Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself:
"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." (7)
Stevenson's own verdict on DEACON BRODIE given to a NEW YORK HERALD
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the LUDGATE HILL, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it.BUT WE WERE BOTH YOUNG MEN WHEN WE DID THAT, AND I THINK WE HAD AN IDEA THAT BAD-HEARTEDNESS WAS STRENGTH."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R.L.Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude.He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands.
He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the PALL MALL MAGAZINE about the EDINBURGH
EDITION, etc.Men are mirrors in which they see each other:
Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious PALL MALL MAGAZINE article than he did R.L.
Stevenson.Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking paltry revenges - writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty grievances - they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things.
R.L.Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained.Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:- certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in PIPPA PASSES:
"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillsides dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven, All's right with the world.
............
"All service ranks the same with God, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work - God's puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."
It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him.
