第47章 EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS(2)

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 kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real case.Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a PENCHANT - and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain things in that ADDRESS TO THE SCOTTISH CLERGY written when Stevenson was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did.It starts in the EDINBURGH EDITION without any note, comment, or explanation whatever, but in that respect the EDINBURGH EDITION is not quite so complete as it might have been made.In view of the point now before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels brought out and illustrated.Were this adequately done, only new ground would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said, "seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside that sphere.This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world.The mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art.You see in Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes - how it lays a disturbing check on real presentation - hindering the action, and is not favourable to the loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and high art should be.To some extent you see exactly the same thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy.Hawthorne's preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power;