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Robert Louis Stevenson-Part19_Alexander H.Japp(1839-1905)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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"We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution



to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable

person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards



Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the

asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for



individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This

is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man



who sees only the visible world.

Mr Baildon says:



"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in

Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a



moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily

calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality.



Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is

also much more of the conscious artist, questionableadvantage as



that sometimes is. He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than

Scott, also a questionableadvantage, as genius has no greater



enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than

to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness. But



Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and

it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical



ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae. In one

sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but



rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims

more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet



breadth of Scott."

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's



theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free

creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.



Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when

he criticises Stevenson for the FAUX PAS artistically of resorting



to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close

of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, he only tells and tells plainly how



cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not

a few cases - certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in



CATRIONA and in not a few in DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. The fault of

that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling



to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am."

That too mars the MERRY MEN, whoever wrote them or part wrote them,



and PRINCE OTTO would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-

conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and



artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another

proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L. Stevenson. If, as Mr



Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of being put in

fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, PRINCE OTTO



remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine

clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the



piracy, and treasure-hunting of THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.

"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective,



spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with

more art and with a firmer grip on his reader." And that is



exactly what I, wishing to do all I dutifully can for Stevenson,

cannot see. His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled



by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh

Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself



what he might achieve." But he doesn't - never does, and therefore

remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist



and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very

points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the






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