CRITICISM IS LOVE
From an Aesthetic Realism Seminar
By Barbara Allen of There Are Wives
Includes Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson
(Fanny Van de Grift Osborne)
 Part I
Though the doctors told him that he couldn't expect to live much longer, Stevenson felt marrying Fanny would make him stronger. They were married
on May 19, 1880 and to everyone's surprise, he lived for fourteen more
years with his wife. He wrote of his marriage this way in 1881 in a letter
to a friend:
It was not my bliss that I was interested in when I was married; if
was a sort of marriage in extremis; and if I am where I am, it is
thanks to the care of that lady, who married me when I was a mere complication
of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.
[p. 77]
They travelled together all over the world in search of a place where Robert's
health could be maintained--to the mountains, to Mount Saint Helena; they
spent months aboard ships; and they finally settled in Samoa, where they
lived for five years. In every place Stevenson wrote his stories which
the world came to love.
What Eli Siegel says here about the criticism of ourselves is true
also of what two people are looking for in marriage:
Criticism of self must be severe and stirring, ruthless and kind.
If this is so criticism of self is like a painting, severe and flowing;
a poem, tough and elusive, exact and palpitating; music, structural and
reassuring.
The criticism of self consequently, is like the criticism of anything else;
indeed, it is like the seeing and valuing of tree, water, pole, or animal.Like most married couples the Stevensons' criticisms of each other were
not always given with good will, with that oneness of severity and encouragement
that would cause them to think well of themselves. Sometimes the very qualities
they cared for in each other were a cause of discontent. For instance,
soon after they were married Fanny called Stevenson's old friends "fiends
disguised as friends" and "banned them" from the convivial "junketings" that she felt endangered her husband's health. She interfered for his good
and Stevenson liked her interference and didn't like it. Fanny sometimes
felt her husband was entirely too cheerful and it got on her nerves; Robert
felt his wife was constantly nagging him and much too gloomy. He wrote
to their mutual friend, the writer Henry James in January 1887, a lively,
though regretful account of one of their arguments, and you can see some
of the feeling husbands and wives have when they know they have said things
to hurt, and not to encourage. Stevenson writes: She is a woman (as you know) not without art: the art of extracting
the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in
this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing.
It is strange: "we fell out my wife and I" the other night; she tackled
me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting
that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was
discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain
by an arrow of truth, and we tenderly carried off each other's corpses.
[Stevenson and His World, Daiches, p. 69]In this account Stevenson is treating something lightly that must have
caused a good deal of pain. Married people know the sensation of having
said things that are in some way true, but are motivated by the desire
to wound the other person, which is ill will. Fanny felt her husband could
have respected her more. She writes in her Samoan diary of being depressed
for some days because he called her a "peasant" and not an artist. Yet
this was belied by the fact that he asked her to be a critic of his writing.
These were the times when criticism had as its purpose consciously "the
seeing and valuing" of a thing exactly. Mrs. Stevenson wrote an account
of their days to her sister:
My husband usually wrote from the early morning until noon, while
my household duties occupied the same time. In the afternoon the work of
the morning was read aloud, and we talked it over, criticizing and suggesting
improvements. This finished, we walked in our garden, listened to the birds,
and looked at our trees....[p. 108]These conversations were often heated, but Robert Louis Stevenson respected
the criticism of his wife. The most outstanding example of this was the
day he brought her the first manuscript of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde saying, "It is the best thing I have ever done." Mrs. Stevenson read it
and thought it was the worst thing she had read, and she was so upset that
her opinion differed so much from her husband's that she became physically
ill. Writes her biographer:
She fell into a state of deep gloom, for she couldn't let it go, and
yet it seemed cruel to tell him so, and between the two horns of the dilemma
she made herself quite ill. At last, by his request and according to their
custom, she put her objections to it, as it then stood, in writing, complaining
that he had treated it simply as a story whereas it was in reality an allegory.
After reading her paper and seeing the justice of her criticism,...he burned
his first draft and rewrote it from a different point of view.
His wife was appalled that he burned the first draft, but when asked why
he did, he said he didn't want to be influenced by it. The result is the
powerful, critical description of the dual nature of the self that is Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that stunned, and educated the world. Eli Siegel
had such respect for this book that it is on the required reading for all
Aesthetic Realism consultants.
The story, though it has its remarkable elements, is about good and
evil in every person. How intimately Stevenson saw these forces working
in himself and in his wife, Fanny, is for us to consider. Dr. Jekyll is
a respected man in the community an Mr. Hyde the other side of him, committed
to evil. In Dr. Jekyll's confession, Stevenson writes:
...I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man;
I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness,
even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was
radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific
discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle,
I had learned to swell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought
of the separation of these elements. [From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
p. 82]At the time this book was published, Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson were traveling
from Northhampton to New York on a tramp steamer because aboard ship was
the one place he could breathe. When they reached New York in 1887 they
were very surprised to see it ...has made a tremendous impression on the reading public; the idea
of dual personality was being discussed on all sides; ministers preached
sermons about it. Stevenson was amazed and bewildered, though immensely
pleased. [p. 125]
It is thrilling to see how one of the most critical stories ever written,
terrifying in its criticism, was loved so much and has kept on being loved. "Criticism of self," wrote Eli Siegel, "must be severe and stirring, ruthless
and kind."
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