Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members. This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future.
Raskolnikoff is the greatest book I have read easily in ten years; I am glad you took to it. Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from livingina book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. The Juge d'Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation: the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protoplasmic humanity of Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder: the execution also, superb in places. Another has beentranslated:Humiliés et Offensés. It is even more incoherent thanLe Crime et le Châtiment; but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power. Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure. Have you heard that he became a stout imperialist conservative? It is interesting to know. To something of that side, the balance leans with me also, in view of the incoherency and incapacity of all. The old boyish idea of the march on Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I know the worst assails me. Fundamental errors in human nature of two sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations. First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness consists of anything but an internal harmony. Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success—the elements our friends wish to eliminate. And on the other hand, happiness is a question of morality—or of immorality, there is no difference—and conviction. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of anger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted avia media, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same. It is quite an open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy, on the other hand there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy. He was right (if he said it) that he wasla misère humaine, cureless misery—unless perhaps by the gallows. Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had justice done it, no, not by Whitman. As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (quorum pars), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch of life. Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two flaunting emblems of their hollowness.
God knows where I am driving to. But here comes my lunch.
Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue. I have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle. Pray don't fail to come this summer. It will be a great disappointment now it has been spoken of, if you do.—Yours ever,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
[Mr. Locker-Lampson, better known as Frederick Locker, the friend of Tennyson and most accomplished writer ofvers de sociétéin his time, had asked Stevenson, through their common friend Mr. Andrew Lang, for a set of verses, and he had sent those beginning:
Not roses to the rose, I trow,The thistle sends, nor to the beeDo wasps bring honey. Wherefore nowShould Locker ask a verse from me?
Not roses to the rose, I trow,The thistle sends, nor to the beeDo wasps bring honey. Wherefore nowShould Locker ask a verse from me?
Not roses to the rose, I trow,
The thistle sends, nor to the bee
Do wasps bring honey. Wherefore now
Should Locker ask a verse from me?
To Mr. Locker's acknowledgment Stevenson replied as follows, asking for that gentleman's help in trying to get a nomination to Christ's Hospital (the historic Bluecoat School) for the son of a friend who had shown him kindness at Hyères:]
Bournemouth, September, 1886.
Dear Locker,—You take my verses too kindly, but you will admit, for such a bluebottle of a versifier to enter the house of Gertrude, where her necklace hangs, was not a little brave. Your kind invitation, I fear, must remain unaccepted; and yet—if I am very well—perhaps next Spring—(for I mean to be very well)—my wife might.... But all that is in the clouds with my better health. And now look here: you are a rich man and know many people, therefore perhaps some of the Governors of Christ's Hospital. If you do, I know a most deserving case, in which I would (if I could) do anything. To approach you in this way, is not decent; and you may therefore judge by my doing it, how near this matter lies to my heart. I enclose you a list of the Governors, which I beg you to return, whether or not you shall be able to do anything to help me.
The boy's name is ——, he and his mother are very poor. It may interest youin her cause if I tell you this: that when I was dangerously ill at Hyères, this brave lady, who had then a sick husband of her own (since dead) and a house to keep and a family of four to cook for, all with her own hands, for they could not afford a servant, yet took watch-about with my wife, and contributed not only to my comfort, but to my recovery, in a degree that I am not able to limit. You can conceive how much I suffer from my impotence to help her, and indeed I have already shown myself a thankless friend. Let not my cry go up before you in vain.
Yours in hope,Robert Louis Stevenson.
Yours in hope,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
[The sequel of this correspondence explains itself.]
Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886.
That I should call myself a man of letters and land myself in such unfathomable ambiguities! No, my dear Locker, I did not want a cheque; and in my ignorance of business, which is greater even than my ignorance of literature, I have taken the liberty of drawing a pen through the document and returning it; should this be against the laws of God or man, forgive me. All that I meant by my excessively disgusting reference to your material well-being was the vague notion that a man who is well off was sure to know a Governor of Christ's Hospital; though how I quite arrived at this conclusion I do not see. A man with a cold in the head does not necessarily know a ratcatcher; and the connection is equally close—as it now appears to my awakened and somewhat humbled spirit. For all that, let me thank you in the warmest manner for your friendly readiness to contribute. You say you have hopes of becoming a miser; I wish I had; but indeed I believe you deceive yourself, and are as far from it as ever. I wish I had any excuse to keep your cheque, for it is much more elegant to receive than to return; but I have my way of making it up to you, and I do sincerely beg you to write to the two Governors. This extraordinary outpouring of correspondence would (if you knew my habits) convince you of my great eagerness in this matter. I would promise gratitude; but I have made a promise to myself to make no more promises to anybody else, having broken such a host already, and come near breaking my heart in consequence; and as for gratitude, I am by nature a thankless dog, and was spoiled from a child up. But if you can help this lady in the matter of the hospital, you will have helped the worthy. Let me continue to hope that I shall make out my visit in the Spring, and believe me, yours very truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
It may amuse you to know that a very long while ago, I broke my heart to try to imitate your verses, and failed hopelessly; I saw some of the evidences the other day among my papers, and blushed to the heels.
R. L. S.
I give up finding out your name in the meantime, and keep to that by which you will be known—Frederick Locker.
24th September 1886.
My Dear Locker,—You are simply an angel of light, and your two letters have gone to the post; I trust they will reach the hearts of the recipients; at least, that could not be more handsomely expressed. About the cheque, well now I am going to keep it; but I assure you Mrs. —— has never asked me for money, and I would not dare to offer any till she did. For all that I shall stick to the cheque now, and act to that amount as your almoner. In this way I reward myself for the ambiguity of my epistolary style. I suppose, if you please, you may say your verses are thin (would you so describe an arrow, by the way? and one that struck the gold? It scarce strikes me as exhaustively descriptive), and, thin or not, they are (and I have found them) inimitably elegant. I thank you again very sincerely for the generous trouble you have taken in this matter which was so near my heart, and you may be very certain it will be the fault of my health and not my inclination, if I do not see you before very long; for all that has passed has made me in more than the official sense sincerely yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
(To be continued.)
THE POINT OF VIEW
"A HundredThousand Copies."
What is the formula for writing a book which will sell a hundred thousand copies? Authors consider the question with more or less interest, publishers meditate upon it more closely still. What sort of works is it that this interesting experience befalls? Are they literary masterpieces? Let us see. There was "David Harum;" so much of that as is literature is chiefly horse stories—excellent horse stories, without "tendency" or moral purpose. The rest of it that is good is made up of character sketches in which David Harum is the character. It is the kind of book of which you say, after it has entertained you and kept you cheerful for two or three evenings, that it is not much of a book, but has mighty good things in it, and the following morning you find it necessary to buy two more copies to send away.
Then there is the "Dooley" book, which has been doing its tens of thousands; that, too, is a book which has good things in it rather than a literary masterpiece; and though the good things were better when served hot in the newspapers, they do not lose all their flavor when dished up on a cold plate.
There is a book from Kansas called "In His Steps," which is reported to have sold by the million, both in this country and in Great Britain, which appeals to readers who are interested in putting the precepts of the Gospels into practical effect. There is not much literature in that book either, and in reckoning its readers it is proper to consider that it has been issued in very cheap form.
That takes us nearly back to "Trilby," which had some literature in it, some theology, much entertainment, and some structure; and yet as a book it was rather a happy-go-lucky work than a great novel. But it sold far more than a hundred thousand. Verily, with these examples in mind we must feel that the literary race is not to the professionally swift nor to the professionally literary. For a living example of what we should consider a legitimate success we have to fall on Mr. Kipling, who has built up a reputation in prose by good writing, and is able to gather the fruits of it whenever he puts forth his hand. It may be that in the matter of poetry he has gathered a fig reputation from a sowing rich in thistles, but that has been because he has been progressive, and finding his thistles so readily marketable has been stirred to cause figs to follow them.
What, then, is our popular book going to be? Shall it be a compilation of horse stories like "David Harum," a religious story like "In His Steps," a book like "Dooley," of lively discourse on current events, or a "Trilby," compounded of charm, mystery, Bohemianism, love, theology, and music? Alas, there is no formula. One may not choose what he will write, nor plan before-hand with any certainty to catch his myriad of readers. The only shafts the author can let fly are those that he finds in his quiver. He may grow expert in shooting them; he may bring down more readers with each successive missile, but the arrows themselves will always be those that he happens to have in stock. All he can do is to select each one in turn and look to its feathers and its point and let it drive.
But while there is no sure method of writing a book that will find a hundred thousand buyers, the fact that nowadays the successful book may succeed enormously, brings pleasant thrills to the practitioner of letters. The finding of a big nugget sets the hearts of all the prospectors a-thump. The miraculous draught agitates all the fishermen and makes them experience, without sin, the delights of holding a ticket in a lottery. Let us be thankful, without envy, to the Fortunatuses of letters. We—most of us—would be glad if we too had the golden touch, and yet we need not sorrow if we haven't it, for it has its drawbacks, and once the possession of it is demonstrated, it tends to make its owner merchant first and writer afterward. His wares are so precious that he is bound to turn trader; his success is so notorious that he is constrained to be a public character, and he pays in part for phenomenal good luck by the loss of a valuable obscurity. Let us be sympathetic with literary popularity rather than unduly stirred by it. Let us say, "Poor Jones, his book has sold a hundred thousand and he has gone to Europe. What a desperate chore it will be to keep that up—if he can keep it up—and what a bump he will get if he finds that he can't."
THE FIELD OF ART
Let us consider some of the difficulties of the artist in dealing with subjects that are to be considered in other modes than his own.
The artist is of necessity extremely stubborn, like men who have to do things; impressionable as a man who must push the tiller at the slightest warning, for he must be both rudder and helmsman. He is unjust very often, for he sees men before principles—often, alas, the man whom he sees being himself. He is unaffected to a surprising degree by criticism or advice from outside, and extremely careful of it from within the circle. He is doubtful and irresponsive in answer to reasoning not clearly put into his own terms of thinking. Like the Chinese philosopher, the artist is apt to say, or to think without saying, "What is proven by the fact that your dialectics are better than mine, and that your mind has a better use and handling of logic? Nothing more than these very facts of your powers. Is, therefore, what you say true because I cannot confute it? All this, you say, may be right in the terms of another way of looking at things, but it does not seem to be so in any arrangement that I can make of mine." "E pur si muove," he would have answered, like Galileo, to arguments in his own mode but based upon theological and therefore extraneous views.
Far down within him remains a dislike of a closed and finished proposition. He is Bagehot's Englishman. He does not wish to commit himself to a statement that twice two make five, but he is also extremely unwilling to pin himself to the statement that twice two make four. His mind lives in the practical, in the joining of the ideal with the real, which does not prevent his being a dreamer—in fact, confirms him in that direction. All these things he has in common with the man of practical action who, himself, in these things, recalls the attitude of mind said to be feminine.
As he works for no result outside of his work—that is to say that the emotions produced by him upon himself and upon others are not prolonged outside of the work itself—he is kept more and more within a circle of unprovable suppositions, within a method of applying thought that seems satisfactory, as it is complete in its circuit. For, as you know, he gives only a fictitious pain, a fictitious sadness—and no real sorrow or hurt comes from his most beautiful tragedy; indeed, it produces an exaltation of the mind not disconnected with joy. Confined within his own circle he generally loses the use of the methods of words; and he is often, and most wisely and rightly, unwilling to handle them; for he has the most complete and almost superstitious respect for the mastery of tools in methods of appreciation. When he uses words he finds that they are tools whose use he does not know—living tools that refuse to work, that stumble over each other, that lead him astray, that turn on him sometimes, or actually direct his path, instead of being led by him; until at length he recognizes that they are old acquaintances in new forms. They are the signs of thought, of ideas, and perceptions.They are not these last themselves.And he becomes both delighted and timid; pleased, because words express differently and yet like his tools; timid, because how long and difficult and endless perhaps are their full use and mastery. He sees also that each one is an abstraction; that each phrase, and often each word, has involved the consumption, the absorption, the waste of hundreds of sensations concerning still more objects. To put into record merely the impressions of nature, he has only a few notes, and he knows that these external appearances that delight him are written in an infinite gamut. Before the accurate and full description of anything that he sees could be worked out in words, it would have decayed and been born again many times. He sees that the essence of these tools is to generalize, and thereby to leave over in each thing something that is inexpressible. All this reminds him of the failures and inadequaciesof his own art, wherein (in those moments of despair which are the consequence of passionate attachment) he feels that he has felt all, and that his miserable means only allow him to express a part. This eternal enemy—so much loved—nature, never meets him half-way for more than a moment. Just as he closes the circle of the little world he has made, in which he thinks, for a moment, that she is imprisoned, and says to himself and to us—There! she passes on making other worlds and creating continual appearances.
How is he in days like this, when the life of the seasons is beginning again, to paint the spring that delights him? He can paint some trees and a little sky, and the reflections of water. How can he paint its murmur? How can he paint the settling restlessness of the air above him? How can he paint the forgotten odors of new growth? How can he paint that "becoming" of the season, in which is also expressed the faint sadness of a past long put aside?
Surely he feels that all is inadequate, and that the only happy one is he who forgets to paint, and only looks without seeing.
He may turn to those who work in other ways, but who also—he becomes more and more sure of it—have limitations not unlike his. But those limitations are not his, and they are not responsible to him, and so far he can be happy with them. With them he can continue the dreams of a complete recall and perception. And when they fail he does not suffer; he is more willing to see that they could not look at everything from every point of view at once.
He recognizes with some amusement how words, and consequently ideas, are placed in masses, as he places forms and colors; and is occasionally even a little worried when what he considers styles are confused, and thought which he respects is brushed about for effect or for purpose, like so much paint.
And he recognizes that just as with him in the modes he knows, minds are caught in the net of imitation, and fly around and about it without escaping, so that they are even affected in their deepest soul—that this often comes from using certain manners and certain styles, "for that the matter of style very much comes out of the manner," and the outside reacts upon the inner.
He gives up asking for all sorts of truth in any one form of language, and does not lose the interest, the exhilaration that Shakespeare gives because his Marc Antony does not include all, besides, that history has told. Science cannot wither the charm of Cleopatra.
At some such moment, when he sees thought more clearly, and is reverential toward the minds that live in ideas, he may be asked, as I have been, to express in words his beliefs and perceptions. At such a moment, forgetful of early experiences, that were both confusing and disenchanting, but are long past and faded, he may do as I have done—open some page of a writer—some person who thinks in words and who thinks about art.
He finds that that writer has asked art to tell "the truth," but has forgotten to ask of it sincerity. In reality he has forbidden the artist to express himself while expressing things. He has asked him to go out of his own humanity, out of his own thought, his own emotion, his own proper affection, and try to execute what he thinks proper to cause on others such and such an impression. Nothing can relieve this tendency from the duplicity which looks toward the public, and only lives to act upon the spectators.
This is not the painter's art of painting. In minds like that of Mr. Ruskin, the destiny thus given to painting would be certainly one of the noblest and most useful of functions, but it has the fault of being impossible. No more could music, while agitating my nerves according to the laws of harmony, teach me at the same time as from the chair of a professor.
No, never, however shocking it may sound in or out of studios, never has truth in the ordinary sense of the word been the end of art. The value of a painting as a means of making us know the nature of realities shall have nothing in common with its value as a work of art.
Truth is not the pictorial essence of a painting; it is, on the contrary, the manner or means of the painting's addressing ordinary intelligence; all the general powers that the artist has in common with other men, but which faculties and powers do not constitute his artistic side, that part of himself which he tries to please, to represent, to disengage, to assert in his painting.
He may, of course, because his profession is partly a profession or art of sight, teach how to see—how to see better and farther and more delicately; but this is only incidental,and is good so far as it does not injure or detract from his own special duty. Of course he should not shock or annoy the most intelligent part of our intelligence, so that our other instincts that meet his may not be troubled in their peaceful enjoyment.
Therefore, according to time and place, in one way for the mediæval mind, in another for the Oriental, in another for us of to-day, it is advisable that he conform somewhat to the general knowledge that composes the vague ideas of a public; that he do not contradict too squarely scientific exactness that is fairly familiar.
But nothing can be falser than to measure his merit by the instruction he gives us. In the first place, if what he does is a lesson of observation, the effort to understand it is so much to detract from the spectator's emotion. Secondly, if a painter wishes to teach he will no longer be carried away by his special emotions, the one thing in which he is stronger than we. He cannot, even if he wishes—and this will explain the cause of certain blunders that have astonished us. It is for the scientific, the religious mind to remove our ignorances and correct our moral defects; it is not the duty of the artistic mind.
No more than when I am dead and have found the Reality, now vaguely seen in this world of appearances, should I expect of the divine who may preach my funeral sermon to try to decide what may have been my errors in the technique of the art of painting.
Nor, of course, can the end of art be untruth. Teachings like those of Mr. Ruskin, far more common than they should be (because of our natural want of humility and charity, and the narrowness of the fields into which accident forces us), divide absolutely our art into two kinds—those that give images of things just as they are, and those that give images of things just as they are not; such a dilemma as worries the child's mind.
"Things as they are" may mean so much as to be meaningless. If we mean things as they are in themselves, only God can so see them as to enclose them and leave nothing outside but falsehood. For us, we see but as in a mirror darkly. We have a few imperfect senses, and such moral faculties as we manage to distinguish the one from the other, and which we have to complete by making one act upon the others.
So that for us there exist many truths. We have truths of smell, before which all things are absorbed in one or more impressions of odor. We have the truths of the eyes, for which all is appearance. We have the truths of intelligence, for which there are ideas; truths of feeling for which there are impressions; and many others in a long list perhaps exhaustless; and I only use these definitions for our momentary convenience.
Now, in connection with which of these truths must the painter represent the manner of existence of objects?
That is the question the painter must ask himself—that must be his canon of æsthetics. He cannot exile the truths that affect his specialty, however much he may care for the others. It is possible for him to let the truths of one kind affect his own, but his own must predominate, or the work of art will not exist.
Persons like Mr. Ruskin think that they are fighting the cause of truth against falsehood. In fact, they are making one truth fight another, with injury to both.
It is not possible that a work of art should define like science and still move like poetry.
It is precisely that point of which I spoke first, that tendency of the artist which makes him not a reasoner but a seer, which gives him the unexplainable power of impressing us in a way that we can only analyze afterward. It is because he can escape from the rule of his intelligence, can become a being that does not judge, can become as a little child, no longer see things through ideas, but merely feel the agitation of a love, an unexplainable passion. As if he felt the breath that animates the world behind a covering of what we call realities.
It is in this way that he is an awkward man when he tries to handle the tools which we generally calllanguage—that is to say, words and phrases; in so far, at least, as he has to use them, to explain the ideas and sentiments involved in his own language. This is all the more difficult in that literature, the language of words, has not become acquainted as yet with this mind of the artist, and has not furnished to the artist special tools to define his intentions and position. It is because of the peculiarities of his work, which we have just considered, that no person can explain that work perfectly in terms of words; while he, the artist himself, grows continually more averse to handle words which seem unsatisfactory, and, naturally, becomes more and more unfit to use them.
J. L. F.