Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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(p. 121). This is not just the mark of a shrewd lad, which we know David to be, but of a young man with a gift for language and a desire to exploit that gift. Thus the biting insult and the mock wonder are equally illustrative of David’s fluency in expressing the complexities of his emotions. He expends his wit even at moments of great danger: “Alan’s society was not only a peril to my life, but a burthen on my purse” (p. 190). This is drier than the gallows humor of James Stewart (“‘It would be a painful thing for our friends if I was to hang’” [p. 166]), as David seems unable to decide which is worse, Alan as a danger to his life or a drain on his purse. The line recalls a familiar if not proverbial phrase—“your m oney or your life”—which was used subsequently in one of the signature routines of a great modern comedian.
David and Alan at last cross the Highland line, with just a body of water left between them and safety. As David looks across to the other shore, with its prospect of freedom and wealth, he muses on his present homeless state, a beggar in rags, and an outlaw as well. The chapter “We Pass the Forth” serves as a pause in the plot, providing a respite for the fugitives from the fatigue of the flight, and a bridge to the final cluster of chapters, in which David recounts his adventures and recovers his estate. It is also a smart and entertaining comic interlude. The male bonding that has dominated the narrative to this point is here broken, or at least interrupted, by an attractive and resourceful woman who proves instrumental in transporting David and Alan across the Forth. If Stevenson had in mind the bravery of Flora Macdonald, and the compassion of Cummy, then he could do no better than his creation of Alison of Limekilns. And in the process he slips in a bit of banter that teasingly touches on issues of sexuality.
The comedy begins with Alan and David’s repartee on the logic of traversing a body of water (“‘If it’s hard to pass a river, it stands to reason it must be worse to pass a sea’” [p. 236]) and broadens to the good-natured epithets that Alan hurls at David in exasperation at his young friend’s ignorance of female psychology (“‘ye have a fine, hang-dog, rag-and-tatter, clapper- maclaw kind of a look to ye, as if ye had stolen the coat from a potato-bogle’” [p. 238]). It reaches a high point in Alan’s covert wooing of the innkeeper’s daughter, whom he is determined to use to secure a boat and carry them across the Forth. To do that he assumes her natural sympathy for a poor, woebegone lad like David (whose condition he theatrically exaggerates) and, working on her good looks, as well as David’s ungainliness, he entices both her curiosity and her pity. If Alan’s “play-acting” (as he calls it) is deceptive, and offensive to his young companion’s sense of honesty, he reminds David of the alternative: “‘if ye have any affection for my neck (to say nothing of your own) ye will perhaps be kind enough to take this matter gravely’” (p. 239). The wry remark is a way of lancing the reality of death. Stevenson’s comedy, as we have seen, is never far from its near cousin, and the wit and raillery often serve to make the prospect of tragedy bearable. But his art conceals this complexity. Just as the simplicity of the style masks the studied diction and the rhythmic syntax, so too does the subtle blending of comedy and tragedy deflect from the clearness of understanding that is at the heart of each of the modes. Of course, to separate the humor from the pathos would wrench the meaning from the text, for in the end comedy is the balm for sadness, just as tragedy is a beacon in the midst of laughter.
But Stevenson was not beyond the display of comic effect for its own sake, as Alan here pleads with the young woman for help.
If we lack that boat, we have but three shillings left in this wide world; and where to go, and how to do, and what other place there is for us except the chains of a gibbet—I give you my naked word, I kenna! Shall we go wanting, lassie? Are ye to lie in your warm bed and think upon us, when the wind gowls in the chimney and the rain tirls on the roof? Are ye to eat your meat by the cheeks of a red fire, and think upon this poor sick lad of mine, biting his finger ends on a blae muir for cauld and hunger? Sick orsound, he must aye be moving; with the death grapple at his throat he must aye be trailing in the rain on the lang roads; and when he gants his last on a rickle of cauld stanes, there will be nae friends near him but only me and God. (p. 243)
Alan is making this most extraordinary appeal to an innocent lass whose heart (he presumes) she puts before her head. The passage is a parody of sentimental fiction, or more precisely of the techniques and attitudes that sentimental writing indulges in: the adjective that pretends to make the noun larger but is merely a conventional epithet (“this wide world”); the rhetorical repetition (“and where to go, and how to do, and what other place”) that tugs at the listener’s heart; the picture of the victim, cold, suffering, and in want, contrasted with the warmth and comfort of the auditor, who ought to feel guilty at the inequity of their positions; and the final indignity of death on the gibbet, with the body left to hang in chains. Who could be dry-eyed at this projection of a young man’s fate? And if Alan is “playacting” here, well aware that he is conning the trusting lass, there is Stevenson behind his puppet, with a full consciousness of how much this writing is bred in the bone of popular romance. Ever the magus, however, the novelist gives his own twist to this self-reflexive exercise. For by the use of a vigorous Scots vocabulary—one that leads the Scottish National Dictionary to quote the same sentence twice in order to cite both “gowls” and “tirls”—he turns a sentimental parody into a miniature prose performance, one where the subject becomes the transformation of a tired literary form into a living art.
Half-title page from Henry James’s inscribed copy of the English edition.
V
From the beginning Stevenson was a favorite of sophisticated readers, and these included that vast Grub Street fraternity who reviewed books and were instrumental in creating reputations in the local and periodical press. This was also true in the United States, where virtually every new Stevenson book was reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Tribune. Stevenson’s “popularity” is an extremely complicated question, and the casual notion that he was a writer who appealed to a very broad reading public is at best a problematic truth.14 If he was not caviar, like Henry James, or ortolans, like George Meredith, he was nonetheless a dry white wine that demanded a delicate and knowledgeable 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