Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 9

are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much may be made of this idea.'
'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'
'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate--he having made himself one of the personages.'
'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'
'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'
Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.
'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the operation of a certain vice on him.'
M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel called Le Disciple. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality.'
'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'
This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in Marion Delorme, and of Captain Flint in Treasure Island.
'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich man's mansion, and there dies--assuming state, and striking awe into the breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'
These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to a romance--of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind's eye. Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance--to the superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality.
Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in Kidnapped, and of the disguise of a blind leper in The Black Arrow, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of Admiral Guinea, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'
The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never to be found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception. The main situation in The Wrecker is a splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best passages