Читать книгу Kidnapped - Роберт Льюис Стивенсон - Страница 10

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 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, and was used thus by Sir Walter Scott: “A sturdy Scotsman, with all sort of prejudices against the southern, and the spawn of the southern” (1818; OED). Stevenson is protesting with all the force of his native tongue what passes for the English understanding of “Scotch” in literature. He is in fact railing against the taming of the Scottish language for the sake of a tepid English taste for local color. If anyone wonders where Stevenson gathered the rhetoric years later to denounce the Reverend Dr. Hyde in his famous defense of Father Damien, one need look no further than this wonderful sentence (which is quoted on three separate occasions in the SND). The power and vigor of the expression, the intensity of feeling, are directed not simply against the false “South-Scotch” that Stevenson decries but against the attitudes and conditions that compel an artist to acquiesce in that kind of writing: it can even be seen as the visceral reaction of a “colonized” subject to a form of “imperial” oppression.

Stevenson chafed all his life at the array of social, sexual, and political mentalities that controlled and censored literature, yet there is no question but that he conformed to them. This does not mean that he did not at times break out in anger, although the outbursts were confined almost exclusively to the privacy of his correspondence. The irony, and truly the brilliance of his achievement in Kidnapped, is that he was able to accomplish his genuine objectives in spite of these enormous obstacles. Far from being softened, the language of the novel is bold and hardy throughout. Finally, as the writer mock-jests with Baxter, his book has no “sculduddery”; it is not, in other words, obscene or smutty. By deliberately using such a coarse word (which also means fornication) Stevenson affirms his right to speak openly and freely in his own language. And yet even here the long process of planing the edges of this deeply recalcitrant writer never ceases. In DeLancey Ferguson and Marshall Waingrow’s 1956 edition of the letters to Baxter they gloss “sculduddery” as “bawdy,” while Ernest Mehew, in the latest edition, avoids any definition altogether.

From early on Stevenson proclaimed the virtue of Scots as a literary language, using it sparingly in “The Pavilion on the Links,” extensively in The Merry Men, and exclusively in “Thrawn Janet.” He submitted the last story to Leslie Stephen at the Cornhill, “but as it is all in Scotch he cannot take it, I know. It was so good, I could not help sending it.”22 Of course the story was accepted, but Stevenson’s remark reflects his awareness of the difficulty the language presented to a foreign (i.e., English) reader, and so he would occasionally insert a definition within the sentence: “I found a den, or small hollow, where there was a spring of pure water” (“Pavilion”; italics added). Or from Kidnapped: “we spent a great part of our days at the waterside, stripped to the waist and groping or (as they say) guddling for these fish” (p. 183; italics added). But this kind of internal glossing, while artistic at best, was simply unworkable when the vocabulary and idiom and syntax were predominantly Scots. As proud as Stevenson was of working in his native tongue— “‘Tod Lapraik’ is a piece of living Scots; if I had never writ anything but that and ‘Thrawn Janet’, still I’d have been a writer”23—it was plain that it could not be read, let alone understood, without a Scots dictionary, or at least a glossary. Stevenson was conscious of this, as he was of the grumbling on the part of English readers about a language they had little knowledge of and less interest in. When Marcel Schwob wrote to him asking if he could translate any of his books, Stevenson suggested Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae, but then warned him: “In both these works you should be prepared for Scotticisms used deliberately.”24

But the matter of language goes beyond mere usage, beyond the fact that Scots pyat is used in place of magpie (p. 147) or that clachan substitutes for “what is called a hamlet in the English” (p. 184). For Stevenson language is the texture and structure of thought, and the words we use and the way we use them, their rhythm and inflection, are as important as what they mean. They tell us who we are. In an inspired touch Stevenson shows us what we lose when our voice is stilled. He places David Balfour in the same position to the exotic Highlanders as the English reader is to the text. David is helpless before all these people whose Gaelic “might have been Greek and Hebrew for me” (p. 124), just as the reader is baffled by a plethora of alien words. A telling example is the scene where the fishermen are laughing at David, who is panic-stricken on the islet. The Scot feels their behavior as deliberate cruelty; the Gaels think the lad with the waving arms a figure of great fun. Neither comprehends the other, and a simple experience is thus apprehended in diametrical terms. For without a common tongue we are all living in a Tower of Babel, confused by others and caught in the web of our own words. David’s frustration, and his sense of isolation, is heightened as he travels through an uncharted territory where everyone speaks a “strange” language and where his own speech is equally “strange” to everyone else. He has a brief respite from these feelings when he meets Mr. Hender- land, only because the Lowland minister “spoke with the broad south-country tongue, which I was beginning to weary for the sound of” (p. 140).

It was while hiding on a naked rock in the heat of the day, when the redcoats were jabbing their bayonets in the surrounding heather, that David faced another linguistic experience.

It was in this way that I first heard the right English speech. …

‘I tell you, it’s ’ot!’… and I was amazed at the clipping tones and the odd sing-song in which he spoke, and no less at that strange trick of dropping out the letter h. To be sure, I had heard Ransome, but he had taken his ways from all sorts of people, and spoke so imperfectly at the best, that I set down the most of it to childishness. My surprise was all the greater to hear that manner of speaking in the mouth of a grown man; and indeed I have never grown used with it; nor yet altogether with the English grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and there spy out even in these memoirs. (pp. 177–78)

This passage appears two-thirds of the way into the narrative, and is the first time that “English” is formally cited as a language. In other words, for the first two-thirds of the novel David Balfour, along with everyone else, is implicated in the two languages of his own country, Scotland, and only now, when he is nearly cheek by jowl with a live English soldier, does he realize that the language of that country, of the supporters of King George, of whom he counts himself an adherent, is quite simply different from his own. It comes as a genuine shock to him. And his assumption that it is the “right English speech” only further confounds him; for if the English spoken by the soldier is proper English, why then does it sound so “odd” both in its inflection as well as in its pronunciation? (David, of course, was not equipped to identify the class of the speaker, but Stevenson cleverly maintains his character’s integrity while offering the reader an early Shavian observation.)

Stevenson has suddenly brought the two cultures of Scotland, of the Highlands and the Lowlands, into contact with the third culture of England, thus bringing into the foreground the reality of not two countries but three. Of course David and Alan, along with everybody else through the first nineteen chapters, are speaking English, but it is from David’s point of view an improper or imperfect sort of English, as David periodically translates for his reader the occasional Scots word, just as Stevenson provides the occasional gloss. In reality this passage makes explicit issues about language that are played out in the novel, not the least of which is the sense of inferiority that the narrator has with respect to his command of English, an inferiority he attributes to his weakness in grammar but which in reality Stevenson subverts for the reader. When David says he has never grown “used with it” in reference to the inflection and pronunciation of the soldier, the reader might pause and think, “used to it,” but the phrase is actually good Scots, meaning “to make familiar with, to accustom to,” and is cited in the SND and EDD as dialectal, with Stevenson quoted from Underwoods in the SND. What the author is doing is clear and opaque at the same time: he is asserting the legitimacy of his own language, its forms and expressions, its rhythms and inflections, while giving apparent credence to an unsuspecting reader that David does not have a solid command of English grammar. It is a tactic that only the most deliberate and self-reflexive of writers would undertake, and few could manage as artfully. It is a small irony that a number of Stevenson’s forms of speech that may be considered Scots or idiosyncratic or both were altered by editors and compositors in the setting of the novel, since it hardly needs saying that it was an English publishing apparatus that put the book in print. But through it all there is more than mere gamesmanship on the writer’s part, for Stevenson addresses the central questions of how we use our language and what it means to us. David was quick enough to guess that Ransome’s speech was a bastardization that derived from a variety of social experiences, and he was not prepared to accept it as definitive. If this passage means anything, it is a sly shedding of the sense of inferiority that the Scots speaker has to the English.

Kidnapped is a text constitutive of and informed by three major languages—Scots, English, and Gaelic—with a fourth, Latin, thrown in for good measure. Obviously not all are given equal status; Stevenson was unfamiliar with Gaelic, and the proverbial Latin phrases were designed more for gentle satire than to make a case for another language’s place in the province of the book. Yet even here Stevenson was insinuating an important point: for as he said repeatedly, we are but the ruins of an ancient culture, and those familiar tags from Virgil and Horace and Martial, tossed off so casually by Rankeillor, remind us of who we are and where we come from. They remind us, too, of an older book and another wandering, timeless hero: David’s odyssey, after all, has a long and glorious history behind it.

Autograph title page.

1. New York Daily Tribune, 10 December 1894, p. 16.

2. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style”, Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.

3. Chūō Kōron, January 1906. I am indebted to my colleague Nobuko Ochner for the reference and the translation.

4. Tinsley Pratt, “A Chapter in the Life of R. L. Stevenson”, Manchester Quarterly 25 (1906), pp. 502–03.

5. The Century Magazine, vol. 35, no. 6 (April 1888), p. 871.

6. Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas (London: Bell & Hyman, 1979), p. 205.

7. February 1912. Silverado Museum, Saint Helena, California.

8. See the first entry in the Notes, “the Appin murder … printed trial.”

9. New York Times, 1 August 1886, p. 9.

10. Henry James, marking the famous quarrel chapter between David and Alan, noted on his page, “do psychological truth of this.”

11. In “the little Fishing Towns … such numbers of half-naked Children, but fresh coloured, strong and healthy, I think are not to be met with in the In-land Towns. Some will have their Numbers and Strength to be the Effects of Shell-fish”; [Edmund Burt], Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: S. Birt, 1754), 1:33–34.

12. “On Groundless Fears,” Seneca and Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gum- mere (London: William Heinemann, 1925), vol. 1, p. 79.

13. The first printed letter to Young Folks called attention to the “fine leaven of humour” running all through the story-in-progress: “It is Scotch humour, keen flavoured, gripping the palate” (May 29, 1886). Christopher Morley in an introduction to Kidnapped for the Limited Editions Club, wrote that Stevenson was never given “due acclaim” for his humor, although Morley found it limited in the novel to chapters 25 and 26 (New York, 1938, p. ix).

14. Publishers’ Circular reviewed an American magazine’s list of the 150 most popular novels in America and commented on the absence from the list of Kidnapped, Prince Otto, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Wrecker: “This is likely to astonish Mr. Stevenson’s admirers in Great Britain” (30 December 1893, p. 749). Just over a year later, the New York Times quoted figures from the Westminster Gazette on the sale of Stevenson’s books in their English editions. Setting aside Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a relatively “cheap book” that easily topped the list at 80,000 copies, Treasure Island was next at 52,000, with Kidnapped a distant third at 39,000. New Arabian Nights, published in 1882, was only at 12,000. Now compare King Solomon’s Mines, published in the same year and at the same price as Treasure Island, then at 94,000 (5 January 1895).

15. George Stronach, newspaper clipping pasted in rear of The Merry Men, n.d. [December 1894], Huntington Library.

16. New York Daily Tribune, 30 December 1894, p. 16.

17. 10 June 1879. Beinecke Library, Yale University (B5501).

18. Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–1995), 4:200.

19. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style,” Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.

20. Letters, 5:206.

21. All the examples in the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) support Stevenson. Edmund Burt says that all over Scotland his countrymen are “dignified with the title” which “signifies a glutton” (ca. 1730). Scott uses it pejoratively (“The Englishers … the pock-puddings ken nae better”) and Stevenson himself is cited, having compacted all his countrymen’s animosity for the English into the expression.

22. Letters, 3:188.

23. Letters, 8:38.

24. Letters, 7:70.