The question really is, however, for the critical spirit, whether Louis’s work itself doesn’t pay somewhat for the so complete exhibition of the man and the life. You may say that the work was, or is, the man and the life as well; still, the books are jealous and a certain supremacy and mystery (above all) has, as it were, gone from them. [ … ] he is thus as artist and creator in some degree the victim of himself.2
James’s ‘The Real Right Thing’, written in the year that Graham Balfour was starting his book, features a novice biographer preparing to write the life of an author whose work he has idolised. The sense of the dead man’s presence haunts both him and the writer’s widow (‘a strange woman, and he had never thought her agreeable’), and the more he examines the archive, the greater is his sense of wrongdoing. In the story, the biographer eventually gives up his task, an outcome James perhaps wished in Balfour’s case.
Half a year after the publication of Balfour’s biography, Henley published a review of it in the Pall Mall Magazine that he made the excuse for a full-scale onslaught on his dead friend’s character and reputation. ‘Not, if I can help it, shall this faultless, or very nearly faultless, monster go down to after years as the Lewis I knew. [I decline] to be concerned with this Seraph in Chocolate, this barley-sugar effigy of a real man.’ The article poured scorn on Stevenson’s moralisings and vanity, even his invalidism (‘Are we not all stricken men?’), criticised his removal to America and the Pacific and judged him an over-strained stylist, a third- or fourth-class romancer. ‘At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson.’3
James wrote to Balfour of ‘the long accumulated jealousy, rancour – I mean, of invidious vanity’ in Henley’s review,4 but the backlash against Stevenson had already begun. His style was being treated as a joke among the group of friends (known to James of course) around Ford Madox Ford, who recalled ‘hearing Stephen Crane [ … ] comment upon a sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson that he was reading. The sentence was: “With interjected finger he delayed the motion of the timepiece.” “By God, poor dear!” Crane exclaimed. “That man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years.”’5
Ford’s collaborator Joseph Conrad, if present, would not have laughed loud at this joke. His and Ford’s first novel, Romance (originally called ‘Seraphina’, like the heroine of Prince Otto), had been written specifically to ‘tap the audience for Stevenson, Anthony Hope and Rider Haggard’,6 but Conrad was very touchy about both the style of the novel and the fact that it took two men eight years to write it: Stevenson, he reminded Ford, produced his masterpieces much more quickly than that. The comparison stuck in Conrad’s mind, as it was bound to: by 1900 he had been taken up by Colvin and Frances Sitwell, and was their new ‘young man’. But the last person he wanted to be associated with was the ‘conscious virtuoso’ of Vailima with his (apparently) obnoxious fluency. ‘I am no sort of airy R.L. Stevenson who considered his art a prostitute and the artist as no better than one,’ Conrad wrote to his agent in 1902.7 But the fact that he had read Stevenson with minute attention is obvious: Heart of Darkness is not just full of The Ebb-Tide, but usefully adapted Gordon Darnaway’s speech in ‘The Merry Men’ about ‘the horror! – the horror, the sea!’*
Colvin and Mrs Sitwell married on a dull, grey day in June 1903, at the Marylebone church where their late friend Robert Browning had married Elizabeth Barrett. Henry James was one of only four guests, all of whom had instructions to enter by a side door and wear everyday dress. On the way to the reception at the Great Grand Central Hotel Colvin requested the party to walk in ones and twos on opposite sides of the street, so as not to arouse the suspicions of passers-by. The hotel staff of the Great Grand Central, too, could in this way be kept from guessing that anything untowardly festive was going on. Circumspection still ruled this relationship. The groom was fifty-eight years old, the bride sixty-four.
Fanny Stevenson’s house on Hyde Street survived the fire that devastated San Francisco in 1906 after the earthquake only because concerned citizens, knowing the building to contain the papers of the dead novelist, left other fire-fighting duties to protect it. Fanny died in 1914, aged seventy-four, but Henry James had long before this noted ‘a darkening of her mind – as with a further receding from all that had lifted her life out of its native poverties’.8 ‘I am afraid you will find FS a relation of questionable joy,’ he wrote to a friend seeking an introduction to Stevenson’s widow, ‘– old, changed, barbaric, weary, queer. You come too late.’9 ‘It’s all a strange history,’ he sighed, ‘and histories never end, but go on living in their consequences.’
* * *
*Because it appears on Stevenson’s tomb, ‘Requiem’ is one of very few texts by the author easily available in Samoa. It has been set to music and taught to generations of Samoan schoolchildren, holding a place in the island’s culture something like that of ‘Greensleeves’ in ours.
*For further similarities between Heart of Darkness and ‘The Merry Men’ see Daniel Balderston, ‘Borges’s Frame of Reference: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson’ (Princeton University PhD thesis, 1981), p.161n: ‘It should be added that the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz, the fascination with the experience of one who has gone over the edge, is remarkably similar to the one between the nephew and the uncle [in ‘The Merry Men’].’
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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS ABOUT STEVENSON
Scott Ashley, ‘Primitivism, Celticism and Morbidity in the Atlantic fin de siècle’, Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. P. McGuinness (Exeter, 2000)
Daniel Balderston, ‘Borges’s Frame of Reference: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson’ (Princeton University PhD thesis, 1981)
Hilary J. Beattie, ‘Father and Son: The Origins of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 56 (2001), pp.317–60
Alexander Clunas, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson: Precursor of the Post-Moderns?’, Cencrastus, 6 (1981), pp.9–11
Alan E. Guttmacher and J.R. Callahan, ‘Did Robert Louis Stevenson Have Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia?’, American Journal of Medical Genetics, 91 (2000)
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