first full realizing sense of the abyss."
To that I reply, "Bring on your abyss!" That is one perfectly legitimate object of letters. I like to think of myself as an "unblinking adult"—not dizzy at precipices. I am ready to hear whatever honest report the moderns may bring in concerning their soundings in the abyss. But, surely, for an adequate literary movement, the exclusions of "the modern school," as Mr. Swinnerton describes it, are too wide, its remorseless intention is too narrow. Ultimately it will be forced to expand and make room for the dancing and music of children and for all the other folk to whom Stevenson showed, with so much grace and charm in the showing, how to be happy in "playing the game."
The game of which we are speaking is not optional—is not so regarded by my crowd. It must be played. Therefore, it is not a whit more the business of a realistic personal philosophy to acknowledge where it ends than to devise good ways of playing it with some spirit and with some style to the end. But I definitely exclude here discussion of Stevenson's great rôle as instructor in the game, contributor to its rules and keyer-up of the sporting spirit on the grounds.
That is not our theme. What I wish to inquire is whether this graceful fellow is alive yet or whether he has succumbed to the only thing which really threatened him—the danger of being too much at his ease in Bohemia, too much a play-boy.
A quarter of a century ago I had read everything of Stevenson's then accessible, and in every year since I have reread some portions of his work. In all that time I have not exhausted him, and the violence of reaction against him by the "movement" writers puzzles me. Probably I shall have to be classified as an incorrigible Stevensonian.
Inevitably the long crusade of the anti-Stevensonians against him, his character and his art, and against us—the Stevensonians—our character and our taste, infuriates me. All of them, from the atrabilious W. E. Henley to Messrs. Swinnerton, Steuart[2] and Hellman[3]—all of them say such nasty things about us: about our author and his readers. In general, they are consistent in their very curious line of attack. First, demonstrating that he was an invalid and an immoral man, they contend that his work is invalidated by the fact that it expresses too much of his invalidism and too little of his immorality!
It is true that when last fall Mr. Steuart discharged his double-barreled blunderbuss in Stevenson's direction Mr. Swinnerton took him roundly to task for his bad shooting. (I had taken him to task for his superfluous and exultant repeppering of the straw man set up for his own peppering by the ingenious Henley.) But no one has dealt more drastically with Stevenson than Mr. Swinnerton himself, and no one has said nastier things about him and about those who persist in admiring him. Doubtless he knows what he is about. He calls it criticism, but he means war. Stevenson persists in enchanting readers generation after generation. He fails to "senesce" as a writer should do who has been before us so long. Mr. Swinnerton desires to give him a knock-out blow and to drag him out of the circle of his glamour, so that there will be elbow room and attention for "the modern school of novelists." But let the Stevensonians consider the mortal nature of such thrusts as these—if they really reach home, if they really touch the man we know:
The teaching of the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals; it is the doctrine of that "state of life" which finally ends in a good-natured passivity not unlike the happy innocence of the domesticated cat. . . . With all his writing he took the road of least resistance, the road of limited horizons; because, with all his desire for romance, his desire for the splendor of the great life of action, he was by physical delicacy made intellectually timid and spiritually cautious. He was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after. . . . His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances—all are seen nowadays to be consumptive.
In short, this R. L. S., it seems, was a swathed, coddled, and timorous weakling of a tedious virtuosity, consciously fashioning toys and polishing truisms "fit to be culled and calendared for suburban households."
Now, I confess that I enjoy the clash of school with school in a struggle for survival, and I like encounter with a critic who drives a thesis hard against the ribs of an adversary. A stiff fight over the body of a wounded or assaulted leader animates the scene, recruits fresh combatants and jolts the sleepy-eyed to partisanship. But I like, too, a nice regard for truth in these collisions—the blade of the swordsman entering a joint in the armor and not shattered on impenetrable steel, or coarsely used as a bludgeon. And to lapse a little into the Elizabethan style of my youth, most of these things which Mr. Swinnerton says about Stevenson seem to me "as false as hell," and for saying them I could "eat his heart in the marketplace."
It should perhaps be explained that the Stevenson controversy has been waged in great part over the heads of the public. Poems, letters, essays, unfinished novels, commentaries by Mrs. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, and all sorts of supplementary evidence, which even old readers had not seen, constantly entered into the debate. Much of the material employed by disputants on both sides has remained till recently in manuscript or in semi-private publication or in separate collections of the letters or in stately subscription editions of the collective works which, for many of us, were too expensive to ink and thumb in the familiarity of private ownership. As for previous popular and unauthorized "dry goods" editions, they contain, relatively speaking, but an expurgation and abridgment of the man, upon which no argument can now rest.
The material in the new South Seas Edition[4] described as "not previously published in any popular edition" includes more than a dozen introductions to the individual volumes, by Lloyd Osbourne, vividly sketching his stepfather at various ages of his life from twenty-six to his death; five "ethical" papers; twenty-two pages from the Silverado diary, first published in the Vailima edition; some eighty pages of critical reviews; a play, "The Hanging Judge," first published in the Vailima edition; a story called "When the Devil Was Well"; an autobiographical fragment of twenty pages containing an important statement of his relations to Mrs. Sitwell and Sidney Colvin; "Moral Emblems"; nearly two hundred pages of new poems; half a dozen unfinished stories in "The Ebb Tide" volume; the juvenile "History of Moses," with sundry sketches; a "Protest on Behalf of Boer Independence"; Stevenson's "Companion to the Cook Book," and, above all, the letters, all of them, four volumes of them, of which more than a hundred "appear here for the first time in a popular edition."
I say this is the best possible counterblast to the undermining operations of the anti-Stevensonians. None of them, from Messrs. Hellman, Steuart and Swinnerton back to the atrabilious Henley—none of them, I firmly believe, will be able permanently to impose his destructive views upon a public which has, as now, easy access to the complete works.
I have emerged from my explorations brimming with fresh wonder as to where the anti-Stevensonians collect their impressions. What wild and savage life have these London and Edinburgh critics lived which enables them to speak of Stevenson as a physical weakling, barred from a romantic life of action because, forsooth, "he was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after"!
What lions have these critical fellows shot with a bow and arrow, that they turn up superior noses at Stevenson, who merely consorted with thieves and harlots in the slums of Edinburgh and London, ran through the professions of engineering and law before he was twenty-five, explored the Scotch coast in a sailboat, canoed the Sambre and Oise, slept in a lonely bivouac à la belle étoile in the Cévennes, fled to San Francisco by emigrant train, ran away with a wife and family, camped on Mount St. Helena, chartered his own schooner, sailed the South Seas for three years, feasted with cannibal chiefs, refused to sleep with their wives, conspired with Kanaka kings, was threatened with deportation, planted a wilderness, governed a small tribe of savages and died in his boots?
If these lofty critical fellows hold that Stevenson's sheltered and coddled life starved and devitalized his romance, come, let us bring them to confession and require them to tell us what sort of dare-devil existence a really "modern" writer must live.
The field of battle to which he likened marriage as well as life was a field in which there was no headstrong conflict of ideal and practise, but a mere accommodation which a phrase could embody.
This is Mr. Swinnerton again. But where did he pick up that impression? Not, surely, from considering with any attention Stevenson's long heart-breaking fight for his own morality, his own religion, his own love choice, and his own profession, against the stubborn opposition of his parents and all the embattled forces of time, place and circumstances. Can't they see, these superior critics, that what they call a "toy," this romance of "Kidnapped," for example, with its desperate flight of David and Alan Breck Stewart through the heather is a vital poetic symbol for the whole course of Stevenson's running fight for life both physical and spiritual?
"The teaching of the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals."
Well, now, who was it before Stevenson that compounded the French artist with the shorter catechist and was in dead earnest about both? Was it Wilde or Pater or Ruskin or Carlyle? Who, for the behoof of us all, cured himself of all reverence for the stereotyped mid-Victorian Calvinist, and for "the common banker," and for all types whatever of smug, prudential, conforming "respectability" Who taught us that if a sour morality was all we had, for pity's sake to keep it, but to keep it to ourselves? Who took his favorite authors—Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and Dumas and Hazlitt and Thoreau and Whitman—and derived from them, and tested to the hilt in his own experience, a modern gospel, realistic, based on self-knowledge and self-acknowledgment, boldly individualistic, with independent standards of honor and loyalty, with a quite fresh assortment and proportioning of virtues, gleaming among them courage and charm and gaiety and passionate kindness and fidelity inflexible to one's calling?
If Stevenson did not enlarge ideals, who was it between 1870 and 1893 that clear-cut, brightly colored and popularized just his type of Bohemianism throughout the English-speaking world, and in particular infatuated with it starved, stodgy, stiff, frock-coated America? Did it change the tune here, or didn't it?
Yes. But some of the iconoclasts tell us, with an immense deal of scorn, that this picturesque Bohemian pleased the clergy!—never stopping to inquire whether that fact was creditable to the clergy or discreditable to him; whether it indicated that he had been won to their view or they to his. The iconoclasts noticed that he "preached," without noticing what he was preaching; and that he wrote "Lay Morals," without noticing what virtues he commended; and that he composed prayers, without noticing the objects of his supplications or the nature of the deity that he addressed. And so, one must assume, they reached the conclusion that his vision of life was essentially conventional, his beliefs spiritually timid, and his maxims acquiescent and compromising.
Assuming that his moral ideas were purely conventional, others of the iconoclasts argue that he was a hypocrite, with obvious reference to the field of sexual morality. They produce evidence for believing that in early life, at any rate, his conduct partook more of the French artist than of the shorter catechist. Mr. Osbourne, indeed, tells us that he was involved in several tempestuous affairs with women, and that he never heard him regret the experience. Mr. Steuart, of course, made this the outstanding feature of a twovolume life. Several of the "new poems" are corroborative. Why did not Stevenson speak out frankly all that he thought and felt about these matters, as "modern" writers do?
Well, now, in the first place, modern writers don't. The most "outrageous" of them is still so far from his own ideal of self-acknowledgment that it is indecent of him to twit Stevenson with compromise in that field. Living in an environment, as he declared, of realism à l'outrance in the South Seas, he ventured in "The Beach of Falesà" to introduce an illicit relation under a fictitious marriage. You may read in the introduction and in the letters how he strove against editors and publishers in order to present to English and American readers of thirty-five years ago that mild overture to modern realism. After this attempt he concluded that he knew "nothing—except that men are fools and hypocrites."
As all observant readers know, Stevenson did deliberately shun the treatment of "modern love." Was that because he really desired to suppress that side of life? No, it was because he was unwilling to write falsely about it. It was because, as he said, "You can't tell any of the facts; the only chance is to paint in the atmosphere." He shunned it because he knew that he could not treat "modern love" in English in accordance with his increasing bent toward a biting realism and the sharp noting of physical sensation. He could not treat it in accordance with his own experience, and therefore he preferred not to treat it at all; for, as he said, "I can't mean one thing and write another."
But, Messieurs et Mesdames, if you believe that Stevenson's opinions in this matter reposed upon an orthodox, conventional or clerical conception of human passions, if you think that he looked timorously into the abysses of nature and shrank from the full implications of his vision—or even really concealed his vision from readers, then, I pray you, open again that "courtly collect," as Mr. Llewelyn Powys calls it, "Virginibus Puerisque," and read again with unsealed eyes, weighing phrase by phrase, those two bits of stark realism regarding life and death, which you passed lightly over twenty-five years ago, because they were entitled, with a kind of classical elegance then in vogue, "Pan's Pipes" and "Aes Triplex."
Read what he says about "tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a funeral procession" and about "melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away." Consider his glowing young pagan preference of those dwellers on the sides of the volcano who give themselves to life as to a bride—give themselves "to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature and the pride of our nimble bodies." Read again his contempt of the "tooth-chattering ones who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature's God," and his contempt of "respectable citizens" who, in order to keep their hats on in the midway of custom, flee life's pleasures and its responsibilities, its ecstasies and its agonies. Consider again his stunning characterization of this fertile earth—"sunshiny, lewd and cruel!" Through all the "winning music" of the world he heard a "threat," yet that music, that Panic music, "is itself the charm and terror of things." These are, he declares, at the very heart of all true romance—the charm and the terror, one and inseparable.
Where one is not the other is not. Do you understand? And is that, I ask you, the way the matter is set forth in Sabbath school?
If you wish a brief and candid expression of Stevenson's response from his early years till his death—his response to the Panic music—I commend to your attention one of the "new poems," called "Stormy Nights." He had a way, you remember, of writing poems and then of fulfilling them with his life. The famous "Requiem," for example, he wrote on a sickbed in France, and then fulfilled it "under the wide and starry sky" of Samoa. But what asks your attention in "Stormy Nights" is the stark realism in his account of his passage from the fierce, stifling, suppressed lewdness of adolescence through a period of savage Indian revolt to "Greek" serenity, from the midst of which he contemplates the possibility, as the seasons pass, of entering his "Saint" Louis period. All in due season, he tells us, he will be ready to embrace the whole of life. But.
You with the bands and the shilling packet of tracts
Greatly reduced when taken for distribution?
White-robed among the sunshine and the statues
And the fair porticos of carven marble—
Fond of olives and dry sherry,
Good tobacco and clever talks with my fellows,
Free from inordinate cravings.
Isn't he all there in that little poem, in esse and in posse, the "R. L. S." that real Stevensonians have always known and have always loved? Isn't he all there?—the "R. L. S." who did touch the quick of life; know the sting of sex, the taste of blood; get his feet wet—wet to the waist, man; foot the open road; test sleep in lonely hills under "a clear night of stars"; fare on through blossoms—drunk with the scent of them; up rocky pitches, putting his back into it—eh, what! on to the place where the fog began, and the swift bright stream of his life went down—as he had prophesied the day before that it would—"foaming over a precipice." Look up the poem, I pray you, Stevensonians, and ask yourself if he isn't all there.
And I say it is not a man of no character, and it is not a man of no genius for vital characterization neither, that can stamp, clear-cut, a figure like that of "R. L. S." into the consciousness of three generations. Try it, O superior "modern" young men! We are waiting for you.
I ask you if you can find a single one of these thirty-two volumes in which "R. L. S." is not effectively present. In running through his letters and his essays on the art of fiction I came repeatedly upon a certain ideal for the writer of romance: namely, that each chapter should (1) advance the story, (2) develop the character, and (3) embody the theme.
Now Stevenson wrote out the romance of life in many chapters, with astonishing technical versatility. There are poems, essays, criticism, descriptive sketches, travel books, plays, biography, history, short stories, novels and letters; and within most of these forms there is as much variety of form, mood, and substance as appears when one contemplates the large divisions of the complete works. Yet in each main division and in each subdivision, I, for one, feel that he advances his story, develops his character and embodies his theme. Compare him with any author of his bulk that you choose, where will you find such unity in variety, such centrality and emphasis with so little of repetition?
What is the controlling informing spirit throughout the mass? Style, of course. Not style, as his critics allege, conceived as a mere foppishness in words. Style for him is not mainly in the words but in the "web" or "pattern" which the synthetic stylist weaves in order to hold fast "a far more deep and stimulating view of life and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity of events" than the styleless writer can convey.
In one of his letters Stevenson suggests what is indubitably true, that he looked in prose for a texture to which many of his fellows were indifferent and that he listened for a music to which their ears were deaf: "The little artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly."
But, for all that, it is absurd to say, as his critics do, that style took him by the ear and led him away from life. It is even, in my opinion, absurd to deny that he was driving as hard as he could toward the goal of "modern" writing. He had no technique for the immense penumbral suggestiveness of some modern masters. He is nearer Meissonier than Monet. He worked with sharp form and clear color. "I have," he declared, "in nearly all my works been trying one racket, to get out the facts of life as clean and naked and sharp as I could manage it."
But every new thing that he wrote was for him a fresh problem in style, because every new thing palpitated to his sense with its own unique individual thrill. And the throb of life in the individual thing—that is what he was after. He felt along the sharp edges of "the fact," only half content with his method, groping for something beyond, fully conscious that there is no great art which shows "no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night," tormented by the desire of all "modern" writers to express "a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition."[5]
- ↑ R. L. Stevenson, A Critical Study, New York, 1923.
- ↑ Robert Louis Stevenson, Boston, 1924, two vols.
- ↑ The True Stevenson, A Study in Clarification, Boston, 1925.
- ↑ New York, 1925, 32 vols.
- ↑ To Charles Baxter, 18th July, 1892, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. IV, page 74, South Seas Edition.