IN opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert 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 passages, as they reinforce by a new reference or illustration 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 classes - 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 Institution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, 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 cockney 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.
