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Robert Louis Stevenson-Part16_Alexander H.Japp(1839-1905)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm

for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he



often attained the counterfeit presentment - artistic and graceful

euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of



phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We often love

Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in



spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom

Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather



misses it. THE SEDULOUS APE sometimes disenchants as well as

charms; for occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too



directly in search of the model; and this operates against the

interest as introducing a new and alien series of associations,



where, for full effect, it should not be so. And this distraction

will be the more insistent, the more knowledge the reader has and



the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's first appeal, both by

his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and well read,



rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the more

directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting



impression; where he should be most simple, natural and

spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved. If the



story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by his

matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped that we



shall be possessed in the reading of it? More than once in

CATRIONA we must own we had this experience, directly warring



against full possession by the story, and certain passages about

Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first



introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara

Grant, of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is



decidedly clever, indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to

be a mere DEUS EX MACHINA, and never do more than just pay a little



tribute to Stevenson's own power of PERSIFLAGE, or, if you like, to

pay a penalty, poor lass, for the too perfect doing of hat, and



really, really, I could not help saying this much, though, I do

believe that she deserved just a wee bit better fate than that.



But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater

than at the very close. Stevenson died young: in some phases he



was but a youth to the last. To a true critic then, the problem

is, having already attained so much - a grand style, grasp of a



limited group of characters, with fancy, sincerity, and

imagination, - what would Stevenson have attained in another ten



years had such been but allotted him? It has over and over again

been said that, for long he SHIED presenting women altogether.



This is not quite true: THRAWN JANET was an earlier effort; and if

there the problem is persistent, the woman is real. Here also he



was on the right road - the advance road. The sex-question was

coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left



out in any broad and true picture. This element was effectively

revived in WEIR OF HERMISTON, and "Weir" has been well said to be



sadder, if it does not go deeper than DENIS DUVAL or EDWIN DROOD.

We know what Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess



now what Stevenson would have done. "Weir" is but a fragment; but,

to a wiselycritical and unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not



only what the complete work would have been, but what would have

inevitably followed it. It shows the turning-point, and the way



that was to be followed at the cross-roads - the way into a bigger,

realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the dream, and



fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in achieving the more

enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.



Yes; there was growth - undoubted growth. The questioning and

severely moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism - the



tendency to casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection -

which had so coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of THE MASTER



OF BALLANTRAE, and made him a great essayist, was passing in the

satisfaction of assuredinsight into life itself. The art would



gradually have been transformed also. The problem, pure and




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