THERE are many books which we think we have read when we have not.
There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original
picture, perhaps, was imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own
changing minds. We only remember our remembrances. There is many a man who
thinks he can recall the works of Swift or of Goldsmith; but, indeed, he
himself is the principal author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or ‘The Vicar of
Wakefield’, which he recalls. Macaulay, with his close reading and miraculous
memory, was quite certain that the Blatant Beast was killed at the end of ‘The
Faerie Queene’; but it was not. A brilliant and scholarly friend of mine quoted
a stanza as one in which not one word could safely be altered — and quoted it
wrong. Hundreds of highly educated people are quite fixed in false versions
touching facts that they could easily verify. The editor of a Church newspaper
(in rebuking Radicals) asseverated again and again, after contradiction and
challenge, that the Catechism commands a child ‘to do his duty in that state of
life to which it has pleased God to call him’. Of course the Catechism says no
such thing, but the editor was so certain that he would not even open his
prayer-book to see. Hundreds of people are sure that Milton wrote, ‘Tomorrow to fresh fields and
pastures new’. Hundreds of people are sure that Jesuits preached that the end
justifies the means; many of them are sure that they have seen some Jesuit’s
statement to that effect; but they have not.
But it is a stranger thing
still that memory can thus trick us about the main artistic effect of really
fine books. Until about a year ago I believed that I had a vivid recollection
of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, So, indeed, I had, of certain images of the wreck and
island; above all of the admirable fact that Crusoe had two swords instead of
one. That is one of the touches of the true Defoe; the very inspired poetry of
the accidental and the rough-and-tumble; the very romance of the unromantic.
But I found I had completely forgotten the really sublime introduction to the
tale, which gives it all its spiritual dignity — the narrative of Crusoe’s
impiety; his two escapes from shipwreck and opportunities for repentance; and,
finally, the falling upon him of this strange judgement: food, security,
silence — a judgement stranger than death.
With this case in mind I
am in no position to exult over my fellow-critics when they prove that they
have not read properly the books that, as it happens, I have read properly. But
I have been somewhat singularly impressed with the most cultivated and
authoritative criticisms of the dramatic version of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, in so
far as they refer to Stevenson’s original romance. Of the play I cannot speak,
but with the romance I am very well acquainted, which is more than can be said
of those who have lightly and gracefully criticized it on the present occasion.
Most of them said that Stevenson was a charming artist but no philosopher; that
his inadequacy as a thinker was well represented in the tale of ‘Jekyll and
Hyde’, which they proceeded to describe with the wildest inaccuracy of detail
and a complete oblivion of the design. One idea, above all, has established
itself firmly in their minds and I daresay in many other people’s. They think
that in Stevenson’s tale Jekyll is the good self and Hyde the bad self; or, in
other words, that the protagonist is wholly good when he is Jekyll and wholly
bad when he is Hyde.
Now, if Hamlet had killed
his uncle in the first act, if Othello had appeared as a mari complaisant, it could not
have upset the whole point of Shakespeare’s story more than this upsets the
whole point of Stevenson’s story. Stevenson’s story has nothing to do with
pathological pedantries about ‘dual personality’. That was mere machinery; and
as he himself seems to have thought, even unfortunate machinery. The business
of the powders I think he himself thought clumsy; but he had to make the tale a
modern novel and work the transformations by medicine, unless he was prepared
to tell it as a primeval fairy-tale and make them by magic. But he did not care
a jot about either compared with the mystical idea in the transformation
itself; and that had nothing to do with powders or dual personalities, but only
with heaven and hell — like ‘Robinson Crusoe’.
Stevenson goes out of his
way to emphasize the fact that Jekyll, as Jekyll, was by no means perfect but
was rather a morally damaged piece of goods. He had ‘a sly cast’, in spite of
his handsome presence; he was nervous and secretive though not ill-natured.
Jekyll is not the good man; Jekyll is the ordinary mixed, moderately humane
man, whose character has begun to suffer from some evil drug or passion. Now,
that which is thus sucking and draining him is the habit of being Hyde; and it
is here that the fine moral of Stevenson comes in, a moral as superior as it is
opposite to that popularly put into his mouth. So far from preaching that man
can be success fully divided into two men, good and evil, he specifically
preached that man cannot be so divided, even by monstrosity and miracle; that,
even in the extravagant case of Jekyll, the good is still dragged down by the
mere existence of the bad. The moral of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is not that man
can be cut in two; it is that man cannot be cut in two.
Hyde is the innocence of
evil. He stands for the truth (attested by a hundred tales of hypocrites and
secret sins) that there is in evil, though not in good, this power of
self-isolation, this hardening of the whole exterior, so that a man becomes
blind to moral beauties or deaf to pathetic appeals. A man in pursuit of some
immoral mania does attain an abominable simplicity of soul; he does act from
one motive alone. Therefore he does be come like Hyde, or like that
blood-curdling figure in Grimm’s fairy-tales, ‘a little man made of iron’. But
the whole of Stevenson’s point would have been lost if Jekyll had exhibited the
same horrible homogeneity. Precisely because Jekyll, with all his faults,
possesses goodness, he possesses also the consciousness of sin, humility. He
knows all about Hyde, as angels know about devils. And Steven son specially
points out that this contrast between the blind swiftness of evil and the almost
bewildered omniscience of good is not a peculiarity of this strange case, but
is true of the permanent problem of your conscience and mine. If I get drunk I
shall forget dignity; but if I keep sober I may still desire drink. Virtue has
the heavy burden of knowledge; sin has often something of the levity of
sinlessness.
G K Chesterton in The Glass Walking Stick - Selections from the Illustrated London News
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