The book, as I see it now, should be really two books. The one should be the plain tale of an adventurous romantic’s progress through life in the nineteenth century; and the other should be a kind of log-book, kept by the clerk of a workshop, retaining perhaps a little of the abridgement and hurried character of notes made in the whistle and hum of the machinery, its pages smudged a little with iron filings, and here and there a shaving to keep the place. It should, I think, retain the sharp clean smell of new sawdust. And yet, different in character as the two books should be, it ought not to be possible for the reader of the tale to forget that its hero was, in fact, prospecting for metal and timber that was afterwards to go into the workshop, and the reader of the mechanic’s record should be reminded that he who wrestled so merrily with the problems of machinery, was also the man who sailed and rode and played at being a consul1 away in the South Seas, and, in earlier manhood, had walked on Princes Street, exultant in his youth, and from the Calton Hill2 had swelled at the vision of the town beneath him, and in wild northern seas3 had done his day’s work with the rest.
Stevenson, perhaps more markedly than any other Scottish writer born in the nineteenth century, stands a little apart from English literature. Even such writers as Sir J. M. Barrie,4 for all their rather aggressive dialect, have their eyes on English books and their ears attuned more particularly to English prose. Stevenson was a contemporary of Wilde’s;5 but it would be hard to imagine two intellectual backgrounds more essentially different. And the background of Irish legend adopted by Mr W. B. Yeats,6 adopted only in its periods of vivid dream and action, is quite other in character than the continuous tradition not only of history but also of literature in which Stevenson, as a Scotsman, grew up. His short-winded Latinity and his still shorter-breathed knowledge of Greek7 confined him closely to his own language, and in that language for him Burns and Scott and Drummond of Hawthornden8 were not Scottish islands in a sea of English literature, but the peaks of a main land whose lower hills and valleys were no less familiar to him. He knew Fergusson9 as well as Burns, and his knowledge of Scottish ballads was not bounded by ‘Chevy Chase’ or that stirring invitation to assault the walls of Carlisle,10 which the descendants of the assaulted sing with sturdy relish and cosmopolitan toleration. The figure on which his imagination brooded in boyhood was not Robin Hood in Lincoln green under the oaks of Sherwood, but Hackston of Rathillet11 sitting on horseback muffled in his cloak watching the assassination of his spiritual and private enemies, and refusing, for conscience’ sake, to strike a blow.
The period of Stevenson’s activity in writing lies, roughly, between 1870 and 1890. Its background is not altogether easy to construct. His delight in vigour and gallantry inclined him to look beyond the Pre-Raphaelites12 in search of adopted ancestry, preferring to follow on a moonlit road the exploits of an incredibly courageous musketeer than in a green-house to listen to the talk of an intenser but less spectacular personality. But if Dumas,13 Hugo,14 and as much as their works the traditional romantic attitude, influenced his view of life, his demands from art, Flaubert15 – and that later, more scrupulous, generation – dictated his punctilious technique. His heart was born in 1830; his critical faculty in the time of the Parnassians,16 and under the tutelage of that inexorable master who paced roaring like a lion in his room at Rouen in a ferocious rather then graceful search for accuracy of expression.
To these influences, felt, it is politic to notice, not only directly, from books, but also in the air at Fontainebleau,17 where the students’ camp in a village inn was in its way a Royal Exchange18 of half-assimilated ideas, he brought a mind already furnished in a manner not at all like that of most English writers of his age. He brought a mind to which its own nationality was not a question of indifference, as it is to most,19 a mind exultantly Scottish, romantically in love with its country, as Byron20 was with the East, as Johnson21 with London, as Hazlitt22 with England, and full of Scottish history and literature, which had for him something of the special vividness and sanctity of family traditions.
It is worth remembering that, as Stevenson quoted from an imaginary Encyclopaedia, the English are ‘a dull people, incapable of comprehending the Scottish tongue. Their history is so intimately connected with that of Scotland, that we must refer our readers to that heading. Their literature is principally the work of venal Scots.’23
These elements at least, the scrutiny of technical processes24 which followed the over-productive facility of the great Romantics25 the Romantic attitude which no close attention to technique was to divert into a realism, charm, and an engaging reliance on charm, not only in life but in literature also, a deeply engraved Scottish background, and, due perhaps partly to that background, to discussions in the Edinburgh students’ Speculative Society,26 to studies prosecuted with his friend Ferrier,27 a definite though narrowly circumscribed knowledge of certain philosophers: these elements are important to any critical examination of the phenomenon which, in Stevenson’s works, we are about to discuss. It will be our business as we proceed to search more narrowly into them, to place them in gradually clearing perspectives, and not to forget that, important as they are, they are no more than perspectives, in and out of which flits, far more difficult to seize, or even to perceive, the personality they partly formed, which left with their collaboration so vivid, so individual an imprint.28
1 Stevenson described the politics of Samoa as ‘a distracted archipelago of children, sat upon by a clique of fools,’ because of the conflicting interests of America, Germany and Britain. Ransome correctly implies that Stevenson had much diplomatic influence there. It was his home from 1890 until his death in 1894. In 1892 he forwarded to the ‘Three Powers’ through the consul in Apia proposals for amendments to the Treaty of Berlin, and chaired the public meeting that adopted them.
2 At the north end of Princes Street, Edinburgh.
3 Stevenson accompanied his father on lighthouse-engineering sea-voyages in the North of Scotland, and to the Isle of Mull, where he explored the islet Erraid on which he later caused his hero David Balfour to be marooned in Kidnapped.
4 James M. Barrie (1860–1937), Scottish playwright and novelist, author of Peter Pan, Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, A Window in Thrums, and many other well-received novels and plays.
5 Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Ransome’s work on Stevenson was interrupted by the demand of his publisher Martin Secker for a critical study of Wilde (1912).
6 William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet, dramatist, and statesman, a leader of the late-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist revival of Irish legend and myth.
7 Ransome’s lack of prowess in the classics, endearingly demonstrated in mistakes in Latin in Missee Lee (1941), is only one aspect of the affinity he feels with Stevenson as man and writer. He re-works a famous phrase in Ben Jonson’s elegy on Shakespeare: ‘For though thou had’st small Latin and less Greek …’
8 Ransome here summons up heroes of the Scottish literary establishment: Robert Burns (1759–96), poet and icon of Scottishness; Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), immensely popular Scottish historical novelist and poet, whose towering memorial dominated Princes Street in Stevenson’s Edinburgh as it does today; William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), ‘the Scottish Petrarch’, poet, essayist, laird and lawyer.
9 Robert Fergusson (1750–74), the ‘ill-fated genius! Heaven-taught Fergusson’, much admired by Burns. ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase’ is a traditional ballad about the Earl Percy of Northumberland’s ill-fated hunting in the Earl Douglas of Scotland’s forest.
10 Writing in New Witness, 7 May 1914 under the pseudonym ‘Svidatel’ (‘witness’ in Russian), Ransome remarked: ‘I do not forget that not two hundred years ago there were young men’s heads on the Scottish Gate at Carlisle. Yet, whatever the side on which our ancestors fought, we cannot now regard their enemies as vermin only, and with this in mind, I find it hard to believe that the opponents of revolutionaries in Russia are a set of devils.’ Perhaps he had in mind here ‘The Ballad of Kinmount Willie’, which relates a border action of 1596, and was revived after the Jacobites’ imprisonment in Carlisle Castle; it contains the lines:
O were there war between the lands,
As well I wot that there is none,
I would slight Carlisle castell high,
Tho it were builded of marble stone.
I would set that castell in a low,
And sloken it with English Blood;
There’s nevir a man in Cumberland
Should ken where Carlisle castell stood.
The allusion is also reminiscent of Lord Macaulay’s ‘The Armada’, ‘Till Skiddaw saw the fire that burned on Gaunt’s embattled pile, And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle’, quoted in his Swallowdale (1931).
11 Ransome here contrasts the legendary Robin Hood of traditional English ballad, with the historical David Hackston (d. 1680), a leader of the Scottish Covenanters wrongly executed for murder.
12 A ‘brotherhood’ of artists and poets, a movement founded in 1848 with the aim of restoring painting to a primitive truthfulness They were much admired by the painter and influential critic John Ruskin.
13 Alexandre Dumas, père (1802–70), French novelist, author of The Three Musketeers and many other popular novels of adventure.
14 Victor Hugo (1802–85), French poet and novelist, stalwart of the French Romantic movement, author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame etc.
15 Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), born in Rouen, author of Madame Bovary and many other novels; a more conscious stylist than Dumas.
16 Derived from Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses in Greek mythology, this refers to a French literary movement in the mid-nineteenth century. The group was influenced by the French romantic writer Théophile Gautier (1811–72), who is also associated with Rouen, and his doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’; it included the symbolist poets Mallarmé and Verlaine.
17 After Stevenson left university in 1875 he made extended visits to France, staying in several artists’ colonies there including that of Fontainebleau, where he met his future wife, Fanny Osbourne, in 1876.
18 The Royal Exchange, in Threadneedle Street, London, had been more than a financial institution; a frequent rendezvous for Samuel Pepys and his coffeehouse friends, it is often mentioned in his Diary.
19 As it seemed then to Ransome, the Yorkshire-born Englishman. The vicissitudes of his later life changed his mind, and his major novels evoke a fierce pride of place.
20 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1728–1824), English Romantic poet, author of Don Juan, autobiographical narrative poem of his adventures in the East etc.
21 Samuel Johnson (1709–84), essayist, poet, lexicographer, and subject of the famous biography by his friend James Boswell.
22 William Hazlitt (1778–1830), English critic and essayist much admired by Ransome and Stevenson. His Table Talk was Ransome’s constant companion at this time, and he had unsuccessfully proposed a study of him for the series that was to have included this present book.
23 This paragraph is editorially constructed from “Scotch paragraph. Scotland. From an imaginary Encyclopaedia. Letter to Jason, July 24, 1879. Letters, I, 236.” (Double quotation marks are used in these footnotes to indicate a verbatim quotation of Ransome’s own notes.)
24 He is thinking of (and being influenced by) the stylistic scrupulosity of Henry James; these were high matters of debate to Stevenson in the 1880s. His essay ‘A Gossip On Romance’ was first published in Longman’s Magazine, 1882, and James’s reply ‘The Art of Fiction’ was published there in 1884. The literary debate was extended by Ransome, whose own explorations in narrative stylistics include an essay of 1911, ‘Kinetic and Potential Speech’ (see Introduction).
25 Ransome is alluding to the French Romantic movement and its novelists, rather than the earlier English romanticism and its poets.
26 The Speculative Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1764, is a prestigious literary and debating society. In Stevenson’s day the most famous former member was Sir Walter Scott.
27 Walter Ferrier was Stevenson’s best friend in Edinburgh student days; with him he read Friedrich Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man) (1794); Stevenson mourned his death in 1883.
28 This sentence applies equally to Ransome and the literary heritage that formed him. He too steeped himself in French romanticism and had been a literary pilgrim in France; by this time he had published A History of Story-Telling: Studies in the Development of Narrative (Jack, 1909), which includes chapters on ‘The Romanticism of 1839’, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, ‘Poe and the new technique’, ‘Gautier and the East’, ‘Balzac and Romantic analysis’. Working notes for this section are in appendix A.2.v.