Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson

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СКАЧАТЬ palate. If Kidnapped is commonly promoted in our time as a thrilling story in order to generate interest among the young, Stevenson’s adult readers had a far easier time balancing their judgments: “The world of men and boys has appraised him long ago—the boys for the sake of the story, the men for the sake of the myrrh and aloes of the style.”15 If the note of that praise sounds a bit sweet to a contemporary ear, nevertheless it reflects a hard truth acknowledged by all serious readers at the end of the nineteenth century, including Oscar Wilde: Stevenson’s prose was virtually unmatched by any living writer in English. Of course there were Meredith and James and Hardy. But the first two were truly stylists for the elite, and Hardy in his own way possessed an idiosyncratic manner. Stevenson alone wrote an English that was at one and the same time lyrical and limpid. In fact, one of the commonest words in Kidnapped is plain, a term that dignifies the garb of a good minister (“dressed decently and plainly in something of a clerical style” [p. 139]), highlights sound thinking (“‘the plain common sense is to set the blame where it belongs’” [p. 168]), and is itself a plea for clear expression (“‘Tell me your tale plainly out’” [p. 106]).

Stevenson’s contemporaries, living before the First World War and that generation’s antipathy to the real or illusory icons of the nineteenth century, and long before our own generation’s visceral reaction to aesthetics as a standard for judgment, were acutely conscious of his facility and even a bit awed by it. “‘Kidnapped’ remains his masterpiece. There his genius is to be seen at its best … in its most perfect and flawless expression.”16 Or this from an editorial in the Glasgow Herald: “The mastery of words … is not surpassed in distinction and music by that of any English story-teller, and it is hard to imagine a better equipment for a great novelist” (18 December 1894). But we do not have to look to the obituaries to find a consciousness among his contemporaries of his linguistic originality. Shortly after the publication of Travels with a Donkey Stevenson received a letter from his good friend and traveling companion for An Inland Voyage, Walter Grindlay Simpson: “As for your language it is perfect. Critics say it is pedantic. Away with them. You merely use dictionary words when they are necessary and what the critics resent is that your vocabulary is larger than that of a ploughman or a merchant.”17

If Stevenson prided himself on anything it was his precision as a writer, chastising Edmund Gosse for using the wrong word (“never again write ‘noticeable’; I have but to remind you that ‘notable’ is the word”)18 and complaining about the nineteenth century’s “slovenly” literary habits. “I have only one feather in my cap, and that is I am not a sloven.” He credited that to his study of the classics:

Although I am in the position of Shakespeare—I have little Latin and less Greek—yet the benefit which I owe to my little Latin is inconceivable. It not only helps one to arrive at the value of words, but you must remember that we are only the decayed fragments of the Roman Empire from which we have all that we value ourselves upon, and I always believe we can never be so well employed as in endeavouring to understand as well as we can the original meaning of that system of things in whose ruins we live.19

      Stevenson begins with Shakespeare and Jonson and ends with a presentiment of T. S. Eliot. Since he was living under the falling shadow of the fin de siècle he felt nothing more pressing than the need for exactitude in language. These remarks were made to a journalist in New Zealand just eighteen months before his death in Samoa. He had begun to see his work outside the frame of his century’s experience and within the larger context of Western history. He highlighted the linguistic nature of his writing as a wedge into its deeper structure, for meaning and intention were embedded in history, and history was nothing if not constituted of words. Thus to know the origins of our language was to know something of ourselves.

      On 14 February 1886, Stevenson wrote to Charles Baxter about his new book:

What’s mair, Sir, it’s Scōtch: no strong, for the sake o’ they pock-puddens, but jist a kitchen o’t, to leeven the wersh, sapless, fushionless, stotty, stytering South-Scotch they think sae muckle o’. Its name is Kidnaaapped; or Memo- yers of the Adventyers of Darvid Balfour in the year seventeen hunner and fifty wan. There’s nae sculduddery aboot that, as ye can see for yoursel. And if you hae no objection, I would like very much to put your name to it.20

      From the beginning Stevenson took pains to ensure that each book of his had a dedication, and in the early years he even tried to fit the text to the person. New Arabian Nights was for his cousin Bob, in memory of their salad days, while Treasure Island went to his enthusiastic and energetic stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. No one could have been a better match for Kidnapped than Charles Baxter. Their friendship dated from their college days and was maintained without interruption through their adult years. If Baxter became in the end Stevenson’s most trusted financial adviser and business agent, it was not that role that made the dedication so just: the two men were deeply nationalistic about Scotland (Baxter lived his entire life in Edinburgh) and they enjoyed nothing more than sporting with each other in their native tongue. Stevenson’s letters were often a rollicking tumble of Scots words and phrases, and were implicated with a shared set of nationalistic attitudes. If Stevenson recalls for Baxter (in the dedication) the old clubs of their youth, or the intellectual giants whose legacy they cherished and whose achievements they were just beginning to emulate, he also reminds him (and himself) of his own distance from “those places that have now become … a part of the scenery of dreams.”

      Henry James’s markings on the advertising pages of his copy of Kidnapped. These notes were used for the essay on Stevenson that James first published in the Century Magazine in April 1888.

But the dedication was a broad public statement, written at Bournemouth, in another land and largely for another people, and with all the constraints of a public discourse. In the confines of a private letter, on the other hand, Stevenson could leave England and reenter the land of his birth. And he could freely express himself. Of course, he had been doing that all through the composition of Kidnapped, painstakingly legitimating the Scots language, but in his letter the point is made with crystal clarity. After assuring Baxter that he does not have to worry about any damage to his professional reputation because the text is neither “indecent” nor “irreligious,” Stevenson then identifies the salient feature of a book dedicated to a habitué of the Parliament close—“it’s Scotch.” What follows is a brilliant minidiatribe against the English. Stevenson employs a succession of words that go far to characterize his prospective audience’s ability to understand or even tolerate the “strong” Scots that he and Baxter are comfortable with. The fault, of course, lies with the “pock-puddens,” a contemptuous term for the English that is often defined as a jocular expression but in Stevenson’s use conveys all the contempt and none of the jocularity.21

      So (he implicitly argues) he has used just enough “Scotch” to “kitchen” or spice—and now follows a string of adjectives that intensify the derision in pock-puddens—the dull, tasteless, insipid, uninspired, stammering, and halting kind of Scots they think so much of. “South-Scotch” is Stevenson’s term for “English- Scotch,” some hybrid creation of English speakers who want to ornament the language, which the great Cockburn protested against in 1844: “Railways and steamers, carrying the southern [i.e., English] into every recess, will leave no asylum for our native classical tongue” (SND). Southern was a term almost as contemptuous as pock-puddens, СКАЧАТЬ