FROM these sources now traced out by us - his youthfulness of spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to dream - symbolisms leading to disregard of common feelings - flows too often the indeterminateness of Stevenson's work, at the very points where for direct interest there should be decision.In THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE this leads him to try to bring the balances even as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far justifying from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation we have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of the STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER:
"The younger brother in THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, who is black-
mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged.In the later adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that his brain has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed throughout to the interests of the story [or more strictly for the working out of the problem as originally conceived by the author].The curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish stories, since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of life.When in CATRIONA Stevenson introduces a love story, it is still unsatisfactory, because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped animal that his passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible.I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these stories I am really among living human beings with whom, apart from their adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy."
In the EBB-TIDE it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three heroes choke each other off all too literally.
In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines that would give the attraction of true individuality to his characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his liberal, and even over-sympathetic views of them and allowances for them.But instead of thus furthering his object, he sacrifices the whole - and his story becomes, instead of a broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant egotism of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind.
Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly this defect - a serious defect in view of interest - arises.
"That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend, if only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p.74).
Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or unable to do for ourselves.Interest in two characters in fiction can never, in this artificial way, and if they are real characters truly conceived, be made equal, nor can one element of claim be balanced against another, even at the beck of the greatest artist.
The common sentiment, as we have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere.After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart, if not according to any conventional notion or opinion.
Stevenson's pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy for the one, and then for the other in THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, admits us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human interest.It is the same in CATRIONA in much of the treatment of James Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of WEIR OF HERMISTON and his son, though there, happily for him and for us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.
Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost.It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago - "a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him - victim of inheritance, this, that and the other;
and considering everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency - he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters;
but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way, do not succeed - the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect.
