Sir — I fear that, despite the charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas, there is no doubt that Mr Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening Depreciation of Stevenson which has been published over his name.
What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley’s conscience tell him; but permit me to remind him of two or three things which R. L. Stevenson has written concerning W. E. Henley.
First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh:
“(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace, or the great King’s palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.”
Secondly, this passage from Stevenson’s dedication of Virginibus Puerisque to “My dear William Ernest Henley”:
“These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive these little revolutions, undiminished, and, with God’s help, unite us to the end.”
Thirdly, two scraps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to show that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L. Stevenson’s work:
“1. I’m glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had. . . . To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans — sich is my aspiration.
“2. Dear lad, — If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think — (the editor who had pruned down Mr Henley’s review of Stevenson’s Prince Otto) has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. . . . Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself.”
And, lastly, this extract from the very last of Stevenson’s letters to Henley, published in the two volumes of Letters:
“It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.’s Joy of Earth volume, and Love in a Valley; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. . . . I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S.”
It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary friendship lies the true modesty and magnanimity? I had rather be the author of the last message of R. L. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, than of the last words of W. E. Henley concerning R. L. Stevenson.
CHAPTER XXV — MR CHRISTIE MURRAY’S IMPRESSIONS
Mr Christie Murray, writing as “Merlin” in our handbook in the Referee at the time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by us:
“Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is conceived. ‘If he wanted a thing he went after it with an entire contempt for consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful.’ Now if Mr Henley does not mean that for the very express picture of a rascal without a conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in his choice of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a profession of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take him au pied de la lettre. A man who goes after whatever he wants with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel, and the man who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and cheerful, whatever his conduct may have been, and justifies himself on the principles of the Shorter Catechism, is a hypocrite to boot. This is not the report we have of Robert Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him. It is a most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr Henley’s acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow. We all know the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in debate. In Victor Hugo’s tremendous indictment of Napoléon le Petit we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship. It spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo’s pages. It is meant to do that. An insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and even with a touch of reluctance.
“Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of ‘’Tis’ and ‘it were,’ is a fairly competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to make a plain man’s plain meaning an evident thing if he chose to do it. But if for the friend for whom ‘first and last he did share’ he can only show us the figure of one ‘who was at bottom an excellent fellow,’ and who had ‘an entire contempt’ for the consequences of his own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be obscured. . . .
“All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned from his books, and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he wrote to me years ago in friendly recognition of my own work. I add the testimonies of friends who may have been of less actual service to him than Mr Henley, but who surely loved him better and more lastingly. These do not represent him as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter Catechism. The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues. . . .
“To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling to mere existence. The basest of us can do that. But it is a heroism to maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness in the face of death. For my own part, I never bowed at the literary shrine Mr Henley and his friends were at so great pains to rear. I am not disposed to think more loftily than I ever thought of their idol. But the Man — the Man was made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will keep him alive when his detractors are dead and buried.”
As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was christened Robert Lewis — the Lewis being after his maternal grandfather — Dr Lewis Balfour. Some attempt has been made to show that the Louis was adopted because so many cousins and relatives had also been so christened; but the most likely explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the name to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any notion of association with a very prominent noisy person of the name of Lewis, in Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt dislike, if not positive animosity. Anyhow, it is clear from the entries in the register of pupils at the Edinburgh Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was there, that in early youth he was called Robert only; for in the school list for 1862 the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis, while in the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson. Clearly if in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and elsewhere, called Robert, there could have then arisen no risk of confusion with any of his relatives who bore the name of Lewis; and all this goes to support the view which I have given above. Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert at home, and ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list, and became Lewis Robert. Whether my view is right or not, he was thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name uniformly spelt Louis. What blame on Stevenson’s part could be attached to this family determination it is hard to see — people are absolutely free to spell their names as they please, and the matter would not be worth a moment’s attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley chosen to be very nasty about the name, and in the Pall Mall Magazine article persisted in printing it Lewis as though that were worthy of him and of it. That was not quite the unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as it was trumpery. Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery spite of this in the following passage:
“Stevenson, it appears, according to his friend’s judgment, was ‘
incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson,’ but most of us are incessantly and passionately interested in ourselves. ‘He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it.’ I remember that George Sala, who was certainly under no illusion as to his own personal aspect, made public confession of an identical foible. Mr Henley may not have an equal affection for the looking-glass, but he is a very poor and unimaginative reader who does not see him gloating over the god-like proportions of the shadow he sends sprawling over his own page. I make free to say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does not live. ‘The best and most interesting part of Stevenson’s life will never get written — even by me,’ says Mr Henley.
“There is one curious little mark of animus, or one equally curious affectation — I do not profess to know which, and it is most probably a compound of the two — in Mr Henley’s guardedly spiteful essay which asks for notice. The dead novelist signed his second name on his title-pages and his private correspondence ‘Louis.’ Mr Henley spells it ‘Lewis.’ Is this intended to say that Stevenson took an ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal appellation? If so, why not say the thing and have done with it? Or is it one of Mr Henley’s wilful ridiculosities? It seems to stand for some sort of meaning, and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small spitefulness which might go for nothing if it were not so well borne out by the general tone of Mr Henley’s article. It is a small matter enough, God knows, but it is precisely because it is so very small that it irritates.”
CHAPTER XXVI — HERO-VILLAINS
In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason he himself gave about Deacon Brodie utterly fails in that healthy hatred of “fools and scoundrels” on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently dilated. Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply. Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional. Admitting that such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the Ebb-Tide on the one side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely demanded that they should not stand alone, but have their due complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to tell on them in the action. If “a knave or villain,” as George Eliot aptly said, is but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and effective sense. It is here that Stevenson fails — fails absolutely in most of his work, save the very latest — fails, as has been shown, in The Master of Ballantrae, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his sympathy with them or for them. Thus he fails to give his readers the proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given. The highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely, outwardly, and inwardly defeated. It is here the same in the melodrama of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare. “The evening brings a’ ‘hame’” and the end ought to show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of elevated impression, acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true dénouement and the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.
Stevenson’s toleration and constant sermonising in the essays — his desire to make us yield allowances all round is so far, it may be, there in place; but it will not work out in story or play, and declares the need for correction and limitation the moment that he essays artistic presentation — from the point of view of art he lacks at once artistic clearness and decision, and from the point of view of morality seems utterly loose and confusing. His artistic quality here rests wholly in his style — mere style, and he is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment and reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws. Herein lies the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic work — which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of the theatre, and of dramatic creation.
From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success. He confuses and so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once moral and dramatic.
I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about Beau Austin, and the reason of its failure — complete failure — on the stage:
“I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in the way the author intended. Yet the fact that Beau Austin, in spite of being ‘put on’ by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success. Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy, a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the most dangerous. Now I maintain that in Beau Austin we have an element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman. Richardson, in Clarissa Harlowe, is well aware of this, and is perfectly right in making his dénouement tragic. Stevenson, on the other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy. It is even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and ennobled. But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip. He endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had done others. He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be convincingly effected. Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this demand. And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art.”
The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences — religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and fully justified in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for presentation o
n the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this — even this — is only in appearance.
True, it is not the dramatists part of himself to condemn, or to approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each other. But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation of these relations, and the effect upon each other. Character is vital. And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be made to tell directly also in the drama. There is no escape from this — none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster if he is wholly blind to it — like the poet in In Memoriam, “Without a conscience or an aim.” Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the Pall Mall Magazine, has a remark which I confess astonished me — a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he “had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals.” “Remarks about morals” are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson’s works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it. What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are “remarks about morals,” nothing else — the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up “remarks about morals” as near as might be to the “remarks about morals” in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic consistency. Shakespeare is rich in “remarks about morals,” often coming near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius addresses his son before his going forth on his travels. Mr Henley here only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to relieve Beau Austin and the other plays in which he collaborated with R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness. The two youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or worse, contemning “remarks about morals” in the loftier as in the lower sense. To “live a full and varied life,” if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in “remarks about morals.” If this is perverted under any self-conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will any way make up. So long as this is tried, with whatever concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play, because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and instinct for moral proportion — an ethnic reward and punishment, so to say — is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 872