Something! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably awakens, was much with him-the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect-the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-devilries-Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been-the same, or different from what it was with those that were there? His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for the grace of G.o.d, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Th.o.r.eau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way-a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to G.o.d"s will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in Old Mortality, "I hae laid three hunner an" fower score in that kirkyaird, an" had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:
"It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. "This," he said, "is the way in which our valuable city hotels-packed no doubt with gems and jewellery-are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a week would enable such a man to retire in course of a year. A mask might perhaps be worn for the mere fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real disguise would be needful.""
I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here:
"Stevenson"s enormous capacity for joy flowed directly out of his profoundly religious temperament. He conceived himself as an unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless grat.i.tude... . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of the bon vivant. It was the greater gaiety of the mystic. He could enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle. He was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of the image of G.o.d, portraits at only two removes."
Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from these-reprobation, with its dire shadows, a.s.sured Election with its joys, etc., etc.
3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to dramatic presentation pure and simple. This implies detachment from moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains in life grasped and repeated with emphasis. But towards his leading characters Stevenson is unconsciously bia.s.sed, because they are more or less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality. Att.w.a.ter is a confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson. If the same thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because Stevenson there showed the better art o" hidin", and not because he was any more truly detached or dramatic. "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote Henley in his sonnet. The Hamlet in Stevenson-the self-questioning, egotistic, moralising Hamlet-was, and to the end remained, a something alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom. He is great as an artist, as a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power. "Mother," he said as a mere child, "I"ve drawed a man. Now, will I draw his soul?" He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the soul, separate and peculiar. All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae conceptions came out of that-and what is more, he always mixed his own soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.
4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wondering why he did not more effectively employ it, I can"t agree with him; and this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien to free play of the individualities presented. Like Hawthorne"s, like the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical weird or preconception. This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"-the ground for many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him "less symbol and more individuality"-the ground for the Rev. W. J. Dawson"s remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being set with eternity as a background."
Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker, seer, or mystic, but the a.s.serting sense of such power can only end in lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and there is much indeed against Mr Pinero"s own view that, in the dramas, he finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays. In the strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere. David Balfour could never have writ some speeches attributed to him-they are just R. L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected, renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic.
CHAPTER XIII-PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST
In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a sermon-enforcing a moral-as though he could not help it. "He would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables, and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well as of aesop and Rousseau and Th.o.r.eau-the mixture that found coherency in his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is never wanting. I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be brought in to ill.u.s.trate this here-careful readers who neglect nothing that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.
But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist-casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy:
THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER
Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him, for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act.
The innkeeper got a rope"s end.
"Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.
"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."
"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.
"Fact, I a.s.sure you," said the devil.
"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.
"Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me."
"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.
And he made a noose and hanged the devil.
"There!" said the innkeeper.
The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired. We could scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John Silver, ent.i.tled The Persons of the Tale. After chapter x.x.xii. of Treasure Island, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open s.p.a.ce not far from the story." After a few preliminaries:
"You"re a d.a.m.ned rogue, my man," said the Captain.
"Come, come, Cap"n, be just," returned the other. "There"s no call to be angry with me in earnest. I"m on"y a character in a sea story. I don"t really exist."
"Well, I don"t really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to meet that."
"I wouldn"t set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider argument," responded Silver. "But I"m the villain of the tale, I am; and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is, what"s the odds?"
"Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain. "Don"t you know there"s such a thing as an Author?"
"Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively. "And who better"n me? And the p"int is, if the Author made you, he made Long John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry-not that George is up to much, for he"s little more"n a name; and he made Flint, what there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and-well, if that"s a Author, give me Pew!"
"Don"t you believe in a future state?" said Smollett. "Do you think there"s nothing but the present sorty-paper?"
"I don"t rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don"t see what it"s got to do with it, anyway. What I know is this: if there is sich a thing as a Author, I"m his favourite chara"ter. He does me fathoms better"n he does you-fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves you measling in the hold, where n.o.body can"t see you, nor wants to, and you may lay to that! If there is a Author, by thunder, but he"s on my side, and you may lay to it!"
"I see he"s giving you a long rope," said the Captain... .
Stevenson"s stories-one and all-are too closely the ill.u.s.trations by characters of which his essays furnish the texts. You shall not read the one wholly apart from the other without losing something-without losing much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of the writer. It is this if fully perceived which would justify one writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don"t forget, in saying, as he did say, that Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels. Hence there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation-creation, broad, natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of Cervantes or Fielding. If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful Pall Mall Magazine article had made this clear from the high critical ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so personal and offensive as they are.
Stevenson"s bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this. He is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it in his clever sonnet. He is constantly asking himself about moral laws and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. He is often a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not, like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners-his love of the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure. His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the cla.s.s or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success-he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the very side where wickedness-their natural wickedness-is most available-on the stage. The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight-all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the Ebb-Tide, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect. As to his poems, they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type alien to his own. The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children, will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they would to, say, the Lilliput Levee of my old friend, W. B. Rands. Rands showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.
Even in his greatest works, in The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have secured dramatically is largely lost and make-believe subst.i.tuted, as in the Treasure Search in the end of The Master of Ballantrae. The powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his denouement is thus completely sacrificed. The essence of the drama for the stage is that the work is for this and this alone-dialogue and everything being only worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy completeness.
In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson himself too clearly behind his characters. The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero referred to trace to the intrusion behind the gla.s.s of a part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the gla.s.s is moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said already. For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true instinct. Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind Catriona, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like those in her author were attractive. The constant effort to relieve the sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a navete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature.
More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative ill.u.s.tration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon. Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had-his novels-the best of them-would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception, penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common-sense commonplaceness-if I may name it so-protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for successful dramatic production. Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation. Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be not, as Sh.e.l.ley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he pa.s.sed away, was but on the way to attain. As we shall see, he had risen so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him. For the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely this-to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary. True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art with all cla.s.ses lies here and not elsewhere. Cleverness, refinement, fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere in this sphere without this.
CHAPTER XIV-STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST
In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I a.s.sert that Stevenson"s defect in spontaneous dramatic presentation is seen clearly in his novels as well as in his plays proper.
In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M"Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh, telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may perhaps be excused quoting the following pa.s.sages, as they reinforce by a new reference or ill.u.s.tration or two what has just been said:
"Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L. Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides-common sides, after all, of human nature. This was so far largely due to a dreamy, mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and scoundrels; with both of which cla.s.ses-vagabonds in strictness-he had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy. Mr Pinero was wrong-totally and incomprehensibly wrong-when he told the good folks of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Inst.i.tution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Inst.i.tution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox-and sometimes he realised it-his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, that, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity, be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the stage-more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of malice prepense; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and immediate verdict-an audience not inclined to some kinds of overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique. If The Master of Ballantrae (which has some highly dramatic scenes and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success, would really have-not in details, but in essential conception-to kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes (brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the audience wobble in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does. As for Beau Austin, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ-re-writ especially towards the ending-and the scandalous Beau tarred and feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought, for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the c.o.c.kney hero and villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the stage-the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and varied, the less would it have stood it-not at all; and his relief of style and fine or finished speeches would not there in the least have told. This is demanded of the drama-that at once it satisfies a certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong-the uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction certain kinds of revenge or retaliation. The one feeling will emerge most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called Providential equity-each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished, roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in the inner torments that so often lead to confessions. There it is-a radical fact of human nature-as radical as any reading of trait or determination of character presented-seen in the Greek drama as well as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the drama-transpontine and others of to-day. R. L. Stevenson was all too casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so he was not dramatic, though Weir of Hermiston promised something like an advance to it, and St Ives did, in my idea, yet more."
The one essential of a dramatic piece is that, by the interaction of character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation of the play, are justified. Where this is wanting the true leading and the definite justification are wanting. Goethe failed in this in his Faust, resourceful and far-seeing though he was-he failed because a certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say, chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L. Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be. And to come to another ill.u.s.tration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw"s very clever and all too ingenious and over-subtle Man and Superman would, in my idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the setting-the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all-tinting it with strange and even outre colours. Much the same has to be said of most of what are problem-plays-several of Ibsen"s among the rest.
Those who remember the Fairy opera of Hansel and Gretel on the stage in London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven, having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and baked there, literally brought down the house. She received exactly what she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands. Quaint, nave, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of all drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been out of place, but hotly resented by that audience. Now, Stevenson, if he could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven, would most a.s.suredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect. He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength. If this is the sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus const.i.tuted. "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the Scotsman, to show Stevenson"s defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has himself been so successful.
"If Stevenson had ever mastered that art-and I do not question that if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it-he might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too, that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive, half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost. He would have known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days, again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds... . When you take up a play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling thing-a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty pages long. It is the height of the author"s art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?"
But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the "concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one. Mr Pinero"s magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many playwrights in the past.
The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive sense or consciousness of the ma.s.s of men and women, and to subst.i.tute for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at any rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task-he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run, created and presented. He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of characters upon each other is a further element against him. In a word no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action. Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient for scientific examination. The healthy and normal must come in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal, and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes.
The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind. Thus care and concentration must be all in all with him-he must never let himself go, or get so interested and taken with his characters that they, in a sense, control or direct him. He is all too conscious a "maker" and must pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and overweighted work. This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices, secure the general impression or appeal made to all cla.s.ses alike by the natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to the real interest of a special cla.s.s-to whom is finally given up what was meant for mankind-and the troublesome and trying task laid on them, to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways and tend to different ends. As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one painter-so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways, and if they seek the same end, it is by opposing processes-the original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.
As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to him impossible. He might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy attainable in this world-whether by deduction from life itself, or from impressions of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, una.s.sailable, and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in the universe. Just as Byron had it with patriotism:-
"Freedom"s battle once begun, Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, Tho" baffled oft is ever won."