Introduction

M ANY things conspire to make the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  one of the most remarkable, of not the  most remarkable of all the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. Few readers need to be reminded of the triumph of will over physical weakness which Stevenson achieved in many of his writings. None of them is a greater monument of that triumph than this. At Skerryvore in Bournemouth, Stevenson had to be kept in bed and silent, fighting for his life against horrible attacks of hæmorrhage. All communication was by slate and pencil, and in the hushed and darkened room it was necessary to keep the patient solitary and to refuse him the visits of his friends. It would be difficult to conceive of a more impossible occasion for the production of great literature. In the challenge of such illness to the spirit there is nothing to inspire, everything to depress. Yet out of this extraordinary net of circumstances there came one of the greatest stories in the world. It is in a sense classic, like the main ideas and plots of Shakespeare. It has already been translated into many tongues, and it is safe to say that long after most of Stevenson's works have been forgotten, this one will be remembered and quoted by generations yet unborn.

Another peculiarity of this story is its origin in the author's dreams. In his own well-known phrase, he has acknowledged his debt for it to his "Brownies"; and the story of that night when he received this amazing gift from dreamland, and of the next three days when he wrote thirty thousand words almost without pausing, is one of the most startling among the curiosities of literature. The other dream child of Stevenson's fancy is Olalla.  In that sad and fascinating tale there is the glamour of things mysterious, and the suggestion of black magic hovering about the foreign landscape and offering the exact atmosphere for things sinister and illicit. It has the mingled beauty and terror that cling about the emergence of our vaunted human nature from its brute inheritance. Jekyll and Hyde  is very different. The Brownies appear to have been sporting with jangled nightmares of chess problems and other matters which harry the over-excited brain and chase it even into the land of sleep. Suddenly this emerged.

The third peculiarity of the story is the destruction of its first copy. Immediately upon finishing it, the author poured it forth upon his best-beloved collaborators and critics. One can imagine the overwhelming effect of this, even upon so well-balanced a mind as that of Mrs. Stevenson. Yet her critical judgment was not swept away. Something was wrong, and she was quick to detect it. The purpose of the work had been undoubtedly allegorical; but the novelist in Stevenson had outrun the preacher, and the allegory had tailed off into something that was but a brilliant short story. One cannot wonder if, at first, he violently rebelled. On reconsideration, he found that his wife's view of the matter was absolutely true, and then, to her horror, he flung the entire manuscript into the fire. One remembers Newton's immortal dog Diamond, and the tragedy of Mill's housemaid who destroyed Carlyle's priceless manuscript of the French Revolution. This case was different from these. Stevenson entirely capitulated to the rights of the allegory, and in order that these might be preserved he destroyed all that he had done, lest the written manuscript should lure him back to the short story. Three more days of unbroken toil, and the tale, as we now possess it, ended its adventures and was ready for the publisher.

It is a tale of the supernatural, and that is not, as a rule, Stevenson's strongest line. There is an indefinable something that separates his spirit from the world of magic or of demons. Perhaps it is his indestructible common sense and his vivid interest in the things of the actual world. The horror of his supernatural work is very great, and it is wonderfully sustained in Tod Lapraik and Thrawn Janet: yet there is generally some little touch of actual matter of fact which renders the situation precarious. In Jekyll and Hyde  there is the powder and the liquor which positively smell of the chemist's shop. Had it been possible by any means to get rid of these, and by some mystic spell to accomplish the transformation, the story would have gained a safer foothold in the spectral world. Yet, on the other hand any such device would have taken it out of the actual life of modern men, and its hold on that was more important for its real purpose than the mere point of artistry.

In this extraordinary tale, the Brownies had seized upon an idea, and that idea haunted the writer. When first we meet those quite ordinary-looking persons, Mr. Utterson and Mr. Enfield, we little dream where they are going to lead us. All we know is that it will be among the streets and houses of London in 1886. Gradually the idea of the double personality emerges, revealing itself at first by hints, and then afterwards in broad and clear confessions. Eight years earlier, in collaboration with Mr. Henley, Stevenson had written his play of Deacon Brodie.  It was a dramatisation of the life of a man who, by day, was a respectable and eminent citizen of Edinburgh, while, by night, dressed in appropriate costume, he was a clever and audacious burgler. There are many other proofs that the idea of the double life haunted Stevenson's imagination. One finds it in such borderland conceptions as Olalla,  in such dramatic realisations of the heart of murderers as Markheim,  and in such psychological studies as that of the missionary in The Ebb Tide. 

But it was not from the dramatic and artistic point of view alone that this conception took such powerful hold upon Stevenson. All his life long he had much trouble with his conscience, as he confesses humorously in one of his poems in Scots. He could treat his conscience as cavalierly as most men: but, like all the rest of us, he could neither implicitly obey it nor effectively silence it. No one professes that his life was blameless of youthful excess, and no fair judge can deny that his reactions towards nobler things were as genuine and honest as the excesses had been. It is impossible to imagine what good purpose can be served by morbid curiosity as to the detail of his wild oats. Every man born has found, in one direction or another, a law in his members warring against the law of his mind. Some people, like Stevenson, have natures more sensitive, violent, and daring than the rest; but that is only a matter of degree and not of kind. That Jekyll and Hyde  has strong personal value for its author is evident from his allusion in a letter to Mr. Low, "I send you herewith a Gothic gnome for your Greek nymph; but the gnome is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears." The enormous and unique and immediate popularity of this volume shows its appeal to the general conscience of mankind, and the accuracy of its description of universal experience.

There is a terrific passage in the Epistle to the Romans in which the two-fold nature of man is depicted in the most lurid words. It is questionable if anything that has been written since has expressed Paul's meaning so powerfully and vividly as the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Yet the phenomenon is as old as man, and the cry is not less ancient. Long before Paul wrote his epistle Balaam had been fascinated alternately by good and evil, and Ovid had confessed that while he approved the better way he followed the worse. Apart from morals altogether, many modern parallels have puzzled psychologists. The extraordinary cases quoted by the late Professor William James, the curious duality of Fiona Macleod and her author, and other such instances old and new, will occur to every reader. In Bunyan's Grace Abounding  and in his Christian's adventures in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we recognise the same condition. Browning, in his Ned Bratts, has taken up the idea from Bunyan, and portrayed, in his roughest and most vernacular, a man demanding to be hanged while his good self was dominant, lest, being spared, the bad man of him should get the mastery again. These are reinforced by many instances of the moral collapses of good men, and by the times of obsession which plague us all when we find ourselves playing sedulous ape to two moralities. The psychological explanation of this in ancient times was to be found in evil spirits or in the Manichæan doctrine of the inherent evil of matter. Of late years the language in which the phenomenon has been described would seem to indicate the view that within each apparent personality there reside two real and separate personalities, or it may be more than two. On this view a man may be two different persons confined within one body. As we think of the violent contrasts of character which our lives exhibit, we can hardly wonder at so simple although so fantastic an explanation, especially as the bad man in us often gets us into situations which the good man has to reckon with and pay for.

Really, however, this double personality is but a metaphorical way of speaking. When we use it we do not mean personalities, but groups of emotions, moods, likings, and desires behind which one personality sits, choosing and arranging which groups shall dominate us, or sometimes going down before the attack of one group or another. It will be noticed that in the story of Jekyll and Hyde  memory and choice are continuous; and the duality is entirely voluntary and not necessary. The will is the essence of the person, after all is said. There are many causes which explain the multiple so-called personalities within a man. There is the long evolution of the species, and the fact that fragments of a very remote past and of primitive instincts of the brute seem to be still capable of leaping up into conscious life. There is also our human heredity, and the recurrence of ancestral traits of character which crop up unexpectedly in descendants. There are purely physical causes, such as the condition of one's nerves, or the effect of the weather or of illness. There are also environmental conditions, and it is undoubted that some people can call up all the best that is in us, while others seem to raise the worst. Besides all this, no doubt, the responsibility for multiple personalities is largely our own. Habits of thinking that we have cherished or suppressed, uncontrolled impulses which we have been too lazy to direct, these and many other things help to explain the condition.

It is a pitiful condition in many ways. Men used to blame the Devil for it, but the Devil as an excuse is heavily overworked. After all, each of us knows that he himself is the captain of the ship, and that it is his business and not the Devil's to take command. Stevenson saw that, in the human world, there was much temptation to play with this dangerous psychological faculty for the sake of some depraved enjoyment or excitement which it might give; and he portrayed, in all its nakedness, the sheer horror of the thing. He laid special emphasis upon that period in the process when recovery becomes more and more difficult and ceases to be a matter of will, and when the vicious side of a man, chosen at first for his own purposes, fastens itself in him, claws and beak, until it seems to become his only self.

It is noteworthy that Stevenson does not append a moral to his allegory. There was, indeed, no need to do that. All who have eyes to see can perceive, as the horror grows, one of the supreme dangers of life. One thing at least is obvious. It is that, for all men, so long as they have not entirely capitulated, it is possible to make "some brave output of the will," and bid defiance to any such ghastly process within them. Whatever be the ultimate explanation of this recondite condition, it is certain that there is no need to lie down under it and in moral fatalism accept it as inevitable. The self you choose to-day, and not the self you chose yesterday, is the fate of to-morrow.