Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson - a gloom which well might have justified something of his father's despondency.He struggles in vain to escape from it - it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do.In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process -
all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts - is met, solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting."The evening brings a 'hame';" so should it be here - should it especially be in a dramatic work.If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph.From this side, too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite attained.
It was well pointed out in HAMMERTON, by an unanonymous author there quoted (pp.22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins, in Stevenson himself - in his real life - Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde.This writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie.R.L.Stevenson's dramatic art and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie -
it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as expressed in life.
In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of application.Stevenson, at the time he wrote THE FOREIGNER AT HOME, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier knowledge and observation to England - and by doing so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early associations and knowledge.He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it goes to form character - even national character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way radically qualifying.It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with him - the point is that, when he comes to this sort of comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed.It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing - and had I space, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on it, with instances - in which case the Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than it has yet received.But meanwhile just take this little snippet -
very characteristic and very suggestive in its own way - and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain limitation in Stevenson:
"But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England foreign.The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us.The dull neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-
loving ploughman.A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping.It seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus forgotten.Even the educated and intelligent who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction.The first shock of English society is like a cold plunge." (8)
As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" (9) in the little dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot in R.L.Stevenson, and it is to be traced as clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for him.
