Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
W. E. Henley
Buried treasure is one of the very foundations of romance.... This is the theory on which Mr. Stevenson has written ‘Treasure Island.’ Primarily it is a book for boys, with a boy-hero and a string of wonderful adventures. But it is a book for boys which will be delightful to all grown men who have the sentiment of treasure-hunting and are touched with the true spirit of the Spanish Main. It is the story of the monstrous pile which Flint, the great pirate, buried, with extraordinary circumstances of secrecy and ferocity, on an unknown islet; and it sets forth, with uncommon directness and dexterity, the adventures of certain persons who went in search of the cache, and returned to Bristol city with seven hundred thousand pounds in all the coinages of the world. It contains a delightful map (a legacy of Flint himself), a hoard that will bear comparison with Monte Cristo’s own, a fort, a stockade, a maroon, and one of the most remarkable pirates in fiction. Like all Mr. Stevenson’s good work, it is touched with genius. It is written—in that crisp, choice, nervous English of which he has the secret—with such a union of measure and force as to be in its way a masterpiece of narrative. It is rich in excellent characterization, in an abundant invention, in a certain grim romance, in a vein of what must, for want of a better word, be described as melodrama, which is both thrilling and peculiar. It is the work of one who knows all there is to be known about ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and to whom Dumas is something more than a great amateur; and it is in some ways the best thing he has produced.
—from an unsigned review printed in Saturday Review (December 1883)
Pall Mall Gazette
No one but Mr. Stevenson could have written ‘Treasure Island,’ for no one else has his vivid imagination combined with his power of drawing character, his charm of style, and his grave, earnest, perfectly boyish delight in a storm, a shipwreck, a sword combat for two or more. Mr. Stevenson probably wrote ‘Treasure Island’ for his diversion; it has the ease and fluency of work that is done in play. Certainly he has contributed more to the diversion of one critic than all the serious and laborious novelists of the year have done. The question may be asked, will ‘Treasure Island’ be as popular with boys as it is sure to be with men who retain something of the boy? Our opinion of boys will fall considerably if ‘Treasure Island’ is not their perennial favourite.
—December 1883
The Dial
Mr. Stevenson’s romance of ‘Treasure Island’ is a tissue of highly improbable incidents which do not for a moment throw the spell of reality around the reader, and yet constrain him to acknowledge the skill with which they are worked up. The author shows considerable strength of invention in unfolding the plot and delineating the characters, which are life-like and well-sustained. But beyond this exhibition of his power in the line of fiction, there is no appreciable good accomplished by the book. It is a picture of the roughest phases of sea-life. The effort to recover a pirate’s buried treasure from a desolate island in the mid-ocean, by a couple of gentlemen whose followers comprise cutthroats, mutineers, and a sprinkling of honest mariners, is neither dignified nor edifying. It will be relished by adventure-loving boys, but whether it will be wholesome reading for them is more than doubtful.
—May 1884
George Moore
I will state frankly that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed to delight me; but he never wrote a book. You arrive at a strangely just estimate of a writer’s worth by the mere question : ‘What is he the author of?’ for every writer whose work is destined to live is the author of one book that outshines the other, and, in popular imagination, epitomises his talent and position. What is Shakespeare the author of? What is Milton the author of? What is Fielding the author of? What is Byron the author of? What is Carlyle the author of? What is Thackeray the author of? What is Zola the author of? What is Mr. Swinburne the author of? Mr. Stevenson is the author of shall I say, ‘Treasure Island,’ or what?
I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window, and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.
—from Confessions of a Young Man (1888)
G. K. Chesterton
All things and all men are underrated, much by others, especially by themselves; and men grow tired of men just as they do of green grass, so that they have to seek for green carnations. All great men possess in themselves the qualities which will certainly lay them open to censure and diminishment; but these inevitable deficiencies in the greatness of great men vary in the widest degree of variety. Stevenson is open to a particularly subtle, a particularly unjust disparagement. The advantage of great men like Blake or Browning or Walt Whitman is that they did not observe the niceties of technical literature. The far greater disadvantage is that he did. Because he had a conscience about small matters in art, he is conceived not to have had an imagination about big ones. It is assumed by some that he must have been a bad architect, and the only reason that they can assign is that he was a good workman. The mistake which has given rise to this conception is one that has much to answer for in numerous departments of modern art, literature, religion, philosophy, and politics. The supreme and splendid characteristic of Stevenson was his levity; and his levity was the flower of a hundred grave philosophies. The strong man is always light: the weak man is always heavy. A swift humane levity is the mark of spiritual strength. A thoroughly strong man swinging a sledge-hammer can tap the top of an eggshell. A weaker man swinging a sledge-hammer will break the table on which it stands into pieces. Also, if he is a very weak man, he will be proud of having broken the table, and call himself a strong man dowered with the destructive power of an Imperial race....
In the case of so light and elusive a figure as Stevenson, even the terms which have been most definitely attached to him tend to become misleading and inadequate, and the terms ‘childlike’ or ‘childish,’ true as they are down to a very fundamental truth, are yet the origin of a certain confusion. One of the greatest errors in existing literary philosophy is that of confusing the child with the boy. Many great moral teachers beginning with Jesus Christ, have perceived the profound philosophical importance of the child. The child sees everything freshly and fully; as we advance in life it is true that we see things in some degree less and less, that we are afflicted, spiritually and morally, with the myopia of the student. But the problem of the boy is essentially different from that of the child. The boy represents the earliest growth of the earthly, unmanageable qualities, poetic still, but not so simple or so universal. The child enjoys the plain picture of the world: the boy wants the secret, the end of the story. The child wishes to dance in the sun; but the boy wishes to sail after buried treasure. The child enjoys a flower, and the boy a mechanical engine. And the finest and most peculiar work of Stevenson is rather that he was the first writer to treat seriously and poetically the aesthetic instincts of the boy. He celebrated the toy gun rather than the rattle.... In the whole scene there is only one book which is at once literature, like Hans Andersen, and yet a book for boys and not for children, and its name is ‘Treasure Island.’
—from Robert Louis Stevenson ( 1902)
Henry James
It was the happy fortune of Robert Louis Stevenson to have created beyond any man of his craft in our day a body of readers inspired with the feelings that we for the most part place at the service only of those for whom our affection is personal. There was no one who knew the man, one may safely assert, who was not also devoted to the writer—conforming in this respect to a general law (if law it be) that shows us many exceptions ; but, naturally and not inconveniently, it had to remain far from true that all devotees of the writer were able to approach the man. The case was nevertheless that the man somehow approached them, and that to read him—certainly to read him with the full sense of his charm—came to mean for many persons much the same as to “meet” him. It was as if he wrote himself outright and altogether, rose straight to the surface of his prose, and still more of his happiest verse; so that these things gave out, besides whatever else, his look and motions and voice, showed his life and manners, all that there was of him, his “tremendous secrets” not excepted. We grew in short to possess him entire, and the example is the more curious and beautiful as he neither made a business of “confession” nor cultivated most those forms through which the ego shines. His great successes were supposititious histories of persons quite different from himself, and the objective, as we have learned to call it, was the ideal to which he oftenest sacrificed.
—from Notes on Novelists (1914)
Leonard Woolf
Stevenson was quite a good imitator of great writers, but he was not a great writer or artist himself. His ear for verbal music was not fine, and his phrases are rather laboured. He is, indeed, at his best where he is sufficiently interested in his subject to forget about his style. He can then write good, plain, honest English which makes no pretensions to be great literature. This is the case in ‘Treasure Island’ and in some of his other stories.
—from Nation and the Athenaeum (January 5, 1924)
QUESTIONS
1. What is an adventure? What qualifies Treasure Island as an adventure novel? Is it the plot? The colorful characters?
2. Is this a story just for boys or young-at-heart men? What is there in this novel for girls or grown women?
3. Can a search for treasure be taken as a metaphor for other kinds of quests? Is it a metaphor for human life itself? If so, what is the effect of Stevenson’s giving his treasure a history of crime, bloodshed, and intrigue? Is there something wrong or unclean about that which we seek? Is there a comment on human aspirations in how little the treasure seems to be worth once it is found? Is that the case in real life?
4. Piracy can be taken as a metaphor—say, for business or for imperialism. Was it Stevenson’s intention to comment on such activities? Or are we reading too much into the novel when we see piracy and treasure as parallels to occurrences in our daily lives? If so, if there’s no connection at all, how do you explain the enduring relevance of Treasure Island’s improbable adventure story for all types of readers?
