THE complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man who "perceives only the visible world" - he should not engage himself with problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the Palace of Art:
"As God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all,"
because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and passion, and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.
All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid appeal to heart and emotion - in the measure that they may, in his hands, be made to tell for sympathy and general effect.
He creates an atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name.Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all high creative art.Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it - an over-
elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far alien to the very highest - he was too often like a man magnetised and moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to his own freewill and as he would.
Action in creative literary art is a SINE QUA NON; keeping all the characters and parts in unison, that a true DENOUEMENT, determined by their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it.
Egotistical predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the full result, the unity which is finally craved:
Stevenson fails, when he does fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has said, in the French sense, too PERSONNEL, and cannot escape from it.And though these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are, and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested revelation of life and reality.Instead, therefore, of "the visible world," as the only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that between it and him lies a cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which dims the lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in fact melting them into each other; and in his sympathetic regards, causing them all to become too much alike.
