I want to share a short section from his book on Twelve Types. Many of you will know this book already. This section is about Robert Lewis Stevenson, who I consider a truly great writer.
Stevenson’s new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, ‘The Destroying Angel,’ in ‘The Dynamiter,’ that it is ’highly fantastic and putting a strain on our credulity.’ This is rather like describing the travels of Baron Munchausen as ‘unconvincing.’ The whole story of ‘The Dynamiter’ is a kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story ’The Destroying Angel’ is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson’s London stories. He actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, that, ’though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on the whole rather an irritating presence.’ From this we are almost driven to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr Baildon thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he were a man in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we met him in real life we should kill him.
The fact is, that the whole mass of
Stevenson’s spiritual and intellectual virtues
have been partly frustrated by one additional virtue-that
of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his
great message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large
and straggling letters, it would have startled men
like a blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed
paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone
supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He
suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely
said, by not doing every department well enough, but
by doing every department too well. As child,
cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so
good that most people could not see the same man under
all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play
the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just
tolerably, he is called an Admirable Crichton, but
if he does all three thoroughly well, he is apt to
be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black.
This is what has happened in the case of Stevenson.
If ‘Dr Jekyll,’ ’The Master of Ballantrae,’
‘The Child’s Garden of Verses,’ and
‘Across the Plains’ had been each of them
one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same
message; but by succeeding in the proverbial miracle
of being in five places at once, he has naturally
convinced others that he was five different people.
But the real message of Stevenson was as simple as
that of Mahomet, as moral as that of Dante, as confident
as that of Whitman, and as practical as that of James
Watt.
The conception which unites the whole
varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the
vision of the possibilities of things, was far more
important than mere occurrences: that one was
the soul of our life, the other the body, and that
the soul was the precious thing. The germ of
all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape
or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul
is a story. Standing before a stunted orchard
with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact
that no one has been through it but an elderly female
cook. But everything exists in the human soul:
that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is
the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between
a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson
stands for the conception that ideas are the real
incidents: that our fancies are our adventures.
To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have
met one. And this is the reason for his wide
diversities of narrative: he had to make one
story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as
a hoary monolith: for the story was the soul,
or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It
is quite inappropriate to judge ‘The Teller of
Tales’ (as the Samoans called him) by the particular
novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr George Moore
by ‘Esther Waters.’ These novels were
only the two or three of his soul’s adventures
that he happened to tell. But he died with a
thousand stories in his heart.
