The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's 'Jekyll and Hyde.' - Robert Louis Stevenson

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Stephen D. Arata

Shortly after its publication Myers wrote to Stevenson, whom he did not know, enthusiastically praising Jekyll and Hyde but suggesting that certain minor revisions would improve the novel. After noting some infelicities of phrasing and gaps in plotting, Myers came to what he considered the story's "weakest point," the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Hyde's mauling of Carew's "unresisting body" offended the decorous Myers ("no, not an elderly MP's!"), but his primary objection was that such an act was untrue to Hyde's nature. Because "Jekyll was thoroughly civilized . . . his degeneration must needs take certain lines only." Hyde should be portrayed as "not a generalized but a specialized fiend," whose cruelty would never take the form Stevenson gave it. At most "Hyde would, I think, have brushed the baronet aside with a curse."

Stevenson's reply was polite, passing over the bulk of Myers's suggestions in silence. He did pause to correct him on one subject, though, that of a painting in Hyde's lodgings. Myers had questioned whether the doctor would have acquired artwork for his alter ego. Stevenson answered that Hyde purchased the painting, not Jekyll. Myers's response was disproportionately vehement. "Would Hyde have bought a picture? I think - and friends of weight support my view - that such an act would have been altogether unworthy of him." Unworthy? Myers and his weighty friends appear to feel that Hyde's character is being impugned, that his good name must be defended against some implied insult. Asking "what are the motives which would prompt a person in [Hyde's] situation" to buy artwork, Myers suggests three, none of which, he argues, applies to Hyde's case.

1. There are jaded voluptuaries who seek in a special class of art a substitute or reinforcement for the default of primary stimuli. Mr. Hyde's whole career forbids us to insult him by classing him with these men.

2. There are those who wish for elegant surroundings to allure or overawe the minds of certain persons unaccustomed to luxury or splendour. But does not all we know of Hyde teach us that he disdained those modes of adventitious attractions? . . .

3. There are those, again, who surround their more concentrated enjoyments with a halo of mixed estheticism. . . . Such, no doubt, was Dr. Jekyll; such, no doubt, he expected that Mr. Hyde would be. But was he not deceived? Was there not something unlooked for, something Napoleonic, in Hyde's way of pushing aside the aesthetic as well as the moral superfluities of life? . . . We do not imagine the young Napoleon as going to concerts or taking a walk in a garden . . . . I cannot fancy Hyde looking in at picture shops. I cannot think he ever left his rooms, except on business.

This is a most unfamiliar Hyde! On the evidence of Myers's letter we would have to pronounce him an upstanding citizen. Myers clearly perceives how easily Stevenson's Hyde could be taken not for a brute but for a dandy. At no point is Myers worried that Hyde might be considered atavistic. Instead, he is concerned that Hyde's reputation not be smeared by association with "jaded voluptuaries" and aesthetes. In attempting to clear him of such charges, Myers presents Jekyll's alter ego as the very image of bourgeois sobriety and industry, manfully disdainful of the shop window, the art gallery, the concert hall - of anything that might savor of the aesthetic or the frivolous. Myers praises Hyde's simplicity of dress: he's not a fop but a "man aiming only at simple convenience, direct sufficiency." Unconcerned with personal adornment, he is "not anxious to present himself as personally attractive, but [relies] frankly on the cash nexus, and on that decision of character that would startle" those less forceful than himself.