FROM our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in THE DAILY CHRONICLE of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not without laughter - indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr Moore's high position and his assured self-confidence, we should not trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it.It was a review of THE SECRET ROSE by W.B.Yeats, but it passed after one single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson - an abuse that was justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead.Had he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at least, of fable and moral.And when towards the close Mr Moore again quotes from Mr Yeats, it is still "harping on my daughter" to undo Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in HAMLET.
"Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's SECRET ROSE is a survival or a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always something there." No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks with the great literature - unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans Breitmann, he has "nodings on."
He is poor, naked, miserable - a mere pretender - and has no share in the makings of great literature.Mr Moore has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid, which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia, after all.This comes of painting all boldly in black and white:
Mr Yeats is white, R.L.Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory.Mr Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can fully subscribe to all this.
Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master of the horrifying.(11) He even finds the EBB-TIDE, and Huish, the cockney, in it richly illustrative and grand."There never was a more magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little ruffian.His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also, even (!) of regret."
And well it may! Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste and opinion, but the EBB-TIDE and the cockney I should be inclined to cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-
believe, in which there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors to be quite genuine.The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that simplicity which is of inspiration and unassailable.Here Stevenson, alas! all too often, PACE Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of E.A.Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments.And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing upon the reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to be gratified.There is a distinction, very bold and very essential, between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy to which Aristotle was there referring.Stevenson's "horrifying," to my mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more so than in the very forced and unequal EBB-TIDE, which, with its rather doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of what came after.No service is done to an author like Stevenson by fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing.
"Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet.To romance he brought the highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour" (should this not be"essays FULL OF" OR "characterised by"?) "and sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so" (should it not be "as"?) "long as our noble English language."
Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he misses the point.The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject.
Mr Baildon says about the EBB-TIDE:
"I can compare his next book, the EBB-TIDE (in collaboration with Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity, the 'white trash' of the Pacific.Here we have Stevenson's masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest villainy in the cockney, Huish.
Stevenson's other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen satanic glory about them, some shining threads of possible virtue.They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady of not wanting.
