第13章 HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED(3)

that the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic LIFE.And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his head, and is gloomier than ever.Tell him that I give him up.I don't want no such a parent.This is not the man for my money.I do not call that by the name of religion which fills a man with bile.I write him a whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer -.Perish the thought of it.

"'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace you - and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient grounds - no very burning discredit when all is done;

here am I married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first order.A1 at Lloyd's.There is he, at his not first youth, able to take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's weight, a thing of which I am incapable.There are you; has the man no gratitude?...

"'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion, and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the multiplication table - even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a heroic note.What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit indicated.'

"As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious remonstrance, Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently human and beautiful.The family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism.In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position.Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought.The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force.A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it.And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality of the New Testament."

Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we CAN

trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson.His peculiar interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the excesses, the jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes of romance - the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible.There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another -

the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat.The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian.This clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm Tree, during the time he was in close contact with Stevenson, while arranging the production of BEAU AUSTIN at the Haymarket Theatre, for he sees, or confesses to seeing, only one side, and that the most assertive, and in a sense, unreal one:

"Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life.

He was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every flower that came in his way.He was absorbed in the business of the moment, however trivial.As a companion, he was delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of romance as his own creations."

This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother side, or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's personality.Had he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did.Mr Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round.

Miss Simpson says:

"Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true Stevenson would have wished to be known - a queer, inexplicable creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in the stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.

His cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that this foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights for seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.

"Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much humour.When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned and had a want of balance.This made him feel his honest father's sensible remarks like the sting of a whip."

Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:

"The R.L.Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited, egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not.

Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself.

He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted friends.When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in WEIR OF HERMISTON."