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BY PROFESSOR MACNAUGHTON,
M.A., B.D.
THERE are some works of
fiction which one never dreams of reading a second time, though the
first perusal may be interesting enough. To others, most of the novels
of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, for instance, we constantly return.
"Age cannot wither them,
nor custom stale
Their infinite variety."
Or, rather, perhaps it is
not precisely the variety—some quality, at any rate, they have, whose
spell is unfailing and inexhaustible. The more we read them the more
they bind us to them; the more inevitably do we go back to them. Their
people are old friends, the friends of our youth, with whom, though they
never cease to live in our memory, it is ever a fresh delight to renew
the fulness of a direct and immediate intercourse. Their scenes abide
with us like the familiar landscapes of childhood, and are wrought into
the permanent stuff of our inward world; our hearts are irresistibly
drawn to revisit them ; we are jealous as of a precious possession which
is slipping out of our hands, to fix once more their fleeting shapes and
colours.
What is the secret of
these writers' charm? We call it genius. The word is vague even as the
quality at which we throw it out is elusive. This much at least seems to
be implied in it, a certain strong vitality and, as it were, permanent
youthfulness and freshness of sense, which finds an inexhaustible
interest and delight in the spectacle of the world. The ordinary man
soon outgrows the catholicity and vividness of his childish interest in
things. He becomes blunter as he grows older. He has seen all this
before. It is dull, stale, flat and unprofitable to him. That is to say,
he has failed to grasp the elements of permanent significance in the
shows of things. As soon as the newness of their outward features has
worn away, and they have ceased to prick his jaded sense, they become a
mere weariness. He has never seized, or never strongly and clearly
enough, the immortal part of them, and the perishable appearance, the
symbol by which their inward life is half revealed and half concealed,
fades by repetition. The old cat, reserving herself for serious
business, which is mice, is unmoved by the ball of thread which let
loose the overflowing vitality of the kitten. All the more is our need
for those who, favoured by the gods, like the ancient Greeks, are always
children, who in their firm manhood still retain the disinterested and
unworn exuberance of youth, and use the solidity of their maturer vigour
to give body and consistency to such glimpses as have come to them of
the perennial, myriad-sided marvel and problem of the living world.
Those who succeed in doing so with a certain clearness, completeness,
harmony and sanity, we call great artists.
The clearness of the
artist's vision is the primary requisite. It is plainly only a side of
what has. been insisted on as the basis of his endowment—the gift of
free and unselfish attention, the capacity of being supremely arrested,
interested and absorbed by the infinite entrancing show; to lose himself
in that, by loving immersion in it to make his own some parts and
aspects of it, in all the living individual distinctness of their
characteristic features; to reproduce the very form and pressure of them
in his own mind. The man who sees in this way can make others see with
him, and will inevitably feel a strong impulse to do so. Some artists
whose work falls short of greatness, in the other qualities mentioned,
in completeness, harmony and sanity, retain their hold upon us chiefly
by the admirable vigour with which they realize this quality of mere
intense and vital vision. Conspicuous examples in our own literature are
Defoe, Smollett and Swift. But while it is true that this is the
indispensable basis; that without it no one can be an artist at all,
with it any artist will produce what is at least fascinating; much more
than this is needed to make a great artist. The work of a great artist
must have a certain completeness; it must not be altogether
incommensurable with the infinity of the world; no important and
universal aspect of man's concerns must be omitted by him. He must see
life not merely vividly in parts, he must see and reproduce it as a
whole. Moreover, what is no doubt already implied in this, his
presentation of life must be harmonious, sane, invigorating. He must
grasp the essence of all, must seize and convincingly body forth for us
in the transparent shapes of the ideal world he creates, the inner
reason, order and music which underlie the discords and confusions of
the actual world. He must see God. That is what gives to the products of
his genius their quality of high emotion. That is the hidden spell, too,
which has been drawing him all along, the secret spring of his intense
interest in things, the only possible explanation of the strong, blind
instinct which drives him to contemplate and reproduce them. If the
world were not fundamentally God's world, it could not grow artists. A
chaos could not blossom into poets for its final flower. The very
existence of the artistic nature is a main proof of the soul of goodness
in things. None the less arduous is the spiritual struggle which the
poet has to wrestle through, in order to gain and communicate as a
conscious and assured possession, what is at bottom the pre-supposition
of his own activities. None sees so clearly and directly as he the dark
side, none feels so keenly the weight of this unintelligible world, or
rejects with such instinctive vehemence the inadequacies of all
comfortable inherited conventional solutions, the now mouldering bridges
built by our fathers to cross their narrower stream, which has greatly
broadened at the point where we stand confronted by it. Yet he must face
this task and work it out if he is to fulfil his highest functions. The
world he gives us must be a world of order and beauty. He must climb up
the rugged peaks which lead to the serene ether of art, and bathe all
the forms of his shaping imagination in that clear, mildly diffused
light.
This is a high standard
by which to measure Robert Louis Stevenson. In my opinion he can bear it
better on the whole than any recent writer of prose fiction in the
English language. In any case a lower measure would be an insult to the
intense and unceasing ardour of endeavour which he gave to the work he
was born to. For one thing can at any rate be said of him, that no man
ever put more conscience into his art. He never wrote a careless line.
And when we consider the conditions lie worked under, his life long
battle, with frequent succumbings, attended by total prostration,
against a terrible disease, which made it death for him to dwell in or
even to revisit Scotland, though Scotland was the true home of his
spirit, the source of his best inspirations and the theme of his last
and greatest work, we can say that whether he attained to enduring
poetry or not, his life at least was a poem, an inspiring memory which
his native land, and, indeed, the world at large, cannot afford, and
will not choose soon to let die. He was the true son of Scottish
builders, whose lighthouses will stand for ages to come the strain of
the Atlantic waves. He felt himself a weakling compared with them. But
for all the charming and rightly considered, the pathetic and heroic
lightness sometimes marking his outward ways, the amazing free fling,
the buoyancy and youthful dash and almost swagger of the man, the ground
work of his character, was just the dour Scotch courage, the stern sense
of duty of his ancestors, the inherited abhorrence of all slack, scamped
work, the imperious instinct that could not rest content with anything
less than the just lines and straight clear edges, and ashlar masonry of
Skerryvore,' in his own paper fabrics, some of which, I think, may
happen to endure and lighten for as long a date. If Stevenson was not a
great artist, he was at least what is the first thing indispensable in a
great artist, a thorough man and a thorough workman. He took his task
with a rare and noble seriousness, and if he failed in winning the
highest favours of the Muse, it was not for lack of strenuous sacrifice.
One is tempted to dwell
on the heroic and delightful personality of Stevenson, as it could have
been divined in his books, and as it is clearly revealed in his recently
published letters. At present, however, we are mainly concerned to
attempt some estimate of his work as an artist. The best of this work is
undoubtedly the part of it which deals with Scotland. "Kidnapped,"
"David Balfour," the "Master of Ballantrae," "Weir of Heriniston," and I
think one might add most of the Scottish verse in "Underwoods" would be
generally admitted to have the best claim to permanence of all he has
left us. For me, at least, this small list of books has this in common
with the novels of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, that I am always
compelled to go back to them from time to time, and always find it worth
while. I cannot say as much for any other works of prose fiction which
have appeared in my day.
This may be a matter of
individual taste; and, of course, one cannot impose one's literary likes
and dislikes on other people by any process of demonstration. The only
course which can be adopted in seeking to communicate to others one's
own impressions of a writer is to analyze his work with reference to
some standard agreed upon as adequate, such as I have attempted to lay
down, and to show its quality by means of carefully selected specimens.
The first thing that
strikes one in Stevenson's work is the extraordinary vividness with
which his scenes and characters are realized. In this primary artistic
quality he takes rank, as it seems to me, with the best we have. His
plastic power is unique in recent literature. Every one of the tales and
some of the poems in our list abounds in pictures which, apart from
other elements of enchantment, remain stamped upon the reader's mind by
dint of mere clean and vigorous drawing, of coercive and penetrating
verisimilitude. Take one of his simplest and earliest books,
"Kidnapped." The parting of David Balfour with Mr. Campbell, the
minister of Essendean, the house of Shaws, its miserly inmate with his
nightcap and cough, its ruined staircase illuminated with flashes of
lightning, the inn at Queensferry and the ships in the bay, the fight in
the round-house, the stranding of the brig Covenant, the miseries of
Earraid, the two Catechists, the shooting of Cohn Campbell, the scene
after in the house of Aucharn, the confused hurrying to and fro, flicker
of torches, burying of weapons, burning of papers, the haggard
pre-occupations of James Stewart, the suspected man, struggling with his
Highland sense of hospitable duty, the pitiful outbreak of temper with
his son, the tears and agonized gratitude of his wife to the Lowland
lad, who will risk himself to save the innocent, the flight in the
heather, with all its wealth of sharp- cut, vitally imaged incident,
Cluny Macpherson's cave, the bag-pipe contest between Alan Breck and
Robin Og in the house of Duncan Maclaren in Balwhidder; in short, every
single scene without exception in the book, from the first page to the
last, has this same seizing quality of living vision and clear,
unfaltering line. It is just the same in "David Balfour," the "Master of
Ballantrae," and, indeed, in every work which left that "forth-right
craftsman's hand." He thoroughly sees and feels his world, and
communicates to us the indubitable atmosphere, the palpable verity of
it, the very smell of the sea and the old sailing ships, of the heather
and bogs of Rannoch, the crying of the solans on the Bass Rock and the
eerie echoes of its caves, the scream of the whaups on the uplands of a
border parish.
As one convincing
example, out of many, illustrating besides Steven- son's perfect mastery
of the Scottish dialect, in the artistic use of which he can scarcely be
said to come second to Walter Scott himself, I would refer to Andie
Dale's tale of Tod Lapraik, in chapter XV. of "David Balfour." A great
deal might be said of Stevenson's Scotch, both Lowland and Highland. The
chief thing is that it is always expressive, rhythmic, noble,
restrained, not mere philology, but art. It is the cream of the
language, the part worth rescuing from oblivion, inherently immortal,
universal, intelligible to anyone with the least spark of imagination,
and never splashed upon the canvas as by some of his many imitators in
mere wantonness of intemperate zeal for local, which ends by being only.
parochial colour. The source directly or indirectly of most of the
inspiration of the kail-yaird school, he differs vastly from several of
its representatives in this, that he never overdoes anything. His
perceptions were infinitely too fine to let him wallow in any kind of
literary excess, or sink into lumbering splay-footed bathos.
Stevenson's power in
delineation appears not only in his scenes, but perhaps even still more
in the drawing of his figures. In fact, his place in the evolution of
fiction, or, to put it more modestly, the distinctive character of his
achievement as a novelist might be indicated by saying that he enriched
the broad, primitive, romantic interest of thrilling adventure, and
objectively presented scenes and actors, with the careful
character-analysis of the psychological novel, avoiding the shallowness
of Dumas and the puppets and pedantry of George Eliot. Considering the
comparatively small quantity of his work, the number of really living
personages he has given us is not short of marvellous. The most
insignificant figure does not fail to get its individualizing stroke of
definite characterization. Take the lawyers, for instance, in chapter
XVII. of "David Balfour." His art is like sculpture in marble, and
ranges from the moulding of a Colossus like Adam Weir, the Lord Justice-
Clerk, down to Tanagra statuettes like the Countess von Rosen in Prince
Otto, or the French prisoner in St. Yves. His Scottish portrait gallery,
in particular, comes second, though, it is true, a long way second only
to the unapproachable, to Sir Walter Scott's. First, of course, suggest
themselves the im-mortal types of the Lowland Scot and of the
Highlander, David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart. David most thoroughly
reveals himself in his delightful Scotch- English, the very lilt and
rhythm of which plunges us "in medias res" into the essential atmosphere
of that old Scotland of the decade after the Forty-Five. We get quite
inside of David and know him as if we had been at school with him. This
is the very "law- land loon," the basis of him a certain stiff whinstone
sense and courage, without flexibility or charm, but most effective in
the sterner business of life, staunch when a friend's back is at the
wall or a principle is at stake; somewhat of a moral pedant and a whig
dyed in the grain, but with a saving grace of pawky humour too; more
close with his money than is quite graceful on ordinary occasions, and
setting wastefulness and ineffective husbandry very low down in his list
of deadly sins, but capable of warming up to prodigality both of purse
and life where there is good cause. This is the race who have built
bridges and made money, and stood up for law and freedom all the world
over, and who have split up at home into the finest fragments of sects
on infinitesimal points of doctrine. And yet, like the Odysseus of
Homer, the Jacob of Genesis, or the douce David Deans of the Heart of
Midlothian, he is not a type merely, but an individual with flesh and
blood. We should scarcely be surprised to meet him in prop-ia persona in
some other world among the departed whom we knew alive. Through David's
Lowland eyes, too we see in significant reflection the authentic
features of that strange old Highland world of Athol brose and
bag-pipes, peat-rock and skiandhus with its wild beauties, savage
fidelities and noblenesses, and its political and economical
impracticabilities. Above all we see the quintessence of it all the
irresistible Alan Breck Stewart, to my mind the most convincing portrait
drawn with the most penetrating sympathy and the most delicate, swift-
glancing truth of the Highland character in all our literature. It may
sound impious to say so, but even Sir Walter's Highlanders, Roderick Dhu,
Rob Roy and Fergus Maciver, not to speak of that libellous abortion
Conacher in The Fair Maid of Perth, are cold, histrionic, unsympathetic
and remote, compared with Alan Breck. There is such a charming life and
buoyancy to him. His delicious heathen self-conceit and the purely
artistic, child-like joy with which he revels over his bloody work in
the round-house, the soaring hyperbole of his war song, and his ecstatic
cry, "am I no a bonny fechter?", the dancing lightness which flashes in
his eye when he smells a fight, the infinite resource and toughness of
this Highland Odysseus, the charm of his well-hung tongue enough to wile
the birds off the trees, not to be resisted by female hearts young or
old, with its sure and cunning touch right on the quick of the
responsive chord, the artistic fervour which overfloods all inveterate
prejudices and old feuds in enthusiastic recognition of his rival
piper's and blood-enemy's mastery of the instrument, the exquisite
topsy-turviness of his ethical theory; all this, combined with the
fundamental truth and faithfulness of the man, does indeed warm the
blood like sunshine or like wine. To get any parallel to this
sympathetic and yet keen-eyed treatment of the Celt one has to go back
beyond Sir Walter Scott to a greater than he, to the Owen Glendower and
Fluellen of Shakespeare. Observe the skill, too, with which Stevenson
sets off these two types against each other, co-operating with their
contrasting gifts, not without inevitable collisions, but in the final
issue with full accord of mutual respect and affection, and even
reciprocal assimilation, to one end; and admire the concentrated art
with which he has shadowed forth as it were in a parable through these
contrasted types the whole range of characteristic quality which
Scotland has contributed to the British Empire and to the world.
It is impossible within
the limits to take even a glance at many of the figures in this rich
gallery. A host must be passed over. That most fascinating and ruthless
of villains, the Master of Ballantrac, the douce Mackellar, decent man
(though we shall return to them), the false and kindly politician
Prestongrange, the unctuous Highland sentimentalist James More
Macgregor, so sweet and natural in the luxuriant bloom of his
half-unconscious hollowness, his whole being wrapt round in a delicious
melancholy mist of lies; the gallant, kind-hearted, wild and witty Miss
Barbara Grant, another Beatrice, with her high-born audacities in speech
and act of the end of last century Scottish grande dame, the dear
Highland maid Catriona, fragrant of the mountain birks, the coo of the
hill-streams in her voice, her soul as clean and bold and impetuous as
they, Kirslie Elliot, the Moorland Helen, with her lavish golden hair,
the tragic wealth of dammed-up, unexpended passion bursting for outlet
in the fierce virginity of her lonely heart; all these and many more,
especially the two old Scotch ladies in David Balfour and in St. Yves,
and the Lowland peasants like Andie Dale, the Elliots of Cauldstaneslap,
and the two drovers in St. Yves, must be reluctantly hurried over. But
there is one which it is impossible to pass by without a look, by far
the mightiest figure of all—Weir of Hermiston. Distinctively
Lowland-Scotch like David Balfour, but on an incomparably larger scale,
rugged, elemental, tragic, an uncompromising piece of Nature's own
boldest rock- sculpture. Huge as the Bass Rock whose white head,
bespattered by the wild fowl, towers unshaken over gurly scas, and on
closer view no less repellent to dainty senses in the unsavouriness of
its superficial detail, a Cato and Gargantua in one. A man of great
powers, massive virtues and coarse pleasures. A great lawyer, inwardly
absorbed in austere intellectual pleasures, he unbends in mighty
potations and incredible ribald coarseness, wallowing with elephantine
gusto in the mud-bath of plebeian Scotch "sculduddery." The very
embodiment of the impersonal majesty of punitive law, an impregnable
bulwark of the State, a terror to evil-doers, not bearing the sword in
vain, he is the hanging judge, driving before him the noxious vermin of
society into the dust-heap with a kind of grand pitilessness like an
inexorable natural force, and not without a certain callous glee in the
clean whirl of his broom. And yet, with an unfathomed inarticulate sea
of love and pity, too, in the depths of him. A figure, in short, of
antique wholeness and simplicity, the rocky ground of it a sublime,
unconscious devotion to duty, a silent mountainous valour and veracity.
So racy of the soil, too, as Scotch as the Lammermoors, with John Knox
and John Calvin, and the unruffled certitude of hell, as an irrefutable
part of the universe, worked into every line. Here again Stevenson, as
is his wont, makes a masterly use of the device of contrast. Hermiston's
rude vastness, as it looms up before our eyes, is the more intensely
felt for being set off by the foil of his wife's fecklessness, her
shivering softness of heart and evangelical fervour, of his son's
youthful sentimentality, and aristocratic fineness of sense of the
high-bred, fastidious, almost monastic refinement and thin-flanked
stately grace of Lord Glenalmond. It is one of the calamities of
literature that Stevenson's strength sank under the intense spiritual
strain of this, his last and greatest effort. He dictated part of it in
dumb alphabet on his fingers when he was too weak to spare breath. He
was never able to work out in detail the tragic conflict in the breast
of the old Scotch Titan, who, like a Roman father, in obedience to duty,
condemns his own son to death, and himself dies of that sentence. Few
men indeed in our day would have dared to conceive such a situation.
Only one man could have executed it, and he did not live to do it. It
was a noble and characteristic end for him to die in the throes of this
creative wrestle.
What has been said, and a
great deal has been left unsaid, is enough to show what manner of spirit
Stevenson was of, that he possessed in that supreme degree which is
granted only to the few elect, the power of intense, penetrating,
individual, first-hand vision both of the eye and of the heart. That and
all that goes with it, concentration, a sure and rapid touch, bold,
strong lines, not one of which but tells; simple, common material, the
refuse that lies unheeded at all doors fused in that fervid imagination
and transformed by magic handling into a glowing wonder; the few
piercing words that sting like sudden flames and make the whole scene
knock at the ribs. Enough has been said, too, to show that in spite of
small quantity of production, the range of his mastery both in character
and in emotion was great, though not perhaps of the greatest—far behind
Scott's, for example. There remains to consider the last and deepest
quality of high genius. Is his' work invigor- ating and harmonious? Does
the spirit that goes out from him make for a sane and virile view of
life, for a stout and hopeful lift of the daily burden, or for
morbidness and weariness, for a slack and nerveless luxury of woe, for
life, in short, or for death? Well, he would have been no true
Scotchman, no spiritual descendant of John Knox, and Walter Scott, and
Robert Burns, if he had lent any countenance to meagrims. He has not
done so. Read in " Underwoods" the "Blast," the "Counterblast," and the
"Con nterbiast Ironical," and you will find there the dour Scotch
rendering of Pessimism, which in its mere manly vigour gives itself the
lie; the beautiful and splendidly sensible refutation of it in
soberseriousness, and the vitriolic brevity of sarcastic contempt for
its caterwauling arrogance. In this connection I would refer, too, to
the House Beautiful," the "Celestial Surgeon," "Our Lady of the Snows,"
and "Not Yet My Soul," in " Underwoods," where a still higher and deeper
note is struck, and the vigorous stoicism of the Scotch verse is
reinforced with sweeter overtones of pious beauty. Yes, Stevenson's was
one of the most clear-sighted and valiant against heavy odds of our
century. The spiritual vitality and unfailing spring of inward health in
him kept him alert and joyous, responsive to all tender and profound and
odd impressions, to the grace and mystery, the gloom and the absurdity
of this many-coloured spectacle of life, its loveliness, its tears, its
laughs. The same spirit breathes from his books. They do not depress,
they tone us up. And that not on any cheap terms; not by a shallow
optimism, comfortably blind to unpleasant truths, nor by any idyllic
rose-water, from which the harsher elements of reality are carefully
strained out. On the contrary, the complex facts are squarely faced, the
shadows and even the squalor of the verso are given unflinchingly in
trenchant strokes, sometimes with realistic poignancy, sometimes with
deep elegiac and tragic pathos. Yet the whole never leaves a bad taste
in the mouth. Even what is bitter to the taste is sweet to the belly,
has a tonic, invigorating quality. The general effect is harmony, not
discord. Stevenson is emphatically one of those writers who, looking at
things immediately for themselves with their own eyes, not through the
coloured glasses of inherited formula, and giving us a convincingly
first-hand transcript of reality, do nevertheless somehow as the whole
effect of them communicate or reinforce the total impression that life
is worth living, and that reason rules. He, too, bears witness in his
own way with the Sons of Morning—Merrlich wie am erstch Tag. He is one
of these potent idealists, sometimes called by the opposite name, who
can grapple with the naked fact as it lies in the mire and extract its
gold. Clear and piercing as is his eye for the first aspect of its
repellant detail, he can yet see life steadily and see it whole.
I will close with one
short verse of Stevenson's which sums up "subspecie aeternitatis," as it
were, the high melodious sanity of his testimony on life and death. The
aspiration it expresses is worthily fulfilled in that tomb on a mountain
top like the immortal grammarian's, in distant Samoa far from the land
he loved and glorified, but close to the stars, and within sound of the
sea, the tomb in which the fragile form once fretted by that strenuous
and soaring spirit has found its appropriate place of rest.
Under the wide and starry
sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me,
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill." |
