第48章 EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS(3)

his healthy characters who would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly.Phoebe Pyncheon in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her natural element.So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in DOCTOR DOLLIVER, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the MARBLE FAUN.

"We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson.This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the visible world.

Mr Baildon says:

"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in Scott.He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality.

Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is.He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness.But Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae.In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet breadth of Scott."

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he criticises Stevenson for the FAUX PAS artistically of resorting to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few cases - certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in CATRIONA and in not a few in DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE.The fault of that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am."

That too mars the MERRY MEN, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and PRINCE OTTO would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-

conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and artifice.In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R.L.Stevenson.If, as Mr Baildon says (p.30), he had true child's horror of being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, PRINCE OTTO remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine clothes.Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the piracy, and treasure-hunting of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.

"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a firmer grip on his reader." And that is exactly what I, wishing to do all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see.His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't - never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist.This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest.When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped style of thing and do something NEW." But there are things in life and human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are.No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away.That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.