Part 2 (1/2)
The obvious weak point is Secundra Da.s.s, that Indian of unknown nationality; for surely his name marks him as no Hindoo. The Master could not have brought him, s.h.i.+vering like Jos Sedley's black servant, to Scotland. As in America, this alien would have found it ”too dam cold.”
My power of belief (which verges on credulity) is staggered by the ghastly attempt to reanimate the buried Master. Here, at least to my taste, the freakish changeling has got the better of Mr. Stevenson, and has brought in an element out of keeping with the steady lurid tragedy of fraternal hatred. For all the rest, it were a hard judge that had anything but praise. The brilliant blackguardism of the Master; his touch of sentiment as he leaves Durisdeer for the last time, with a sad old song on his lips; his fascination; his ruthlessness; his irony;--all are perfect. It is not very easy to understand the Chevalier Bourke, that Barry Lyndon, with no head and with a good heart, that creature of a bewildered kindly conscience; but it is easy to like him. How admirable is his undeflected belief in and affection for the Master! How excellent and how Irish he is, when he buffoons himself out of his perils with the pirates! The scenes are brilliant and living, as when the Master throws the guinea through the Hall window, or as in the darkling duel in the garden. It needed an austere artistic conscience to make Henry, the younger brother, so unlovable with all his excellence, and to keep the lady so true, yet so much in shadow. This is the best woman among Mr.
Stevenson's few women; but even she is almost always reserved, veiled as it were.
The old Lord, again, is a portrait as lifelike as Scott could have drawn, and more delicately touched than Scott would have cared to draw it: a French companion picture to the Baron Bradwardine. The whole piece reads as if Mr. Stevenson had engaged in a struggle with himself as he wrote.
The sky is never blue, the sun never s.h.i.+nes: we weary for a ”westland wind.” There is something ”thrawn,” as the Scotch say, about the story; there is often a touch of this sinister kind in the author's work. The language is extraordinarily artful, as in the mad lord's words, ”I have felt the hilt dirl on his breast-bone.” And yet, one is hardly thrilled as one expects to be, when, as Mackellar says, ”the week-old corpse looked me for a moment in the face.”
Probably none of Mr. Stevenson's many books has made his name so familiar as ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” I read it first in ma.n.u.script, alone, at night; and, when the Butler and Mr. Urmson came to the Doctor's door, I confess that I threw it down, and went hastily to bed. It is the most gruesome of all his writings, and so perfect that one can complain only of the slightly too obvious moral; and, again, that really Mr. Hyde was more of a gentleman than the unctuous Dr. Jekyll, with his ”bedside manner.”
So here, not to speak of some admirable short stories like ”Thrawn Janet,” is a brief catalogue--little more--of Mr. Stevenson's literary baggage. It is all good, though variously good; yet the wise world asks for the masterpiece. It is said that Mr. Stevenson has not ventured on the delicate and dangerous ground of the novel, because he has not written a modern love story. But who has? There are love affairs in d.i.c.kens, but do we remember or care for them? Is it the love affairs that we remember in Scott? Thackeray may touch us with Clive's and Jack Belsize's misfortunes, with Esmond's melancholy pa.s.sion, and amuse us with Pen in so many toils, and interest us in the little heroine of the ”Shabby Genteel Story.” But it is not by virtue of those episodes that Thackeray is so great. Love stories are best done by women, as in ”Mr.
Gilfil's Love Story”; and, perhaps, in an ordinary way, by writers like Trollope. One may defy critics to name a great English author in fiction whose chief and distinguis.h.i.+ng merit is in his pictures of the pa.s.sion of Love. Still, they all give Love his due stroke in the battle, and perhaps Mr. Stevenson will do so some day. But I confess that, if he ever excels himself, I do not expect it to be in a love story.
Possibly it may be in a play. If he again attempt the drama, he has this in his favour, that he will not deal in supernumeraries. In his tales his minor characters are as carefully drawn as his chief personages.
Consider, for example, the minister, Henderland, the man who is so fond of snuff, in ”Kidnapped,” and, in the ”Master of Ballantrae,” Sir William Johnson, the English Governor. They are the work of a mind as attentive to details, as ready to subordinate or obliterate details which are unessential. Thus Mr. Stevenson's writings breathe equally of work in the study and of inspiration from adventure in the open air, and thus he wins every vote, and pleases every cla.s.s of reader.
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY
I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read them, in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly. The name of Bayly may be unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties chanted--every one much over forty, at all events. ”I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree,”
and ”I'd be a b.u.t.terfly,” and ”Oh, no! we never mention Her,” are dimly dear to every friend of Mr. Richard Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers.
You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr. Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, ”ably penetrated the sources of the human heart,” like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also ”gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit,” and ”reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity,” in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct.
1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord Delamere, while he had a remote baronet on the mother's side. To trace the ancestral source of his genius was difficult, as in the case of Gifted Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal grandfather, Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as ”one of the finest poets of his age.” Bayly was at school at Winchester, where he conducted a weekly college newspaper. His father, like Scott's, would have made him a lawyer; but ”the youth took a great dislike to it, for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of fancy,” which are closed to attorneys. So he thought of being a clergyman, and was sent to St.
Mary's Hall, Oxford. There ”he did not apply himself to the pursuit of academical honours,” but fell in love with a young lady whose brother he had tended in a fatal illness. But ”they were both too wise to think of living upon love, and, after mutual tears and sighs, they parted never to meet again. The lady, though grieved, was not heartbroken, and soon became the wife of another.” They usually do. Mr. Bayly's regret was more profound, and expressed itself in the touching ditty:
”Oh, no, we never mention her, Her name is never heard, My lips are now forbid to speak That once familiar word; From sport to sport they hurry me To banish my regret, And when they only worry me--
[I beg Mr. Bayly's pardon]
”And when they win a smile from me, They fancy I forget.
”They bid me seek in change of scene The charms that others see, But were I in a foreign land They'd find no change in me.
'Tis true that I behold no more The valley where we met; I do not see the hawthorn tree, But how can I forget?”
”They tell me she is happy now,
[And so she was, in fact.]
The gayest of the gay; They hint that she's forgotten me; But heed not what they say.
Like me, perhaps, she struggles with Each feeling of regret: 'Tis true she's married Mr. Smith, But, ah, does she forget!”
The temptation to parody is really too strong; the last lines, actually and in an authentic text, are:
”But if she loves as I have loved, She never can forget.”
Bayly had now struck the note, the sweet, sentimental note, of the early, innocent, Victorian age. Jeames imitated him:
”R. Hangeline, R. Lady mine, Dost thou remember Jeames!”