While thumbing through the pages of my copy of The Scarlet Letter, I came across this prejudiced passage that I had put in brackets. It occurs about thirty pages before the end of the book: “Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.” This is Hawthorne supplying a concocted background for his narrative. Isn’t it interesting that he uses the same word as Chesterton later did—gayety—to tell us what character trait Puritanism, at its best, embodied? Haters of authentic Christianity think alike; and they typically redefine what they love and hate, sometimes in the same words. Hawthorne and Chesterton would like us to believe that being gay is what the best of Puritanism was about and what Christianity should always be about, not holiness, not faith, not grace, not redemption, and not even Jesus Christ. The nearest trait to what Chesterton means by ‘gaiety’ is what the Bible calls ‘merry.’ Did R. L. Stevenson’s ‘gaiety’ resemble this?—: “Is any merry? let him sing Psalms” (James 5.13.) Or did it, rather, resemble this?—“And Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunken” (1 Samuel 25.36.) After a doctor warned him to give up drinking, Stevenson described himself like so: ‘that lean, feverish, voluble and whiskyfied young Scot’ (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 19.) He was habitually ‘gay,’ alright; but a candid critic would define this ‘gaiety’ as ‘whiskyfied.’
Those persons who understand Stevenson best are not, as Chesterton opines, the ones ‘who take him most lightly.’ This is not a true test for anyone; this is not how any person should be judged. To know someone, we need to plumb his depths, not merely skim the surface of his ‘gaiety.’ They who understand R. L. Stevenson best are those who take account of the facts—facts that must be gleaned from sources outside this distorting essay on his life. It is not ‘hazardous’ to ‘dogmatize about a man like Stevenson.’ I don’t feel hazarded from doing so. It does not mean that we are ‘rooted in open and systematic morbidities’ and ‘human prejudices’ if we choose to dogmatize about the subject. It’s almost like Chesterton is the ancestor of 21st century leftists who call others racist merely for wanting to judge a man by the facts. He is so determined to whitewash Stevenson’s tomb that he says that the notion that ‘a thing cannot at the same time be black and white’ is an ‘idle fiction.’ This is like saying that a man can be a woman or that a woman can be a man or that a determined sinner can be, at the same time, a devoted saint. What he’s really saying is that we should never mind the facts and just believe Chesterton instead. We should take it on faith—Chesterton’s faith, which is obviously willfully blind. Speaking of faith, Chesterton is even willing to redefine that in the interest of making his befouled subject look pristine. The ‘best definition of faith,’ he says, is the ‘divine frivolity’ that Stevenson personified. But the author of Hebrews teaches that faith is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ That doesn’t sound like the ‘divine frivolity’ of Stevenson, which ‘divine frivolity’ was nothing else but the prodigal behavior from which he needed to be saved by faith. Life is not ‘a continual heaven of reconciliation,’ as Chesterton says. If God is ‘angry with the wicked every day,’ as the Psalmist tells us—angry each day with wicked sinners such as R. L. Stevenson was—life must be, rather, more like something of a continual rebellion against God. It is not, as Chesterton avers, ‘hazardous’ to ‘dogmatize about a man like Stevenson.’ It is, however, hazardous to bear false witness about a man to the readers who read your rubbish to pass time on the tram on their way to work. It is just as sinful to bear false witness by making a bad man appear virtuous as it is by making a good man appear vicious. It is just as sinful to whitewash as it is to slander. If it was wrong to try to make a Pharisee appear holy in Jesus’ day, it is wrong in our day to try to make a wretch look blameless. If Stevenson was such a mystic, why didn’t he make an effort to live like one? A mystic does not live in sin while getting drunk on his father’s income, does he? Why didn’t Chesterton mention something like this about R. L. Stevenson?—: “The fact that she [Fanny Osbourne] was already married did not hinder their intimacy, and after she returned to California and to her husband, he followed her” (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 18.) That doesn’t sound like a ‘faddling hedonist’ or a ‘gay mystic,’ but a bold adulterer. Iain Murray is a dependable source. But just to make sure, I went beyond him to check what he said about Stevenson’s affair with Fanny Osbourne. In a book that is sympathetic to Stevenson, called, Last Witness of Robert Louis Stevenson, the illicit liaison is confirmed.
No comments:
Post a Comment