“Playing the
Sedulous Ape”:
Robert Lou is
Stevenson
C. L. R. SASTRI
“Though I have
been haunted by the gnawing sense of guilt ever since that Christmas morning when I stole a chocolate elephant from the Christmas
tree and jet my parents think it was one of my younger brothers I have always
been willing to embezzle £ 10,000 provided my victim was wealthy. On the
other hand, my artistic conscience will never let me leave a sentence less good
than I can make it by taking trouble”
–James
Agate: Bad Manners.
Ever since, by
sheer accident. Robert Louis, Stevenson’s
When I am beguiled by an author I make it a point to read as many of his works as possible, even the whole corpus, given the chance. I am proud to say that I have thus devoured all the novels and short stories, not to speak of the essays of “R.L.S.” in the cheap “Tusitala” edition. Stevenson, I think, is best remembered as the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The story appeals to the more philosophical amongst us as it essays to get to the root of good and evil and to trace the various imperceptible gradations by which the good ultimately merges into the evil.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
Dr. Jekyll (the good) does not degenerate into Mr. Hyde (the evil) at one fell swoop, as it were: he becomes Mr. Hyde by slow degrees, by infinitesimal lapses. As Mr. John Kelman, in his erudite introduction to the novel, writes:
“All who have eyes to see can perceive, as the horror (of the transition from the good to the evil) grows, one of the supreme dangers of life. One thing at least is obvious. It is that, for all men, so long as they have not entirely capitulated, it is possible to make ‘some brave output of the will’ and bid defiance to any such ghastly process within them. Whatever be the ultimate explanation of this recondite condition, it is certain that there is no need to lie down under it and in moral fatalism, accept it as inevitable. The self you choose today, and not the self you chose yesterday, is the fate of tomorrow.” (My italics)
Two Classes
In this article of mine on Stevenson it is my endeavour to concentrate on the accusation so often levelled against him of (as he himself, in a moment of acute mental aberration, confessed), “playing the sedulous ape” to several authors of note. The outstanding fact about him, however, is that, though he himself was at one period of his illustrious career, an imitator of the master-spirits that preceded him, it is next to impossible for us to copy his style in our turn. There is, indeed, a fundamental difference of opinion on the matter among those competent to speak on it.
They are divided sharply into two classes: the one holding that he is facile princeps as a writer, the other asseverating that he is nothing of the kind. On the whole, I favour the former group: while readily admitting that he has his peers. In this connection I must confess that I fail to understand what is proposed to be gained by the present astounding fashion of belittling his genius. When a person of Stevenson’s stature imitates, it somehow transpires that the process is purged of its vile associations: it suffers “a sea-change” into something literally “rich and strange.” For R. L. S. not only played the sedulous ape, he played it to perfection and he played it in such wise as to incorporate the best traits of those immortals in his own work at the same time taking care to keep his individual flavour intact.
An Art of Imitation
The truth is that there is an art of imitation, as there is an art of all other things. When you and I begin to imitate, perhaps we write ourselves down as tenth-rate persons, and perhaps botch the job into the bargain. That is because there may be a serious deficiency in us in the first instance, not being “to the manner born,” so to speak. Coleridge said, in a famous passage, “Friend, we receive but what we give.” Probably, the poet philosopher, in coining that precious gem of wisdom, builded better than he knew. It all comes to this in the end: that, unless we have some merit, some distinction, ourselves to start with, it is sheer waste of time and of energy to attempt to imitate our superiors: “we can receive but what we; give”. Stevenson’s imitation justified itself in the event because he himself was not lacking in the “divine afflatus”, because he was “f the elect” before even the knowledge dawned upon him.
The moon’s radiance is, in the final analysis, drawn from the sun, no doubt, and, in so far as that radiance is drawn from the sun, it can be called a lesser orb than the latter. But the point to be borne in mind, surely, is that it requires a star of the moon’s magnitude to draw upon itself the rays of that central luminary. Stevenson, I grant, is not, as a writer, in the same “league” as Hazlitt, for instance; but he is secure in a circle that is equally exclusive. In the circumstances, the vicious campaign of plucking the laurel from Stevenson’s brow is bound to fail in yielding any lucrative dividends.
Not a Boaster of his Wares
It may, perhaps, be as well to suggest that he who gave to the world Virginibus Pureque and Travels with a Donkey; Kidnapped, The Weir of Humiston, and The Master of Ballantre; The Amateur Immigrant, The Silverado Squatters and The Wrong Box; was not a boaster of his wares: nay, could not possibly have been, if he had sincerely loved the highest in his art. Else, what does Hazlitt say? “No really great man ever thought himself to be so ... He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.”
Well, then,
Stevenson did not suffer from that last infirmity of noble minds: conceit. All
the same, there are those who hate him with a virulence that passes the bounds
of reason. That excellent writer, the late Mr. Wilfred Whitten, has this
passing gibe in his article, “The Author’s Author”, in John 0’ London’s
Weekly, of which he was the editor, he writes as “John O’
“The notion that style, as such, can be acquired by obedience to rule, or imitation of the masters of style, is sheer delusion. So that Samuel Butler was not contradicting Mr. Ellis’s teaching, but only turning it upside down when he wrote: ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was, at the same time, readable.’ That may well be taken as a thrust as Stevenson to whom Mr. Ellis refers in the passage: ‘By a dutiful study of what other people have said, by a refined cleverness in catching their tricks and avoiding their subtleties in short, a patient perseverance in writing out copper-plate maxims in elegant copybooks, a writer can become at last like Stevenson, ‘the idol of the crowd.’ Stevenson has his reward but I have long thought that he wrote like a hairdresser. “
How do Hairdressers Habitually Write?
The answer to this ill-mannered, this supercilious gibe is that we do not know how hairdressers habitually write and that, if they habitually write like Stevenson, we may not be far wrong in asserting that some other eminent authors wrote like bootblacks or streerarabs.
The following beautiful passage illustrates R. L. S’ own idea of style:
“Style is the invariable mark of any master: and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered among the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character end to end–these, which taken together, constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.”
R. L. S’. Advice to Sir Edmund Gosse
For the life of me I cannot equate this with a hairdresser’s notion of the art of writing; always granting, of course, that he has a notion of the art of writing. Read that passage carefully, and then decide whether he who penned it can be dismissed as arrogantly as the editor of John 0’ London’s Weekly has done. It is not my wish “to pile Pelion on Ossa”, but I shall give two more extracts from “Tusitala”, on the same subject of style, and leave my readers to judge for themselves whether he strikes them as diamond or as paste. He is addressing Sir Edmund Gosse – himself a writer of rare distinction, apart from his none too inconsiderable merits as a critic and as a biographer–and the occasion was a perusal of the latter’s wonderful book Father and Son, which that gentleman had sent him at Samoa.
Stevenson, in his acknowledgement of it, writes:
“Beware
of purple passages….And in a style which (like yours) aims more and more
successfully at the academic, one purple word is already too much, three – a
whole page – is inadmissible. Wed yourself to a clean austerity: that is your force. Wear a linen
ephod, splendidly candid. Arrange its folds but do not fasten it with any
brooch. I swear to you in your talking robes there should be no patch of
adornment; and, when the subject forces, let it force you no further than it
must.” Letters of R. L. Stevenson. Vol. III.
My Italics.)
Elsewhere, too, he emphasises the same point:
“There is but one art–to omit If I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.” (Ibid: Vol. II.)
Dithering Rubbish
The fact is that a lot of the most dithering rubbish is being written on the question of style and, especially, on that extremely invaluable exponent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson. I do not see how it detracts from a man’s glory if it is established that he has taken consummate pains to write well.
I am willing to concede that he who produces a full-blown essay or article, or book, without any of the preliminary pangs that usually attend such a piece of work, is to be awarded the place of precedence. He is, as it were, born fully armed, like Pallas Athene, from the brow of Zeus, but with the more harmless weapons of the Scribbler’s trade. He has only to sit before his desk and let pen ply on paper, and a King Lear or a Lycidas, or a Prelude, or a Tristran Shandy, or a Vanity Fair, or a Moby Dick, or a Villette unfailingly ensues. It is, one may say, almost like inserting a penny in a slot-machine: the result is instantaneous. I take leave to doubt, however, whether any author, worth the name, has jerked off a masterpiece with quite such a gay Panache, with such a gay insouciance, as all that implies.
Incessant Toil
No: the short is simply not in _he locker. We know that Gibbon perspired not a little with the opening chapter of his Decline and Fall. Nor, for that matter, did De Quincey’s curves and flourishes come to him with the quickness of a lightning flash or with the rapidity of a praire-fire. Hazlitt wrote with difficulty, and Charles Lamb did not master his “Elia” vein at an early stage, either. Waiter Pater could fashion his particular instrument only after a vigil before which the labours of Hercules pale into complete insignificance. Thackerey’s limpidity must have entailed some burning of the midnight oil, and Conrad’s troubles with his writing-pad have passed into history. With A. B. Walkely it was a recurring question whether the night’s theatre-notice would get itself written, and H. W. Nevinson has confessed that his frame used to be wrecked with a similar anxiety in regard to his articles to the press.
Geroge Moore
As for George Moore – why, he is among the classic instances of literary scrupulosity. Revision, with him, was passion. He revised not only sentences and paragraphs but whole books themselves. There was his earlier mode and there was his later mode: and of him it could be said that he was not born with a pen in hand. Even after he had published such standard works of English prose as Hail and Farewell and Heloise and Abelard and The Brook Kerith, he would not depend upon his first draft of any piece of writing. He invented a figure to whom he gave the name of “Amico Moorini”, who represented, as someone has phrased it, his dose of original sin, against which he had to be wakeful and contending up to the last sentence that he ever wrote. Edward Shanks put it in a nutshell when he said:
“George Moore
was not a born writer, or, to put it better, if he was born with the writer’s
gold in him, he had to dig it out and refine it himself at the cost of endless
and painful labour. When I say endless, I mean
that it ended only with
Charles Morgan on George Moore
This passage from Charles Morgan’s Epitaph on George Moore fully illustrates my point:
“I
was able to see his very early drafts. They were a revelation of the writer and
the man. They were not imperfect beginnings of work that was recognisedly a master’s. A passage would open with
excellent quietness and dignity. Here, in the rough, one exclaimed, is prose as
memorable as any in The Brook Kerith. Then,
suddenly, a sentence would appear that seemed to have been interpolated by some
flashy writer of novellets for the lesser magazines
of the ’Eighties. These drafts could be had with a virulent badness, with a pretensiousness, a snobbery, a
sentimentality, a seemingly hopeless incompetence if one had not known that the
genius of
And yet R. L.
S. is dismissed with such contumacious words as that he wrote like a
hairdresser because he took infinite pains to be splendid!