UNTIL THIS NECESSITY I had not read Robert Louis Stevenson since my childhood. I had read then, and in some corner of my mind remember with pleasure, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. I especially remembered the poetry, without, of course, ever thinking of rereading it. It was something designed for my friends’ children on their birthdays. I had, in fact, relegated Stevenson to that dusty and diverse gallery of my childhood, a gallery which also included Horatio Alger, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and almost all of Dickens. Childhood, I decided, having safely survived it, was a period of light and sunshine, and in Stevenson these elements were contained in profusion; he was perfect for childhood, because his stories were so simple and he told them so well.
Thus, rereading Stevenson was something of a shock, almost a betrayal. It was not that he had become less delightful, but that now there stirred for me beneath this brave adventure an element faintly disturbing of which I had not been cognizant before. Treasure Island, it is true, remains perhaps the best boys’ book I have ever read; but not even this masterpiece quite escapes the transformation effected by time.
The most enduring delight offered by Stevenson is contained in his prose; he could write superbly well, a virtue for which we should all be grateful now that the clotheshorse, the fisherman, and nymphomaniac have been equipped with typewriters and entered the world of letters. The admirable study by David Daiches dissects Stevenson’s style in some detail and skillfully traces Stevenson from his “sedulous” aping of the styles of other men to the Stevenson who produced Kidnapped and The Beach of Falesa and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston. Daiches does some extremely careful detective work here and achieves a rare effect: he makes Stevenson grow and strengthen before our eyes. Perhaps this is not the definitive study of Stevenson, but it succeeds within its limits perfectly. Whoever attempts such a study hereafter will be greatly in Mr. Daiches’s debt.
The Pritchett volume—which is badly printed on bad paper and with an inaccurate table of contents—includes Weir of Hermiston, Kidnapped, Travels with a Donkey, The Beach of Falesa, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Suicide Club, and contains an introduction by Mr. Pritchett. Pritchett, rather less sympathetic than Mr. Daiches, notes that Stevenson was too mannered and too clever and too vain and was, for much of his life, not so much of an artist as a charming and irresponsible vagrant; and that even Weir of Hermiston might never have become the great novel it seems to promise because Stevenson does not, at any other time in his career, seem capable of so sustained an effort on such a mature level. Mr. Daiches, in consideration of this aspect of Stevenson, anatomizes the conflict within Stevenson between a bourgeois and a bohemian morality, a conflict related to his father and accounting in part for his unevenness as an artist and his frequent inability to achieve or sustain adult insights.
Stevenson is always a master storyteller; and his failure, when he fails, is not the inability to tell the story but an inability to handle a theme. It is this failure which mars his two most ambitious efforts for me: the murkiness and indecision and unevenness of characterization in The Master of Ballantrae and—in spite of the considerable impressiveness of Weir of Hermiston and the sometimes brilliant handling of the father-and-son relationship—a lack of unity in this fragment, which indeed I doubt that Stevenson could have finished.
Stevenson is at his absolute best, however, in a narrative like Kidnapped, an exceedingly skillful novel and a far less simple one that I had supposed. (According to Mr. Daiches it is only one-half of the novel its author intended, having been sidetracked midway and become something quite different. It has a sequel, David Balfour.) All of Stevenson’s warm brutal innocence is here, the sensation of light and air, the nervous tension, the chase, the victory. And the preoccupations he later pursued in more ambitious novels give Kidnapped an impetus which makes it a good deal more than an adventure tale. The story of David Balfour’s struggle to attain his birthright is told with a strange lack of directness and is emphasized by an indefinable sense of guilt, sometimes almost terror, which makes his victory, when it comes, less than it was in anticipation. He has paid for his victory with himself and has become a different person. The novel, in fact, ends on a restrained and terrible note of melancholy:
It was coming near noon when I passed in by the West Kirk and the Grassmarket into the streets of the capital. The huge height of the buildings, the foul smells and fine clothes struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise so that I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties) there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.
Again, in Kidnapped the relationship of David and Alan, on which much of the book turns, is far more than a friendship and is certainly not the traditional Anglo-Saxon friendship. Alan is for David a father image, a lover, a foe, a child, and, over and above all, a symbol of romance. In spite of Daiches’s reservation that the characterization of Alan is not entirely successful, it seems to me that Stevenson exhibits in the relationship of these two a richness and complexity of insight which does not anywhere—until Kirstie and Archie in Hermiston—characterize his studies of men and women. Pritchett, observing this, concludes, and I agree, that this does not at all indicate that Stevenson was homosexual; for Stevenson men were less of a riddle. They represented no challenge, they were the makers and the movers of the world and more fitting subjects for romance. Here, probably, is one of the keys to Stevenson’s continuing popularity with the young, and one of the reasons it took him so long to become an artist. He is innocent—or asexual—in the same manner that preadolescent youth is asexual. In Treasure Island as in Kidnapped, women and the challenge women represent are only vaguely intimated; it is an element projected into the future and which allows the protagonists, meanwhile, to live as though this challenge will never have to be met. Later, when the challenge must be taken up, it is an awkward and unhappy battle; this bright world is darkened and roughly disoriented; at this time David would be almost willing—if he could—to surrender his birthright, to be hunted and threatened all over again if he could thereby return to Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful.
(1948)