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 Thoreau - 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 illustrate 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 assure 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, entitled THE PERSONS OF THE TALE.After chapter xxxii.of TREASURE ISLAND, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the story." After a few preliminaries:
"You're a damned 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 nobody 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 illustrations 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.
