The name is absent

Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 121
human, and because human the more dreadful in their wick-
edness. Such is Teach the pirate in “The Master of Bal-
Iantrae,” such is John Silver in “Treasure Island,” and such
are those desperate and lost men in “The Ebb Tide.”

That was a master-stroke in “The Ebb Tide,” to have
Davis praying while on his way to commit the murder.

“Prayer—what for? God knows. But out of his incon-
sistent, illogical, agitated spirit a stream of supplication was
poured forth, inarticulate as himself, earnest as death and
judgment.”

Then there breaks in on this prayer the crazy, cheerful
nonsense of Huish the cockney, whose religion had never
reached so deep as the Scot Davis’s:

“ ‘ “Thou Gawd seest me !” I remember I had that writ-
ten in my Bible. I remember the Bible, too, all about Abin-
adab and parties. Well, Gawd, you’re going to see a rum
start presently, I promise you that !’

“The captain bounded.

“ ‘I’ll have no blasphemy !’ he cried, ‘no blasphemy in my
boat.’ ”

And these two men are on their way to commit a cold-
blooded murder ! The very irrationality of it all makes it
horribly human, as the stilted and conventional dime-novel
desperado never is. This is the thinking man writing blood-
and-thunder literature.

Of course, the purely esthetic element of Stevenson’s nov-
els is even stronger than the intellectual. In unity and tonal
quality they have not been surpassed in the history of Eng-
lish fiction. His rule of unity in composition was as strict as
Poe’s: that each story is intended to produce a single effect,
and that any sentence or word that jars on, or detracts from,
that central idea must be mercilessly extracted.

When we remember the eighteenth-century English novel-
ists, and even so skilful a literary artist as nineteenth-century

<<   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   >>

More intriguing information