"To us children," writes Mr. Maurice Kingsley, "Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event.... At times he fairlybubbled over with humour; while his knowledge of slang—Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, Cockney, and English provincialisms—was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, scraps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of which were between children, Irishwomen, or cockneys. He was the only man, I believe, who ever knew by heart the famousIrish Court Scenes—naughtiest and most humorous of tales—unpublished, of course, but handed down from generation to generation of the faithful. Most delightful was an interview between his late Majesty George the Fourth and an itinerant showman, which ended up with, 'No, George the Fourth, you shall not have my Rumptifoozle!' What said animal was, or the authenticity of the story, he never would divulge."
"To us children," writes Mr. Maurice Kingsley, "Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event.... At times he fairlybubbled over with humour; while his knowledge of slang—Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, Cockney, and English provincialisms—was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, scraps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of which were between children, Irishwomen, or cockneys. He was the only man, I believe, who ever knew by heart the famousIrish Court Scenes—naughtiest and most humorous of tales—unpublished, of course, but handed down from generation to generation of the faithful. Most delightful was an interview between his late Majesty George the Fourth and an itinerant showman, which ended up with, 'No, George the Fourth, you shall not have my Rumptifoozle!' What said animal was, or the authenticity of the story, he never would divulge."
I think it is to the conversational quality of their style—its ridiculous and good-humored impertinences and surprises—that his best books owe a great deal of their charm. The footnotes are a study in themselves, and range from the mineral strata of Australia to the best way of sliding down banisters. Of the three tales already republished in this pleasant edition,Ravenshoehas always seemed to me the best in every respect; and in spite of its feeble plot and its impossible lay-figures—Erne, Sir GeorgeHillyar, and the painfully inane Gerty—I should rankThe Hillyars and the Burtonsabove the more terrifically imagined and more neatly constructedGeoffry Hamlyn. But this is an opinion on which I lay no stress.
FOOTNOTES:[A]The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. By Henry Kingsley. New Edition, with a Memoir by Clement Shorter. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden.
[A]The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. By Henry Kingsley. New Edition, with a Memoir by Clement Shorter. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden.
[A]The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. By Henry Kingsley. New Edition, with a Memoir by Clement Shorter. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden.
January 10, 1891. His Life.
Alexander William Kinglake was born in 1812, the son of a country gentleman—Mr. W. Kinglake, of Wilton House, Taunton—and received a country gentleman's education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. From college he went to Lincoln's Inn, and in 1837 was called to the Chancery Bar, where he practised with fair but not eminent success. In 1844 he publishedEothen, and having startled the town, quietly resumed his legal work and seemed willing to forget the achievement. Ten years later he accompanied his friend, Lord Raglan, to the Crimea. He retired from the Bar in 1856, and entered Parliament next year as member for Bridgwater. Re-elected in 1868, he was unseated on petition in 1869, and thenceforward gave himself up to the work of his life. He had consented, after Lord Raglan's death, to write a history ofthe Invasion of the Crimea. The two first volumes appeared in 1863; the last was published but two years before he succumbed, in the first days of 1891, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true perspective; but over Kinglake's mind it continued to loom in all its original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaître's, "le monde a changé en trente ans: lui ne bouge; il ne lève plus de dessus son papier à copie sa face congestionné." And yet Kinglake was no cloistered scribe. Before his last illness he dined out frequently, and was placed by many among the first half-a-dozen talkers in London. His conversation, though delicate and finished, brimmed full of interest in life and affairs: but let him enter his study, and its walls became a hedge. Without, the world was moving: within, it was always 1854, until by slow toiling it turned into 1855.
Style.
His style is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult labor recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author. Kinglake started by disclaiming "composition." "My narrative," he says, in the famous preface toEothen, "conveys not those impressions whichought to have beenproduced upon any well-constituted mind, but those which were really and truly received, at the time of his rambles, by a headstrong and not very amiable traveller.... As I have felt, so I have written."
"Eothen."
For all this, page after page ofEothengives evidence of deliberate calculation of effect. That book is at once curiously like and curiously unlike Borrows'Bible in Spain. The two belong to the same period and, in a sense, to the same fashion. Each combines a tantalizing personal charm with a strong, almost fierce, coloring of circumstance. The central figure in each is unmistakably an Englishman, and quite as unmistakably a singular Englishman. Each bears witness to a fine eye for theatrical arrangement. But whereas Borrowstood for ever fortified by his wayward nature and atrocious English against the temptation of writing as he ought, Kinglake commenced author with a respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The performance was wonderful; the promise a trifle dangerous.
The "Invasion."
"Composition" indeed proved the curse of theInvasion of the Crimea: for Kinglake was a slow writer, and composed with his eye on the page, the paragraph, the phrase, rather than on the whole work. Force and accuracy of expression are but parts of a good prose style; indeed are, strictly speaking, inseparable from perspective, balance, logical connection, rise and fall of emotion. It is but an indifferent landscape that contains no pedestrian levels: and his desire for the immediate success of each paragraph as it came helped Kinglake to miss the broad effect. He must always be vivid; and when the strain told, he exaggerated andsounded—as Matthew Arnold accused him of sounding—the note of provinciality. There were other causes. He was, as we have seen, an English country gentleman—avant tout je suis gentilhomme anglais, as the Duke of Wellington wrote to Louis XVIII. His admiration of the respectable class to which he belonged is revealed by a thousand touches in his narrative—we can find half a score in the description of Codrington's assault on the Great Redoubt in the battle of the Alma; nor, when some high heroic action is in progress, do we often miss an illustration, or at least a metaphor, from the hunting-field. Undoubtedly he had the distinction of his class; but its narrowness was his as surely. Also the partisanship of the eight volumes grows into a weariness. The longevity of the English Bench is notorious; but it comes of hearing both sides of every question.
After all, he was a splendid artist. He tamed that beautiful and dangerous beast, the English sentence, with difficulty indeed, but having tamed, worked it to high achievements. The great occasion always found him capable, and his treatment of it is not of the sort to be forgotten: witness the picture of the PrincePresident cowering in an inner chamber during the bloodshed of theCoup d'État, the short speech of Sir Colin Campbell to his Highlanders before the Great Redoubt (given in the exact manner of Thucydides), or the narrative of the Heavy Brigade's charge at Balaclava, culminating thus—
"The difference that there was in the temperaments of the two comrade regiments showed itself in the last moments of the onset. The Scots Greys gave no utterance except to a low, eager, fierce moan of rapture—the moan of outbursting desire. The Inniskillings went in with a cheer. With a rolling prolongation of clangour which resulted from the bends of a line now deformed by its speed, the 'three hundred' crashed in upon the front of the column."
"The difference that there was in the temperaments of the two comrade regiments showed itself in the last moments of the onset. The Scots Greys gave no utterance except to a low, eager, fierce moan of rapture—the moan of outbursting desire. The Inniskillings went in with a cheer. With a rolling prolongation of clangour which resulted from the bends of a line now deformed by its speed, the 'three hundred' crashed in upon the front of the column."
Dec. 5, 1891. Cambridge Baras.
What I am about to say will, no doubt, be set down to tribal malevolence; but I confess that if Cambridge men appeal to me less at one time than another it is when they begin to talk about their poets. The grievance is an old one, of course—at least as old as Mr. Birrell's "Obiter Dicta": but it has been revived by the little book of verse ("Quo Musa Tendis?") that I have just been reading. I laid it down and thought of Mr. Birrell's essay on Cambridge Poets, as he calls them: and then of another zealous gentleman, hailing from the same University, who arranged all the British bards in a tripos and brought out the Cambridge men at the top. This was a very characteristic performance: but Mr. Birrell's is hardly less so in these days when (to quote the epistolary parent) so much prominence is given to athleticism in our seats of learning. For he picks out a team of lightblue singers as though he meant to play an inter-University match, and challenges Oxford to "come on." He gives Milton a "blue," and says we oughtn't to play Shelley because Shelley isn't in residence.
Now to me this is as astonishing as if my butcher were to brag about Kirke White. My doctor might retort with Keats; and my scrivener—if I had one—might knock them both down with the name of Milton. It would be a pretty set-to; but I cannot see that it would affect the relative merits of mutton and laudanum and the obscure products of scrivenage. Nor, conversely (as they say at Cambridge), is it certain, or even likely, that the difference between a butcher or a doctor is the difference between Kirke White and Keats. And this talk about "University" poets seems somewhat otiose unless it can be shown that Cambridge and Oxford directly encourage poesy, or aim to do so. I am aware that somebody wins the Newdigate every year at Oxford, and that the same thing happens annually at Cambridge with respect to the Chancellor's Prize. But—to hark back to the butcher and apothecary—verses are perennially made uponMr. Lipton's Hams and Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer. Obviously some incentive is needed beyond a prize for stanzas on a given subject. I can understand Cambridge men when they assert that they produce more Wranglers than Oxford: that is a justifiable boast. But how does Cambridge encourage poets?
Calverley.
Oxford expelled Shelley: Cambridge whipped Milton.[A]Facit indignatio versus. If we press this misreading of Juvenal, Oxford erred only on the side of thoroughness. But that, notoriously, is Oxford's way. She expelled Landor, Calverley, and some others. My contention is that to expel a man is—however you look at it—better for his poesy than to make a don of him. Oxford says, "You are a poet; therefore this is no place for you. Go elsewhere; we set your aspiring soul at large." Cambridge says: "You are a poet. Let us employ you to fulfil other functions. Be a don." She made a don of Gray, of Calverley. Cambridge men are for ever casting Calverley in our teeth; whereas, in truth, he is specially to be quoted against them. As everybody knows, he was at both Universities, so over him we have a fair chance of comparing methods. As everybody knows, he went to Balliol first, and his ample cabin'd spirit led him to climb a wall, late at night. Something else caused him to be discovered, and Blaydes—he was called Blaydes then—was sent down.
Nobody can say what splendid effect this might have had upon his poetry. But he changed his name and went to Cambridge. And Cambridge made a don of him. If anybody thinks this was an intelligent stroke, let him consider the result. Calverley wrote a small amount of verse that, merely as verse, is absolutely faultless. To compare great things with little, you might as well try to alter a line of Virgil's as one of Calverley's. Forget a single epithet and substitute another, and the result is certain disaster. He has the perfection of the phrase—and there it ends. I cannot remember a single line of Calverley's that contains a spark of human feeling. Mr. Birrell himself has observed that Calverley is just a bit inhuman. But the cause of it does not seem to have occurred to him. Nor does the biography explain it. If we are to believe the common report of all who knew Calverley, hewas a man of simple mind and sincere, of quick and generous emotions. His biographers tell us also that he was one who seemed to have the world at his feet, one who had only to choose a calling to excel in it. Yet he never fulfilled his friends' high expectations. What was the reason of it all?
The accident that cut short his career is not wholly to blame, I think. At any rate, it will not explain away the exception I have taken to his verse. Had that been destined to exhibit the humanity which we seek, some promise of it would surely be discoverable; for he was a full-grown man at the time of that unhappy tumble on the ice. But there is none. It is all sheer wit, impish as a fairy changeling's, and always barren of feeling. Mr. Birrell has not supplied the explanatory epithet, so I will try to do so. It is "donnish." Cambridge, fondly imagining that she was showing right appreciation of Calverley thereby, gave him a Fellowship. Mr. Walter Besant, another gentleman from Calverley's college, complained, the other day, that literary distinction was never marked with a peerage. It is the same sort of error. And now Cambridge, having madeCalverley a don, claims him as a Cambridge poet; and the claim is just, if the epithet be intended to mark the limitations imposed by that University on his achievement.
"J.K.S."
Of "J.K.S.," whose second volume,Quo Musa Tendis?(Macmillan & Bowles), has just come from the press, it is fashionable to say that he follows after Calverley, at some distance. To be sure, he himself has encouraged this belief by coming from Cambridge and writing about Cambridge, and invoking C.S.C. on the first page of his earlier volume,Lapsus Calami. But, except that J.K.S. does his talent some violence by constraining it to imitate Calverley's form, the two men have little in common. The younger has a very different wit. He is more than academical. He thinks and feels upon subjects that were far outside Calverley's scope. Among the dozen themes with which he deals under the general heading ofPaullo Majora Canamus, there is not one which would have interested his "master" in the least. Calverley appears to have invited his soul after this fashion—"Come, let us go into the King's Parade and view the undergraduate as he walks about having no knowledge ofgood or evil. Let us make a jest of the books he admires and the schools for which he is reading." And together they manage it excellently. They talk Cambridge "shop" in terms of the wittiest scholarship. But of the very existence of a world of grown-up men and women they seem to have no inkling, or, at least, no care.
The problems of J.K.S. are very much more grown-up. You have only to readPaint and Ink(a humorous, yet quite serious, address to a painter upon the scope of his art) orAfter the Golden Wedding(wherein are given the soliloquies of the man and the woman who have been married for fifty years) to assure yourself that if J.K.S. be not Calverley's equal, it is only because his mind is vexed with problems bigger than ever presented themselves to the Cambridge don. To C.S.C., Browning was a writer of whose eccentricities of style delicious sport might be made. J.K.S. has parodied Browning too; but he has also perpended Browning, and been moulded by him. There are many stanzas in this small volume that, had Browning not lived, had never been written. Take this, from a writer to a painter:—
"So I do dare claim to be kin with you,And I hold you higher than if your taskWere doing no more than you say you do:We shall live, if at all, we shall stand or fall,As men before whom the world doffs its maskAnd who answer the questions our fellows ask."
Many such lines prove our writer's emancipation from servitude to the Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emancipation has come somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet, and it is quite likely that when he sounds them he may astonish the world rather considerably. Now, if we may interpret the last poem in his book, he is turning towards prose. "I go," he says—
"I go to fly at higher game:At prose as good as I can make it;And though it brings nor gold nor fame,I will not, while I live, forsake it."
It is no disparagement to his verse to rejoice over this resolve of his. For a young man who begins with epic may end with good epic; buta young man who begins with imitating Calverley will turn in time to prose if he means to write in earnest. And J.K.S. may do well or ill, but that he is to be watched has been evident since the days when he edited theReflector.[B]
FOOTNOTES:[A]I am bound to admit that the only authority for this is a note written into the text of Aubrey'sLives.[B]The reader will refer to the date at the head of this paper:—"Heu miserande puer! signa fata aspera rumpas,Tu Marcellus eris.* * * * * *Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra."
[A]I am bound to admit that the only authority for this is a note written into the text of Aubrey'sLives.
[A]I am bound to admit that the only authority for this is a note written into the text of Aubrey'sLives.
[B]The reader will refer to the date at the head of this paper:—"Heu miserande puer! signa fata aspera rumpas,Tu Marcellus eris.* * * * * *Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra."
[B]The reader will refer to the date at the head of this paper:—"Heu miserande puer! signa fata aspera rumpas,Tu Marcellus eris.* * * * * *Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra."
April 15, 1893. The "Island Nights' Entertainments."
I wish Mr. Stevenson had given this book another title. It covers but two out of the three stories in the volume; and, even so, it has the ill-luck to be completely spoilt by its predecessor, theNew Arabian Nights.
TheNew Arabian Nightswas in many respects a parody of the Eastern book. It had, if we make a few necessary allowances for the difference between East and West, the same, or very near the same, atmosphere of gallant, extravagant, intoxicated romance. The characters had the same adventurous irresponsibility, and exhibit the same irrelevancies and futilities. The Young Man with the Cream Cakes might well have sprung from the same brain as the facetious Barmecide, and young Scrymgeour sits helpless before his destiny as sat that other young man while the inexorable Barber sang the song and danced the dance of Zantout.Indeed Destiny in these books resembles nothing so much as a Barber with forefinger and thumb nipping his victims by the nose. It is as omnipotent, as irrational, as humorous and almost as cruel in the imitation as in the original. Of course I am not comparing these in any thing but their general presentment of life, or holding upThe Rajah's DiamondagainstAladdin. I am merely pointing out that life is presented to us in Galland and in Mr. Stevenson's first book of tales under very similar conditions—the chief difference being that Mr. Stevenson has to abate something of the supernatural, or to handle it less frankly.
But several years divide theNew Arabian Nightsfrom theIsland Nights' Entertainments; and in the interval our author has writtenThe Master of Ballantraeand his famousOpen Letteron Father Damien. That is to say, he has grown in his understanding of the human creature and in his speculations upon his creature's duties and destinies. He has travelled far, on shipboard and in emigrant trains; has passed through much sickness; has acquired property and responsibility; has mixed in public affairs; has writtenA Footnote to History, and sundryletters to theTimes; and even, as his latest letter shows, stands in some danger of imprisonment. Therefore, while the title of his new volume would seem to refer us once more to the old Arabian models, we are not surprised to find this apparent design belied by the contents. The third story, indeed,The Isle of Voices, has affinity with some of the Arabian tales—with Sindbad's adventures, for instance. But in the longerBeach of FalesáandThe Bottle Impwe are dealing with no debauch of fancy, but with the problems of real life.
For what is the knot untied in theBeach of Falesá? If I mistake not, our interest centres neither in Case's dirty trick of the marriage, nor in his more stiff-jointed trick of the devil-contraptions. The first but helps to construct the problem, the second seems a superfluity. The problem is (and the author puts it before us fair and square), How is Wiltshire a fairly loose moralist with some generosity of heart, going to treat the girl he has wronged? And I am bound to say that as soon as Wiltshire answers that question before the missionary—an excellent scene and most dramatically managed—my interest in the story, which is but halftold at this point, begins to droop. As I said, the "devil-work" chapter strikes me as stiff, and the conclusion but rough-and-tumble. And I feel certain that the story itself is to blame, and neither the scenery nor the persons, being one of those who had as lief Mr. Stevenson spake of the South Seas as of the Hebrides, so that he speak and I listen. Let it be granted that the Polynesian names are a trifle hard to distinguish at first—they are easier than Russian by many degrees—yet the difficulty vanishes as you read theSong of Rahéro, or theFootnote to History. And if it comes to habits, customs, scenery, etc., I protest a man must be exacting who can find no romance in these while reading Melville'sTypee. No, the story itself is to blame.
But what is the human problem inThe Bottle Imp? (Imagine Scheherazadé with a human problem!) Nothing less, if you please than the problem of Alcestis—nothing less and even something more; for in this case when the wife has made her great sacrifice of self, it is no fortuitous god but her own husband who wins her release, and at a price no less fearful than she herself has paid. Keawe being in possessionof a bottle which must infallibly bring him to hell-flames unless he can dispose of it at a certain price, Kokua his wife by a stratagem purchases the bottle from him, and stands committed to the doom he has escaped. She does her best to hide this from Keawe, but he, by accident discovering the truth, by another stratagem wins back the curse upon his own head, and is only rescued by adeus ex machinâin the shape of a drunken boatswain.
Two or three reviewers have already given utterance upon this volume; and they seem strangely unable to determine which is the best of its three tales. I vote forThe Bottle Impwithout a second's doubt; and, if asked my reasons, must answer (1), that it deals with a high and universal problem, whereas inThe Isle of Voicesthere is no problem at all, and in theBeach of Falesáthe problem is less momentous and perhaps (though of this I won't be sure) more closely restricted by the accidents of circumstance and individual character; (2) as I have hinted, theBeach of Falesáhas faults of construction, one of which is serious, if not vital, whileThe Isle of Voices, though beautifully composed, is tied down by the triviality ofits subject. ButThe Bottle Impis perfectly constructed: the last page ends the tale, and the tale is told with a light grace, sportive within restraint, that takes nothing from the seriousness of the subject. Some may think this extravagant praise for a little story which, after all (they will say), is flimsy as a soap bubble. But let them sit down and tick off on their fingers the names of living authors who could have written it, and it may begin to dawn on them that a story has other dimensions than length and thickness.
Sept. 9, 1893. First thoughts on "Catriona."
Some while ago Mr. Barrie put together in a little volume eleven sketches of eleven men whose fame has travelled far beyond the University of Edinburgh. For this reason, I believe, he called them "An Edinburgh Eleven"—as fond admirers speak of Mr. Arthur Shrewsbury (upon whose renown it is notorious that the sun never sets) as "the Notts Professional," and of a yet more illustrious cricketer by his paltry title of "Doctor"—
"Not so much honouring thee,As giving it a hope that thereIt could not wither'd be."
Of the Eleven referred to, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson was sent in at eighth wicket down to face this cunning "delivery":—"He experiments too long; he is still a boy wondering what he is going to be. With Cowley's candor he tells us that he wants to write something by which he may be for ever known. His attempts in this direction have been in the nature of trying different ways, and he always starts off whistling. Having gone so far without losing himself, he turns back to try another road. Does his heart fail him, despite his jaunty bearing,or is it because there is no hurry?... But it is quite time the great work was begun."
I have taken the liberty to italicise a word or two, because in them Mr. Barrie supplied an answer to his question. "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne!" is not an exhortation to hurry: and in Mr. Stevenson's case, at any rate, there was not the least need to hurry. There was, indeed, a time when Mr. Stevenson had not persuaded himself of this. InAcross the Plainshe tells us how, at windy Anstruther and an extremely early age, he used to draw his chair to the table and pour forth literature "at such a speed, and with such intimations ofearly death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder. Then it was that I wroteVoces Fidelium, a series of dramatic monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a Covenanting novel—like so many others, never finished. Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clapVoces Fideliumon the fire before he goes, so clear does he appear to me, sitting there between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late night; so ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present!"
There was no hurry then, as he now sees: and there never was cause to hurry, I repeat. "But how is this? Is, then, the great book written?" I am sure I don't know. Probably not: for human experience goes to show thatTheGreat Book (likeTheGreat American Novel) never gets written. But thatagreat story has been written is certain enough: and one of the curious points about this story is its title.
It is notCatriona; nor is itKidnapped.Kidnappedis a taking title, andCatrionabeautiful in sound and suggestion of romance: andKidnapped(as everyone knows) is a capital tale, though imperfect; andCatriona(as the critics began to point out, the day after its issue) a capital tale with an awkward fissure midway in it. "It is the fate of sequels"—thus Mr. Stevenson begins his Dedication—"to disappoint those who have waited for them"; and it is possible that the boys of Merry England (who, it may be remembered, thought more ofTreasure Islandthan ofKidnapped) will take but lukewarmly toCatriona, having had five years in which to forget its predecessor. No: the title of the great story isThe Memoirs of David Balfour. Catriona has a prettier name than David, and may give it to the last book of her lover's adventures: but the Odyssey was not christened after Penelope.
PutKidnappedandCatrionatogether within the same covers, with one title-page, one dedication (here will be the severest loss) and one table of contents, in which the chapters are numbered straight away fromI. to LX.: and—this above all things—read the tale right through from David's setting forth from the garden gate at Essendean to his homeward voyage, by Catriona's side, on the Low Country ship. And having done this, be so good as to perceive how paltry are the objections you raised against the two volumes when you took them separately. Let me raise again one or two of them.
(1.)Catrionais just two stories loosely hitched together—the one of David's vain attempt to save James Stewart, the other of the loves of David and Catriona: and in case the critic should be too stupid to detect this, Mr. Stevenson has been at the pains to divide his book into Part I. and Part II. Now this, which is a real fault in a book calledCatriona, is no fault at all inThe Memoirs of David Balfour, which by its very title claims to be constructed loosely. In an Odyssey the road taken by the wanderer is all the nexus required; and the continuity of his presence (if the author know his business) is warrant enough for the continuity of our interest in his adventures. That the history of Gil Blas of Santillane consists chiefly of episodes is not a serious criticism upon Lesage's novel.
(2.) InCatrionamore than a few of the characters are suffered to drop out of sight just as we have begun to take an interest in them. There is Mr. Rankeillor, for instance, whose company in the concluding chapter ofKidnappedwas too good to be spared very easily; and there is Lady Allardyce—a wonderfully clever portrait; and Captain Hoseason—we tread for a moment on the verge of re-acquaintance, but are disappointed; and Balfour of Pilrig; and at the end of Part I. away into darkness goes the Lord Advocate Preston-grange, with his charming womenkind.
Well, if this be an objection to the tale, it is one urged pretty often against life itself—that we scarce see enough of the men and women we like. And here again that which may be a fault inCatrionais no fault at all inThe Memoirs of David Balfour. Though novelists may profess in everything they write to hold a mirror up to life, the reflection must needs be more artificial in a small book than in a large. In the one, for very clearness, they must isolate a few human beings and cut off the currents (so to speak) bearing upon them from the outside world: in the other, with a larger canvas theyare able to deal with life more frankly. Were the Odyssey cut down to one episode—say that of Nausicäa—we must round it off and have everyone on the stage and provided with his just portion of good and evil before we ring the curtain down. As it is, Nausicäa goes her way. And as it is, Barbara Grant must go her way at the end of Chapter XX.; and the pang we feel at parting with her is anything rather than a reproach against the author.
(3.) It is very certain, as the book stands, that the reader must experience some shock of disappointment when, after 200 pages of the most heroical endeavoring, David fails in the end to save James Stewart of the Glens. Were the book concerned wholly with James Stewart's fate, the cheat would be intolerable: and as a great deal more than half ofCatrionapoints and trembles towards his fate like a magnetic needle, the cheat is pretty bad if we takeCatrionaalone. But once more, if we are dealing withThe Memoirs of David Balfour—if we bear steadily in mind that David Balfour is our concern—not James Stewart—the disappointment is far more easily forgiven. Then, and then only, we get the right perspective ofDavid's attempt, and recognize how inevitable was the issue when this stripling engaged to turn back the great forces of history.
It is more than a lustre, as the Dedication reminds us, since David Balfour, at the end of the last chapter ofKidnapped, was left to kick his heels in the British Linen Company's office. Five years have a knack of making people five years older; and the wordy, politic intrigue ofCatrionais at least five years older than the rough-and-tumble intrigue ofKidnapped; of the fashion of theVicomte de Bragelonnerather than of theThree Musketeers. But this is as it should be; for older and astuter heads are now mixed up in the case, and Preston-grange is a graduate in a very much higher school of diplomacy than was Ebenezer Balfour. And if no word was said inKidnappedof the love of women, we know now that this matter was held over until the time came for it to take its due place in David Balfour's experience. Everyone knew that Mr. Stevenson would draw a woman beautifully as soon as he was minded. Catriona and her situation have their foreshadowing inThe Pavilion on the Links. But for all that she is a surprise. She begins to be asurprise—a beautiful surprise—when in Chapter X. she kisses David's hand "with a higher passion than the common kind of clay has any sense of;" and she is a beautiful surprise to the end of the book. The loves of these two make a moving story—old, yet not old: and I pity the heart that is not tender for Catriona when she and David take their last walk together in Leyden, and "the knocking of her little shoes upon the way sounded extraordinarily pretty and sad."
Nov. 3, 1894. "The Ebb Tide."
A certain Oxford lecturer, whose audience demurred to some trivial mistranslation from the Greek, remarked: "I perceive, gentlemen, that you have been taking a mean advantage of me. You have been looking it out in the Lexicon."
The pleasant art of reasoning about literature on internal evidence suffers constant discouragement from the presence and activity of those little people who insist upon "looking it out in the Lexicon." Their brutal methods will upset in two minutes the nice calculations of months. Your logic, your taste, your palpitating sense of style, your exquisite ear for rhythm and cadence—what do these avail against the man who goes straight to Stationers' Hall or the Parish Register?
"Two thousand pounds of educationDrops to a ten-rupee jezail,"
as Mr. Kipling sings. The answer, of course, is that the beauty of reasoning upon internal evidence lies in the process rather than the results. You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some conclusion which is entirely wrong: within a week you are set right by some fellow with a Parish Register. Well, but meanwhile you have been reading poetry, and he has not. Only the uninstructed judge criticism by its results alone.
If, then, after studying Messrs. Stevenson and Osbourne'sThe Ebb-Tide(London: Heinemann) I hazard a guess or two upon its authorship; and if somebody take it into his head to write out to Samoa and thereby elicit the information that my guesses are entirely wrong—why then we shall have been performing each of us his proper function in life; and there's an end of the matter.
Let me begin though—after reading a number of reviews of the book—by offering my sympathy to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Very possibly he does not want it. I guess him to be a gentleman of uncommonly cheerful heart. I hope so, at any rate: for it were sad to think that indignation had clouded even for a minute the gay spirit that gave usThe Wrong Box—surely the funniest book written in the last ten years. But he has been most shamefully served. Writing with him, Mr. Stevenson has given usThe WreckerandThe Ebb-Tide. Faults may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are splendid tales: nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a singular and original pattern. Yet no reviewer praises them on their own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in relation to Mr. Stevenson's previous work, and the reviewers concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr. Stevenson's development—that he is not continuing as the public expected him to continue.
Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them. But of Mr. Stevenson's genius—always something wayward—freaks might have been predicted from the first. A genius so consciously artistic, so quick in sympathy with other men's writings, however diverse, was bound from the first to make many experiments. Before the public took his career in hand and mapped it out for him, he made such an experiment withThe Black Arrow; and it was forgiven easily enough. But because he now takes Mr. Osbourne into partnership for a new set of experiments, the reviewers—not considering that these, whatever their faults, are vast improvements onThe Black Arrow—ascribe all those faults to the new partner.
But that is rough criticism. Moreover it is almost demonstrably false. For the weakness ofThe Wrecker, such as it was, lay in the Paris and Barbizon business and the author's failure to make this of one piece with the main theme, with the romantic histories of theCurrency Lassand theFlying Scud. But which of the two partners stands responsible for this Paris-Barbizon business? Mr. Stevenson beyond a doubt. If you shut your eyes to Mr. Stevenson's confessed familiarity with the Paris and the Barbizon of a certain era; if you choose to deny that he wrote that chapter on Fontainebleau inAcross the Plains; if you go on to deny that he wrote the opening of Chapter XXI. ofThe Wrecker; why then you are obliged to maintain that it was Mr. Osbourne, and not Mr. Stevenson, who wrote that famous chapter on the Roussillon Wine—which is absurd. And if, in spite of its absurdity, you stick to this also, why, then you are only demonstrating that Mr. Lloyd Osbourne is one of the greatest living writers of fiction: and your conception of him as a mere imp of mischief jogging the master's elbow is wider of the truth than ever.
No; the vital defect ofThe Wreckermust be set down to Mr. Stevenson's account. Fine story as that was, it failed to assimilate the Paris-Barbizon business.The Ebb-Tide, on the other hand, is all of one piece. It has at any rate one atmosphere, and one only. And who can demand a finer atmosphere of romance than that of the South Pacific?
The Ebb-Tide, so far as atmosphere goes, isall of one piece. And the story, too, is all of one piece—until we come to Attwater: I own Attwater beats me. As Mr. Osbourne might say, "I have no use for" that monstrous person. I wish, indeed, Mr. Osbournehadsaid so: for again I cannot help feeling that the offence of Attwater lies at Mr. Stevenson's door. He strikes me as a bad dream of Mr. Stevenson's—a General Gordon out of theArabian Nights. Do you remember a drawing of Mr. du Maurier's inPunch, wherein, seizing upon a locution of Miss Rhoda Broughton's, he gave us a group of "magnificently ugly" men? I seem to see Attwater in that group.
But if Mr. Stevenson is responsible for Attwater, surely also he contributed the two splendid surprises of the story. I am the more certain because they occur in the same chapter, and within three pages of each other. I mean, of course, Captain Davis's sudden confession about his "little Adar," and the equally startling discovery that the cargo of theFaralloneschooner, supposed to be champagne, is mostly water. These are the two triumphant surprises of the book: and I shall continue to believe that only one living man could have contrived them, until somebody writes to Samoa and obtains the assurance that they are among Mr. Osbourne's contributions to the tale.
Two small complaints I have to make. The first is of the rather inartistically high level of profanity maintained by the speech of Davis and Huish. It is natural enough, of course; but that is no excuse if the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Cæsar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovelyHesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid the association of ideas.
Dec. 22, 1894. R.L.S. In Memorium.
The Editor asks me to speak of Stevenson this week: because, since the foundation ofThe Speaker, as each new book of Stevenson's appeared, I have had the privilege of writingabout it here. So this column, too, shall be filled; at what cost ripe journalists will understand, and any fellow-cadet of letters may guess.
For when the telegram came, early on Monday morning, what was our first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow passed and the selfish instinct began to reassert itself (as it always does) and whisper "What haveIlost? What is the difference tome?" Was it not something like this—"Put away books and paper and pen. Stevenson is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britain—though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names—we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us—small or more than small—had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainlywould never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters—that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole.
Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs. One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness—a "soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty: that he labored and keptthe lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not.
Had there been another Scott, another Dumas—if I may change the image—to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for—let it be said again—no man had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa—to die "far from Argos, dear land of home."
And then consider the brave spirit that carried him—the last of a great race—along this far and difficult path; for it is the man we must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in thevery penumbra of death. Yet Stevenson spoke always as gallantly as his great predecessor. Their "cheerful stoicism," which allies his books with the best British breeding, will keep them classical as long as our nation shall value breeding. It shines to our dim eyes now, as we turn over the familiar pages ofVirginibus Puerisque, and from page after page—in sentences and fragments of sentences—"It is not altogether ill with the invalid after all" ... "Who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course." [Hehad two books at least in hand and uncompleted, the papers say.] "Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?" ... "What sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is!" ... "It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.... For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young.... The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with himclouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land."
As it was inVirginibus Puerisque, so is it in the last essay in his last book of essays:—