Tales Of Adventure. Robert Louis Stevenson
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Doctor sang, the Doctor whistled, the Doctor talked. He spoke of the woods, and the wars, and the deposition of the dew; he brightened and babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast on the glories of the political arena.
In The Black Arrow, the style of pathetic naturalistic impressionism (in striking counterpoint to the pseudo-archaic dialogue):
The words died in Richard’s throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels, and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence.
And finally, in the fables – in this case ‘The House of Eld’ – the scriptural mythical style of incantatory repetition:
The blood ran backward in his body and his joints rebelled against him for the love he bore his father; but he heaved up the sword, and plunged it in the heart of the appearance; and the appearance cried aloud in the voice of his father; and fell to the ground; and a little bloodless white thing fled from the room.
The precocious new stylist raised high expectations among men of letters in London, not always to his advantage.
The third current of the ’70s and ’80s was the growth of the institution known as ‘men of letters’, professional writers supported by a spate of magazines and reviews, who played multiple cultural roles as refined entertainers, arbiters of tastes, shapers of opinion, even lay moralists for a literate middle-class public that (as John Gross writes) ‘hungered for intellectual guidance’. In 1873, new friendships brought twenty-three-year-old Stevenson into a London coterie of men of letters. It was a mixed blessing. True, his new friends brought him status and income. But they also held their own high expectations as to what the promising protégé should write. This proved especially troublesome for Stevenson, whose chameleon-like temperament made him peculiarly susceptible to friendly influences. On at least one occasion, he angrily rebelled. His friend Henley had reported that some of their refined circle were distressed to see the gifted R.L.S. serialising ‘hackery’ in a magazine called Young Folks. Stevenson fired back at ‘those who ask me (as you say they do) to do nothing but refined, high-toned be-jay be-damn masterpieces … Let them write their own damn masterpieces. Let me alone.’ The hackery in question was Treasure Island.
In this story of adventure, written ‘for boys’ and thus freed of the need for ‘psychology or fine writing’, he had found the freedom he needed. Not many ‘boys’ were enthused, but a surprising number of older men, including Stevenson’s engineer father, were enthralled. The late nineteenth century – and this was the fourth current – saw a great revival of taste for adventure. Perhaps it offered an escape from the growingly repressive, grey utilitarianism of bourgeois culture. Perhaps it served as a romantic propaganda for the imperialism of the day. Certainly it constituted a key impulse in the late Victorian cult of childhood. Whatever the causes, Stevenson rode the wave of adventure.
What is ‘adventure’? Everyone knows, intuitively, vaguely. I like Paul Zweig’s evocative definition:
The cat’s paw of chance hovers tantalizingly, and suddenly the simplest outcome seems unpredictable. For a brief moment, we are like warriors, charged with the energies of survival, reading every detail of the scene as if it were a sign revealing what was to come … excursions of excitement … ‘vacations’ from our actual selves.
I would add Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s:
… by the grace of an ordeal in the night which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. Great was this creature, and never shall you forget him. And he is yourself.
Paradoxes! ‘Adventure’ means ‘that which comes’ – but comes how? By chance, yet somehow fated? It joins peril and possibility in a brief, intense ‘island in life’, an ordeal, a thrilling challenge. Its opposite is stability, routine, home.
Adventure is a kind of experience, not a kind of story, and yet in it experience takes on the qualities of story. Adventure is the aboriginal stuff of which stories have been made, at least since the earliest Sindbad the sailor came home to enchant the homebound Sindbad with his fearful quests, encounters, dangers, and escapes. Adventure was Stevenson’s donnée. What he made of it and in what various moods is a more complex matter.
Our selection hints at the variety. In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins’s home life is suddenly invaded by piracy and violence. A treasure map is found, the ship sails to a desert island, the pirate crew mutinies, and Jim must find extraordinary skill and nerve to outwit the Bad Guys and save his grown-up companions. In The Black Arrow, young Dick Shelton is caught up in a world of war and treachery and survives through all the game-like ordeals of adventure: flight and pursuit, hide and seek, tunnels and mazes, disguises and escapes. He ‘proves’ himself a warrior and saves his fair maiden. In ‘The Treasure of Franchard’, kindly, pedantic Doctor Desprez and his contented wife lead a bucolic existence until the doctor chances on lost treasure in the woods. Their minds fill with eager visions of opulent, adventurous life in Paris. The treasure vanishes, their house and fortune are lost, the treasure reappears, and the chastened couple contentedly stays home. In the two fables, an innocent young person leads a constricted home life, protected in a pleasant castle or fettered by a mysterious gyve. Chance breaks in: a walk in the woods or on the beach; a chance encounter with an unfettered dancing boy or a prophetic old crone. The young boy and girl rebel; the rebellion proves illusory and tragic. The boy discovers guilt; the girl falls into time. Such can be the price of adventure.
Will o’ the Mill, in his quiet mountain home, awakens to a desire for the intense, crowded life of the cities on the plain. After an encounter with a disillusioned, fat young man, he chooses not to pay the price, stays home, and even retreats from marriage to the girl he loves. His is a story of adventures that never happen – until the end. The young cavalier of ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ must pay the price or die. His story is of the essence of adventure. Surrounded by enemies in a strange town, he visits a friend and becomes lost in a dark maze of narrow streets: ‘It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities.’ A ‘chapter of accidents’ ensues to ‘make this night memorable above all others in his career’. Trapped in a lane, he backs through the door and finds himself locked in a noble house, where he is ‘expected’ by the proud, evil Sire. It is a ‘mistake’, but the Sire doesn’t care, and the young man learns that his only escape from death is through marriage to the Sire’s lovely, lovable niece. He accepts his fate. His evil new uncle chuckles.
What are we to make of this? Would he indeed, as we are told at the start, ‘have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed’, as Will would have done? Are we to seek any meaning? Is this simply a case of ‘the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things’? Is this that elusive thing some critics call ‘pure story’? If not, what kind of story is it?
These problems – and they are connected – have nagged critics ever since R.L.S. first puzzled them with his shifts in mode and seeming evasions of consistent meaning. ‘Will o’ the Mill’ offers an intriguing case study. Its first publisher felt reservations about ‘the story’s indeterminate hovering between realism and allegory’. David Daiches, the wise pioneer of modern Stevenson studies, calls it ‘pure allegory’ and complains, ‘The charm of the situation interested Stevenson as much as its meaning, with the result that the picture of rustic living is filled out in idyllic detail until the shape of the allegory is almost lost.’ (Daiches perceives the same problem – if it is one – in ‘Franchard’.) But what indications are there that ‘Will’ began with a ‘purely allegorical’ intention? And isn’t the charm of Will’s situation essential to the meaning?
Jenni Calder finds ‘Will’ a ‘puzzling story, part fable, part impression of an unfulfilled existence’. Why not both? The American critic Robert Kiely is not puzzled: ‘Will’ is one of Stevenson’s ‘finest short stories’, a ‘fable’ with a complex moral about living death