第39章 STEVENSON'S GLOOM(1)

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 of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life.

Suffering constantly, he still was always kindly.He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has said, this philosophy by every resource open to him.In practical life, all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom.Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in essence.Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge.Always behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined away wholly.He cannot escape from it if he would.Here, too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life backward.Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was before him where to choose.This fateful shadow pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to him, to be ungrateful - "HAS THE MAN NO GRATITUDE?" Two selves thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson.He was from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self-enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating character and inherited influence.When he reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings.

Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service.Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things to odd shapes.Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort.He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company.At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake.He that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the waters.