Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology

by Kevin MacNeil

  And now to make the point at which I have been aiming. The perfectly straightforward person who should have said to Marmont, ‘I was uncommonly glad to get you beaten,’ would have done the next best to Wellington who had the inspiration of graceful speech; just as the perfectly straightforward person who should have taken Lee’s sword and kept it, would have done the next best to Grant who had the inspiration of the truly graceful act. Lee would have given up his sword and preserved his dignity; Marmont might have laughed, his pride need not have suffered. Not to try to spare people’s feelings is so much kinder than to try in a wrong way; and not to try to be a gentleman at all is so much more gentlemanly than to try and fail! So that this gift, or grace, or virtue, resides not so much in conduct as in knowledge; not so much in refraining from the wrong, as in knowing the precisely right. A quality of exquisite aptitude marks out the gentlemanly act; without an element of wit, we can be only gentlemen by negatives.

  V

  More and more, as our knowledge widens, we have to reply to those who ask for a definition: ‘I can’t give you that, but I will tell you a story.’ We cannot say what a thing will be, nor what it ought to be; but we can say what it has been, and how it came to be what it is: History instead of Definition. It is this which (if we continue teachable) will make short work of all political theories; it is on this we must fall back to explain our word, gentleman.

  The life of our fathers was highly ceremonial; a man’s steps were counted; his acts, his gestures were prescribed; marriage, sale, adoption, and not only legal contracts, but the simplest necessary movements, must be all conventionally ordered and performed to rule. Life was a rehearsed piece; and only those who had been drilled in the rehearsals could appear with decency in the performance. A gentile man, one of a dominant race, hereditary priest, hereditary leader, was, by the circumstances of his birth and education, versed in this symbolic etiquette. Whatever circumstance arose, he would be prepared to utter the sacramental word, to perform the ceremonial act. For every exigence of family or tribal life, peace or war, marriage or sacrifice, fortune or mishap, he stood easily waiting, like the well-graced actor for his cue. The clan that he guided would be safe from shame, it would be ensured from loss; for the man’s attitude would be always becoming, his bargains legal, and his sacrifices pleasing to the gods. It is from this gentile man, the priest, the chief, the expert in legal forms and attitudes, the bulwark and the ornament of his tribe, that our name of gentleman descends. So much of the sense still clings to it, it still points the man who, in every circumstance of life, knows what to do and how to do it gracefully; so much of its sense it has lost, for this grace and knowledge are no longer of value in practical affairs; so much of a new sense it has taken on, for as well as the nicest fitness, it now implies a punctual loyalty of word and act. And note the word loyalty; here is a parallel advance from the proficiency of the gentile man to the honour of the gentleman, and from the sense of legality to that of loyalty. With the decay of the ceremonial element in life, the gentleman has lost some of his prestige, I had nearly said some of his importance; and yet his part is the more difficult to play. It is hard to preserve the figures of a dance when many of our partners dance at random. It is easy to be a gentleman in a very stiff society, where much of our action is prescribed; it is hard indeed in a very free society where (as it seems) almost any word or act must come by inspiration. The rehearsed piece is at an end; we are now floundering through an impromptu charade. Far more of ceremonial remains (to be sure) traditional in the terms of our association, far more hereditary in the texture of brains, than is dreamed by the superficial; it is our fortress against many perils, the cement of states, the meeting ground of classes. But much of life comes up for the first time, unrehearsed, and must be acted on upon the instant. Knowledge there can here be none; the man must invent an attitude, he must be inspired with speech; and the most perfect gentleman is he who, in these irregular cases, acts and speaks with most aplomb and fitness. His tact simulates knowledge; to see him so easy and secure and graceful you would think he had been through it all before; you would think he was the gentile man of old, repeating for the thousandth time, upon some public business, the sacramental words and ceremonial gestures of his race.

  Lastly, the club footman, so long as he is in his livery jacket, appears the perfect gentleman and visibly out-shines the members; and the same man, in the public-house, among his equals, becomes perhaps plain and dull, perhaps even brutal. He has learned the one part of service perfectly; there he has knowledge, he shines in the prepared performance; outside of that he must rely on tact, and sometimes flounders sadly in the unrehearsed charade. The gentleman, again, may be put to open shame as he changes from one country, or from one rank of society to another. The footman was a gentleman only ad hoc; the other (at the most) ad hoec; and when he has got beyond his knowledge, he begins to flounder in the charade. Even so the gentile man was only gentile among those of his own gens and their subordinates and neighbours; in a distant city, he too was peregrine and inexpert, and must become the client of another, or find his bargains insecure and be excluded from the service of the gods.

  Some Gentlemen in Fiction

  At bottom, what we hate or love is doubtless some projection of the author; the personal atmosphere is doubtless his; and when we think we know Hamlet, we know but a side of his creator.

  I

  TO MAKE a character at all—so to select, so to describe a few acts, a few speeches, perhaps (though this is quite superfluous) a few details of physical appearance, as that these shall all cohere and strike in the reader’s mind a common note of personality—there is no more delicate enterprise, success is nowhere less comprehensible than here. We meet a man, we find his talk to have been racy; and yet if every word were taken down by shorthand, we should stand amazed at its essential insignificance. Physical presence, the speaking eye, the inimitable commentary of the voice, it was in these the spell resided; and these are all excluded from the pages of the novel. There is one writer of fiction whom I have the advantage of knowing; and he confesses to me that his success in this matter (small though it be) is quite surprising to himself. ‘In one of my books,’ he writes, ‘and in one only, the characters took the bit in their mouth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time, my task was stenographic—it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story. When this miracle of genesis occurred, I was thrilled with joyous surprise; I felt a certain awe— shall we call it superstitious? And yet how small a miracle it was; with what a partial life were my characters endowed; and when all was said, how little did I know of them! It was a form of words that they supplied me with; it was in a form of words that they consisted; beyond and behind was nothing.’ The limitation, which this writer felt and which he seems to have deplored, can be remarked in the work of even literary princes. I think it was Hazlitt who declared that, if the names were dropped at press, he could restore any speech in Shakespeare to the proper speaker; and I daresay we could all pick out the words of Nym or Pistol, Caius or Evans; but not even Hazlitt could do the like for the great leading characters, who yet are cast in a more delicate mould, and appear before us far more subtly and far more fully differentiated, than these easy-going ventriloquial puppets. It is just when the obvious expedients of the barrel-organ vocabulary, the droll mispronunciation or the racy dialect, are laid aside, that the true masterpieces are wrought (it would seem) from nothing. Hamlet speaks in character, I potently believe it, and yet see not how. He speaks at least as no man ever spoke in life, and very much as many other heroes do in the same volume; now uttering the noblest verse, now prose of the most cunning workmanship; clothing his opinions throughout in that amazing dialect, Shakespearese. The opinions themselves, again, though they are true and forcible and reinforced with excellent images, are not peculiar either to Hamlet, or to any man or class or period; in their admirable generali
ty of appeal resides their merit; they might figure, and they would be applauded, in almost any play and in the mouth of almost any noble and considerate character.— The only hint that is given as to his physical man—I speak for myself—is merely shocking, seems merely erroneous, and is perhaps best explained away upon the theory that Shakespeare had Burbage more directly in his eye than Hamlet. As for what the Prince does and what he refrains from doing, all acts and passions are strangely impersonal. A thousand characters, as different among themselves as night from day, should yet, under the like stress of circumstance, have trodden punctually in the footprints of Hamlet and each other. Have you read André Cornélis? in which M. Bourget handled over again but yesterday the theme of Hamlet, even as Godwin had already rehandled part of it in Caleb Williams. You can see the character M. Bourget means with quite sufficient clearness; it is not a masterpiece, but it is adequately indicated; and the character is proper to the part, these acts and passions fit him like a glove, he carries the tale, not with so good a grace as Hamlet, but with equal nature. Well, the two personalities are fundamentally distinct: they breathe upon us out of different worlds; in face, in touch, in the subtle atmosphere by which we recognise an individual, in all that goes to build up a character—or at least that shadowy thing, a character in a book—they are even opposed: the same fate involves them, they behave on the same lines, and they have not one hair in common. What, then, remains of Hamlet? and by what magic does he stand forth in our brains, teres atque rotundus, solid to the touch, a man to praise, to blame, to pity, ay, and to love?

  At bottom, what we hate or love is doubtless some projection of the author; the personal atmosphere is doubtless his; and when we think we know Hamlet, we know but a side of his creator. It is a good old comfortable doctrine, which our fathers have taken for a pillow, which has served as a cradle for ourselves; and yet, in some of its applications, it brings us face to face with difficulties. I said last month that we could tell a gentleman in a novel. Let us continue to take Hamlet. Manners vary, they invert themselves, from age to age; Shakespeare’s gentlemen are not quite ours, there is no doubt their talk would raise a flutter in a modern tea-party; but in the old pious phrase, they have the root of the matter. All the most beautiful traits of the gentleman adorn this character of Hamlet: it was the side on which Salvini seized, which he so attractively displayed, with which he led theatres captive; it is the side, I think, by which the Prince endears himself to readers. It is true there is one staggering scene, the great scene with his mother. But we must regard this as the author’s lost battle; here it was that Shakespeare failed: what to do with the Queen, how to depict her, how to make Hamlet use her, these (as we know) were his miserable problem; it beat him; he faced it with an indecision worthy of his hero; he shifted, he shuffled with it; in the end, he may be said to have left his paper blank. One reason why we do not more generally recognise this failure of Shakespeare’s is because we have most of us seen the play performed; and managers, by what seems a stroke of art, by what is really (I dare say) a fortunate necessity, smuggle the problem out of sight—the play, too, for the matter of that; but the glamour of the footlights and the charm of that little strip of fiddlers’ heads and elbows, conceal the conjuring. This stroke of art (let me call it so) consists in casting the Queen as an old woman. Thanks to the footlights and the fiddlers’ heads, we never pause to inquire why the King should have pawned his soul for this college-bedmaker in masquerade; and thanks to the absurdity of the whole position, and that unconscious unchivalry of audiences (ay, and of authors also) to old women, Hamlet’s monstrous conduct passes unobserved or unresented. Were the Queen cast as she should be, a woman still young and beautiful, had she been coherently written by Shakespeare, and were she played with any spirit, even an audience would rise.

  But the scene is simply false, effective on the stage, untrue of any son or any mother; in judging the character of Hamlet, it must be left upon one side; and in all other relations we recognise the Prince for a gentleman.

  Now, if the personal charm of any verbal puppet be indeed only an emanation from its author, may we conclude, since we feel Hamlet to be a gentleman, that Shakespeare was one too? An instructive parallel occurs. There were in England two writers of fiction, contemporaries, rivals in fame, opposites in character; one descended from a great house, easy, generous, witty, debauched, a favourite in the tap-room and the hunting field, yet withal a man of a high practical intelligence, a distinguished public servant, an ornament of the bench: the other, sprung from I know not whence—but not from kings—buzzed about by second-rate women, and their fit companion, a tea-bibber in parlours, a man of painful propriety, with all the narrowness and much of the animosity of the backshop and the dissenting chapel. Take the pair, they seem like types: Fielding, with all his faults, was undeniably a gentleman; Richardson, with all his genius and his virtues, as undeniably was not. And now turn to their works. In Tom Jones, a novel of which the respectable profess that they could stand the dulness if it were not so black-guardly, and the more honest admit they could forgive the blackguardism if it were not so dull—in Tom Jones, with its voluminous bulk and troops of characters, there is no shadow of a gentleman, for Allworthy is only ink and paper. In Joseph Andrews, I fear I have always confined my reading to the parson; and Mr Adams, delightful as he is, has no pretension ‘to the genteel’. In Amelia, things get better; all things get better; it is one of the curiosities of literature that Fielding, who wrote one book that was engaging, truthful, kind, and clean, and another book that was dirty, dull, and false, should be spoken of, the world over, as the author of the second and not the first, as the author of Tom Jones, not of Amelia. And in Amelia, sure enough, we find some gentlefolk; Booth and Dr Harrison will pass in a crowd, I dare not say they will do more. It is very differently that one must speak of Richardson’s creations. With Sir Charles Grandison I am unacquainted—there are many impediments in this brief life of man; I have more than once, indeed, reconnoitred the first volume with a flying party, but always decided not to break ground before the place till my siege guns came up; and it’s an odd thing—I have been all these years in the field, and that powerful artillery is still miles in the rear. The day it overtakes me, Baron Gibbon’s fortress shall be beat about his ears, and my flag be planted on the formidable ramparts of the second part of Faust. Clarendon, too— But why should I continue this confession? Let the reader take up the wondrous tale himself, and run over the books that he has tried, and failed withal, and vowed to try again, and now beholds, as he goes about a library, with secret compunction. As to Sir Charles at least, I have the report of spies; and by the papers in the office of my Intelligence Department, it would seem he was a most accomplished baronet. I am the more ready to credit these reports, because the spies are persons thoroughly accustomed to the business; and because my own investigation of a kindred quarter of the globe (Clarissa Harlowe) has led me to set a high value on the Richardsonians. Lovelace—in spite of his abominable misbehaviour—Colonel Morden and my Lord M— are all gentlemen of undisputed quality. They more than pass muster, they excel; they have a gallant, a conspicuous carriage; they roll into the book, four in hand, in gracious attitudes. The best of Fielding’s gentlemen had scarce been at their ease in M— Hall; Dr Harrison had seemed a plain, honest man, a trifle below his company; and poor Booth (supposing him to have served in Colonel Morden’s corps and to have travelled in the post-chaise along with his commandant) had been glad to slink away with Mowbray and crack a bottle in the butler’s room.