Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is assertive.Take here the cunning sentences on SELFISHNESS AND EGOTISM, very Hawthornian yet quite original:
"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish.There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear.
Selfishness is calm, a force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish.But egotism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, seeking;
it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."
If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the PALL MALL MAGAZINE article.He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently apt to the purpose.
In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic.
Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of selfishness.Here is another very characteristic bit:
"You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son.It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in the same case.I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem; and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good spirits.I thank you....Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits."
Again:
"It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect.We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise.And there's an end.We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all.There is nothing to make a work about."
The moral to THE HOUSE OF ELD is incisive writ out of true experience - phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce, tragic:-
"Old is the tree and the fruit good, Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."
The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of MORAL EMBLEMS.
"Reader, your soul upraise to see, In yon fair cut designed by me, The pauper by the highwayside Vainly soliciting from pride.
Mark how the Beau with easy air Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer And casting a disdainful eye Goes gaily gallivanting by.
He from the poor averts his head...
He will regret it when he's dead."
Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than has yet been done or even faithfully attempted.This would show at once Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his temperament and genius.Few men who have by force of native genius gone into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and enchanted region.They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it and kept there as by a spell - the more they struggle for freedom the more surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them - they are but like the fly in amber.It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot disguise what they really are - the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came.
Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement -
had he lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its tragic laws and wondrous compensations - he would have shown how to make the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art.This side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or their CONFRERES, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given to it.
The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE.There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive.But even when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.
Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in TREASURE
ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and THE WRECKER - a something which suffices decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially they might be classed.
