Second Mencken Chrestomathy (38 page)

The two biographical volumes above listed make no effort to fix his place; they are wholly devoid of critical purpose. Miss Masson simply puts together all she can find out about his life, adds a few dozen pictures, and calls it a book. The thing is thorough, and, despite some pedaling here and there, very useful; in particular, it does justice to Stevenson’s father, a strict Presbyterian but a gentleman. What miseries the old man must have suffered during Louis’s early efforts to lead his own life! How the news that came home from Paris must have lacerated his Calvinistic pruderies, and then the later news from California! Moreover, all these antinomian monkeyshines cost him a great deal of hard money, and the money of a Scotsman flows in his very veins, along with the red corpuscles and the white. Nevertheless, he took it all like a man, and if the impression prevails that he starved and oppressed a genius it is due far more to the sentimentality of the Stevensonians than to his own acts. He was actually fond, humane, long-suffering and excessively generous. Miss Masson, as I say, does him justice. In Mr. Osboume’s book there is only the scantest mention of him; he is simply an anonymous who gives Mrs. Stevenson a house and £500 on page 58 and slides gently from the scene on page 71. This Osbourne volume, otherwise, should be of immense interest to the Stevensonian. There are twelve short chapters, showing Louis at close range at various ages from 26 to 44. There is intimate knowledge of him in them, and fine feeling, and they are all capitally written. The pupil certainly does no discredit to the master. Stevenson himself seldom wrote anything better.

What is wanting is a full-length study of him, done objectively and by a realistic and scientific hand. There are models, each going about half of the way, in Van Wyck Brooks’s autopsy of Mark Twain and Katharine Anthony’s of Margaret Fuller.
^*
It is a wonder,
indeed, that no Freudian has been tempted to the task, for Stevenson was surely one of the most beautiful masses of complexes ever encountered on this earth. His whole life was a series of flights from reality—first from Presbyterianism, then from the sordid mountebankery of the law, and then from the shackles of his own wrecked and tortured body. He fled in the spirit to the Paris of Charles VII as he fled in the flesh to the rustic Bohemia at Barbizon; later on he fled in both garbs to the South Seas. Doomed to spend half his life in bed, beset endlessly by pain, brought often to death’s door by hemorrhages, and sometimes forbidden for days on end to work or even to speak, he found release and consolation in gaudy visions of gallant encounters, sinister crimes and heroic loves. He was the plow-boy dreaming in the hay-loft, the flapper tossing on her finishing-school bed. It was at once a grotesque tragedy and a pathetic farce, but it wrung out of him the best that was in him. What man ever paid more bitterly for the inestimable privilege of work? Stevenson, alas, wrote a great deal of third-rate stuff; even his most doting admirers must find it hard to read, for example, some of his essays. But out of his agony came also “Lodgings for the Night,” “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” “Will o’ the Mill,” and “Treasure Island,” and if they do not belong absolutely in the first rank, then certainly they go high in the second. Every one of them represents an attempt to escape the world of reality by launching into a world of compensatory fancy. In each of them the invalid buckles on an imaginary sword and challenges a very real enemy.

His weakness as an imaginative author lies in the fact that he never got beyond the simple revolt of boyhood—that his intellect never developed to match his imagination. The result is that an air of triviality hangs about all his work, and even at times, an air of trashiness. He is never very searching, never genuinely profound. More than any other man, perhaps, he was responsible for the revival of the romantic novel in the last years of the Nineteenth Century, and more than any other salient man of his time he was followed by shallow and shoddy disciples. These disciples, indeed, soon reduced his formula to absurdity. The appearance of Joseph Conrad, a year after his death, disposed of all his full-length romances save “Treasure Island,” and that survived only as a story for
boys. Put beside such things as “An Outcast of the Islands” and “Lord Jim,” even the best of Stevenson began to appear superficial and obvious. It was diverting, and often it was highly artful, but it was hollow; there was nothing in it save the story. Once more Beethoven drove out Haydn. Or, perhaps more accurately, Wagner drove out Rossini. It is very difficult, after “Heart of Darkness,” to get through “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The essays have gone the same way. They have a certain external elegance, as of a well-turned-out frock or charmingly decorated room, but the ideas in them are seldom notable either for vigor or for originality. When Stevenson wrote them he was trying to set up shop as a young literary exquisite in London. The breed, unluckily, is not yet extinct; its elaborate nothings still bedizen the English monthlies and weeklies. Stevenson was cured of that folly by his infirmities. They sent him headlong beyond the sky-rim. It was there he came to fame.

From the
American Mercury
, Jan., 1925, pp. 125–27.
A review of R
OBERT
L
OUIS
S
TEVENSON
: A C
RITICAL
B
IOGRAPHY
, by John A. Steuart; Boston, 1924

In reviewing Miss Rosaline Masson’s book on Stevenson, I bemoaned the lack of a critical biography of him, separating the facts about his life and work from the romantic gurgling of his admirers. Mr. Steuart’s two large volumes make a gallant attempt in that direction. They depict the young Stevenson of the Edinburgh days very realistically: a grotesque young mountebank about town, dressed like a guy, boozing in the lowest pubs, and carrying on a long series of depressing love affairs with ladies of the town. One of them, a street-walker, he even proposed to marry. Whence came such aberrations in the son of the respectable Presbyterian? Mr. Steuart, with Scotch smugness and lack of humor, blames them all on a touch of French blood: on the Stevenson family tree, distaff side, there hung the glands of a certain Lizars, or Lisouris, who
settled in Edinburgh about the year 1600. Perhaps the theory has something in it: for a pure Scot to become an artist, even a bad one, is surely rather unusual. But the long hair, the beer-bibbing and the wenching are sufficiently accounted for, it seems to me, in a simpler way. Louis came to adolescence in an era of rising doubt, with the name of Darwin on every Christian’s lips and Huxley in full eruption. He was, furthermore, an only son, and greatly spoiled by a doting mamma. What more natural than for him to rebel violently against the parental Calvinism, and what more natural than for his revolt to take the form of gaudy waist-coats, disreputable hats, low companions, bad beer and loose women? One sees the same thing going on every day among the sons of the evangelical clergy; it is, indeed, almost an axiom that the first-born of a Methodist pastor is bound to be a hard egg. Is the case of Nietzsche so soon forgotten? Stevenson, I believe, took to the vine-leaves simply because the Westminster Catechism, to his generation, had become suddenly intolerable. He became an artist almost as a sort of afterthought. His first impulse was merely to get away from the hard-boiled, cast-iron, anthropophagous Yahweh of the family home. It was not until he escaped to Paris that revolt turned into ambition, and he began to assault the magazines of the time with manuscripts. Greenwich Village is responsible for many transformations of precisely the same sort. The Baptist virgin from the Middle West arrives in Sheridan Square with no thought save to get rid of her flannel underwear and flood her recesses with Chianti. But in a few weeks she is making batiks, learning rhythmic dancing, writing a novel, or rehearsing for one of the plays of Harry Kemp.

Mr. Steuart shows how long it took Stevenson to learn his business—how, indeed, he never learned it at all until his last few years. His early work was all heavily imitative, and in some of it imitation went very close to plagiarism. Despite all the enthusiasm of his disciples, there is really very little that is sound and praiseworthy in his essays; most of them are ruined by transparent affectations. He wrote, in those days, as he dressed: like a popinjay. It was not until he came to “Treasure Island” that he acquired a style that was straightforward and clear—and “Treasure Island” was a deliberate imitation of the juvenile pot-boilers of a forgotten hack,
one Alfred R. Phillips. Mr. Steuart recalls the curious fact that it was a complete failure when it was published serially in
Young Folks
, and hazards the opinion that it is not much read by boys, even today. I incline to agree with him. “Treasure Island,” I believe, is mainly read by grown men, and in the same mood that takes them to detective stories—that is, the mood of deliberate relaxation. Men of the best taste, of course, do not often seek relaxation in that way. Detective stories are read by United States Senators and bank presidents, but not often, I believe, by artists. Stevenson never qualifies for the first table; in his best work there is always a strong flavor of the second-rate. Perhaps Mr. Steuart is right in arguing that he ought to be admitted, not for the genius that he probably lacked, but for the diligence and courage with which he tried to make the best use of the moderate talents he began with. His long and gallant struggle against ill health is surely not to be sniffed at. Beneath that motley of the mountebank there was a very real hero.

Mr. Steuart’s work gets further than any of its predecessors, but it still leaves much to be said. Its materials are thrown together loosely and they are not sufficiently documented; moreover, the author intrudes his own personality too often, and it is uninteresting. When he essays to be critical in the grand manner, he sometimes becomes only sophomoric. What is still needed is a book on Stevenson by a first-rate critic—one sufficiently interested in him to treat him humanely, and yet sufficiently critical to examine him scientifically. Like many another—for example, Bronson Alcott, Thoreau, Björnson and Tolstoi—he was far more engaging as a man than as an artist. His flight to the South Seas gave a grand and gaudy realization to the dreams of every youth who rebels against the dreadful dullness of human existence under Christianity—the stupidity of his parents, the imbecility of his pastors, the sordid business of getting a living. The rest fret themselves into resignation, and one finds them, in the end, playing golf, or haranguing Kiwanis, or writing plays for Broadway. But now and then a Stevenson or a Conrad actually takes ship, and then there is a new hero in the world, and a glow of second-hand joy.

From the
American Mercury
, Dec., 1928, pp. 506–07.
A review of Z
OLA AND
H
IS
T
IME
, by Matthew Josephson; New York, 1928

The eclipse of Zola is one of the strange phenomena of literary history. He is probably read less today than any other major novelist of his epoch, and in discussions of the current literary tides it is unusual to encounter any mention of his name. Yet it must be plain that, in certain important ways, he was the most influential novelist of the Nineteenth Century, not forgetting Scott, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor even Dostoievski, and that his mark is still distinctly visible upon all the considerable brethren of the craft. It was his function, deliberately assumed and triumphantly discharged, to relate his art to the new views of man and the world that came in with “The Origin of Species”—to pull it out of the cloister and bring it into the main stream of human thinking. He was at once a daring revolutionist and a brilliant and imaginative builder. Sweeping away at one colossal stroke the old subjective psychology that had sufficed novelists since the days of Job, he sought for the key to the external tragedy of man in the new science of biology. There the search goes on to this day. The modern novelist is only half an artist; the other half of him is a scientist—an incompetent one perhaps, but still a scientist.

Zola’s own competence was surely not extraordinary: he was only too prone to accept the new scientific concepts of his time without critical examination, and even, indeed, without any examination whatever. Nevertheless, they took him in the right direction, for most of them, after all, were sound. Best of all, they implanted in him the habit of direct observation—they made him go for his material, not to his imagination, but to the facts. Such a novel as “La Terre” may have glaring defects as a work of art, but it is at least a tremendously accurate and moving human document. The people in it do not live as Hamlet and Ophelia live, in a pale mist of fancy; they live as a streptococcus lives, snared fast
in a test-tube. It is no wonder that the book caused an uproar. We have, of late, heard the same uproar over “Elmer Gantry,” and for the same reason. What stood against Zola, in the days of his greatest achievement, was that the readers compared his people, not to the real human beings he had studied, but to the imaginary human beings of other novelists. His enemy was Balzac, and he knew it. He was not simply another novelist; he was a novelist of quite a new kind.

His defect was that of all innovators and enthusiasts: he went so far with his formula that it became mechanical and inhuman. In his early works, even after he had taken the new line, there were sufficient concessions to the conventions of Nineteenth Century novel-writing to make them endurable, even to the sentimental customers of Daudet and company. But with “L’Assommoir” he abandoned the decorums of the boudoir for the harsh realism of the clinic, and by the time he came to “Germinal” and “La Terre” he was in the dissecting room. “Germinal” will probably survive as one of the great novels of all time, but the contemporary reviews of it were almost uniformly unfavorable and its huge contemporary sale was as pornography, not as work of art. People revolted from its appalling picture of human misery as they would from a meticulous report of a difficult labor or a true biography of Warren Gamaliel Harding. But it was true. And if the business of a novelist is to penetrate and reveal the agony of man in this world, it was a novel, and a great one.