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Robert Louis Stevenson-Part11_Alexander H.Japp(1839-1905)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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in the next chapter, that we end with a conception of them as



confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of Hamlet, who was idiotically

sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."



If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and

the child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De



Quincey: "ECCOVI, that child has been in hell," we may say,

"ECCOVI, that child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't



forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child -

such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the



Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more - he has been touched

with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land



as well as of childhood's home.

The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every



one who had intimacy with him. Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his

book):



"I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts -

namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he



could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very

thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have



communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly

any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to,



which struck me - his elder by some fifteen months - as very

amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' HE OF ALL MORTALS,



WHO WAS, IN A SENSE, ALWAYS STILL A BOY!"

Mr Gosse tells us:



"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it

was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed,



when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to

contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or



he modelled little groups and figures in clay."

2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply



this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to

his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and



which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did.

Henley, in his strikingsonnet, hit it when he wrote:



"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,



AND SOMETHING OF THE SHORTER CATECHIST."

SOMETHING! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch



Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities,

and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,"



which it inevitably awakens, was much with him - the sense of

reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy



in the sense of the elect - the Covenanters and their wild

resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-devilries - Pentland



Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them,

but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made



him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or

in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been - the



same, or different from what it was with those that were there?

His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost



all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for

the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on



seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his

fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention



and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with

poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little



of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self-

satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for



the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the

anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way - a hunger for



completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane

feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to



God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in OLD MORTALITY,

"I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had






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