Читать книгу Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Роберт Льюис Стивенсон - Страница 6

From his earliest years, Stevenson’s engagement with the world of the imagination, was a strange marriage of moral and supernatural forces. His young nurse Alison Cunningham (‘my second Mother, my first Wife’) had thrilled him with stories of the sufferings of the Covenanters in the ‘killing times’ of Scotland’s past and, as in the works of James Hogg, these tales were soon spiced with accounts of witchcraft and possession. Indeed the omnipresence of the devil and his works had long been a potent factor in the Scottish understanding of what the spiritual life might be, so that the righteous had always felt besieged by potent forces from without themselves.

—Or indeed, from within, for surely the arch tempter is no more than a projection of all that we fear and all that we desire in the depths of our own hearts? This division, and this ambiguity, was to rule Stevenson’s imagination for the rest of his life. It leads us into strange territory in which history, geography, folklore, the scientific, the moral, the physical and the spiritual, all meet and mingle with the symbolic freedom of somehow materialised dreams. (This is indeed the hidden narrative realm of that fervent young ‘mother-wife’: divided and yet also deeply intimate, puzzling, dangerous, attractive and thrilling.) These are the roots from which Stevenson’s best fiction stems, and it is these roots which allow us to claim a deeply Scottish genesis for stories such as ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ and ‘Markheim’, even although they are, in fact, physically located in London.

So it was very much under ‘Cummie’s’ spell that Stevenson planned ‘A Covenanting Story-Book’ in his teens, listing in his notebooks possible titles such as ‘Satan’s power exemplified: the story of Baillie Grierson and Mrs Elspeth Montcleith’; ‘Strange Adventures of the Reverend Mr Solway’; ‘the Devil of Crammond; or indeed ‘The Story of Thrawn Janet’. The only one of these early stories to survive is ‘The Plague Cellar’ which dates from 1864 or perhaps 1866. Never published (and indeed Stevenson forbade its publication when it turned up among his family’s papers) ‘The Plague Cellar’ shows how strongly the growing boy’s imagination was marked by Covenanting tales of blood and righteousness. Indeed, the budding author planned a novel about the Covenanters, but finding the task beyond his 16 years he produced a little pamphlet instead, The Pentland Rising (1866), which marked the bicentenary of the insurrection and the battle of Rullion’s Green.

Published at his father’s expense Stevenson’s ‘first book’ was full of passionate indignation at the fate of the ‘martyrs’ who were executed in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but ‘The Plague Cellar’ is a more ambiguous piece of work altogether, even although it contains references to actual historical figures such as John Neilson of Corsack (whose tortured ghost appears to Ravenswood) and James Sharp the minister in favour of episcopacy who condemned the Covenanters at their trial. Clearly the work of an apprentice writer, ‘The Plague Cellar’ still displays what would become Stevenson’s characteristically vivid use of setting, weather and physical contrast (snow and fire) and, whether intended or not, it is markedly ambivalent about the faith it seems to sympathise with. Thus the power of the scriptures is represented by painted Dutch tiles, but these Biblical scenes of miracles are distorted by the flames of the fireside until they seem like visions from some inferno. Then again, Ravenswood enters the plague cellar intent on knowledge, power and vengeance for his defeated cause – but what he finds there is only madness, emptiness and mystery. To enter that cellar has been death for generations, and even those who boarded it up had to die: it is indeed the symbolic repository for the unconscious drives that attract us so strongly, but which we cannot bear to face.

The same deeply Scottish combination of religiosity and terror (righteousness and blood) marks ‘Thrawn Janet’, early planned, but not written for nearly 20 years when it was published in Cornhill Magazine for October 1881. Stevenson tells us that the story was written in the summer of that year, during a visit to his parents’ house at Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. It was followed in the same months by a first draft of ‘The Merry Men’, and in these two stories we can see how the author’s imagination was moving from its folk-roots in tales of supernatural wonder towards a more complex account of what was beginning to dawn on him, in more existential terms, as the terror of being.

In ‘Thrawn Janet’, the local community is convinced from the start that old Janet M’Clour is a witch. The voice of reason, in the shape of the reverend Soulis, a keen young minister fresh from his college learning, thinks it knows better. But in the end it is the broad Scots voice of the community which is proved correct in all its prejudices, for Soulis is overwhelmed by his encounter with the ‘black man’ who has inhabited Janet’s dead body, and he is left a sadder and a wiser soul. (The black man was a common Scottish manifestation of the devil.) The story ends on a note of self satisfaction, for the folk voice which narrates it has been proven right, concluding that ever since then ‘the deil has never fashed us in Ba’weary.’ But Soulis is fashed, for he is a grim and haunted creature, walking the roads and ‘groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers’. In a strange transformation of roles and sex, the minister himself has become the very figure of terror and speculation among the parish folk that Thrawn Janet used to be. He has sained the community all right, but at the cost of his old self and all his former assurance.

Fettes, who tells the story of ‘The Body Snatcher’ has also been ruined by what he saw. As class assistant to the notorious ‘Anatomist’ Robert Knox (given only as ‘Mr K—’ in the story) he too has aligned himself with the forces of science and medical progress, except that we soon see him to be a weak-willed and dissipated young man. In the cause of self-advancement, Fettes is too easily persuaded by Wolfe Macfarlane, his immediate superior, to go along with the murderous practices of Burke and Hare, and indeed to turn a blind eye to Macfarlane’s own murder of the importunate Mr Gray, who seems to have some strange hold over that young ‘man of the world’. ‘Wolfe’ is well named, for he divides humankind between ‘lambs’ who believe in ‘Hell, God, devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities’, and ‘lions’ like himself (and the aspirant Fettes) who laugh at such stuff as fit only to ‘frighten boys’. This Nietzschean contempt for the rules of the superstitious herd is terribly overturned when what the pair thought to be hidden and dismembered comes back to confront them – resurrected indeed – when they open yet another ‘plague-cellar’ door into what lies beyond the grave, or beneath the conscious, rational mind. The experience ruins Fettes, turning him into a melancholy alcoholic for the rest of his life, but on the other hand, with a fine sense of how hypocrisy can flourish in polite society, Stevenson allows Wolfe Macfarlane a long and successful career as a prosperous London doctor.

Prosperity, respectability, thrift, godliness, and all the douce values of bourgeois Edinburgh are affectionately mocked in ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’. In this retelling of the fable of the prodigal son – in the well-rounded shape of amiably fatuous John Nicholson – Stevenson exorcised the demons of his own past in comic form. John is a disappointment to his godly father, just as Stevenson was to his, but John’s failings have less to do with the young Stevenson’s bohemian habits, and more to do with an absurd concatenation of circumstances which conspire with his own nature – mild, plump and disorganised – to make him look like a desperate criminal on the run on no less than three separate occasions in his life.

If the corrosive relations between sons and fathers were later to lie at the tragic heart of Weir of Hermiston, here they are played out in a lighter and more generous vein. As for the terrible polarities of a Calvinist God, Stevenson confesses that John’s case can only be ‘perplexing for the moralist’ adding, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, that his hero ‘was a mere whip-top for calamity; on whose unmerited misadventures not even the humourist can look without pity, and not even the philosopher without alarm.’ Pity and alarm are far from our minds, however, as we laugh at John’s complacent ineptitude. And Stevenson sends-up all the conventions of disgrace and romance by having his hero saved in the end by a sickly and artistic younger brother, and by his youthful sweetheart Flora Mackenzie, somehow transformed from his memories of a creature ‘slender, and timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed’, to an ‘undecorative’, plain-talking, large-featured, practical woman more than able to take ‘Fatty Nicholson’ in hand. As a Christmas story published in Cassell’s Christmas Annual for 1887, the tale is happily concluded on Christmas day with a flourish worthy of Dickens, and it is marked, too, by the most detailed and affectionate account which Stevenson was ever to give of the social and architectural topography of the city of Edinburgh in the days of his own youthful misadventures.

‘The Pavilion on the Links’ and ‘The Merry Men’ might be considered together, as tales of adventure and romance on Scotland’s wilder shores. Both stories bring a young protagonist into contact with his future wife, and in each case the young lady’s father is a compromised, or indeed a mad individual who must die in the course of the tale. Yet this love interest (with its oddly primal undertones) has little to do with where the real power of these stories is to be found. ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ is much the lesser of the two, for the mysteries beneath its telling turn out to depend on a rather far-fetched plot about wronged Italian revolutionaries seeking revenge on a defaulting banker. Some of the scenes are prophetic of the fort in Treasure Island (still to be written at this time), with the tense little group besieged in their pavilion at night, white faces in the lamplight, guns at the ready and the sound of the surf outside. But the symbolic force of the story comes from how Stevenson has imagined a setting in which the absurdity of an Italianate summer pavilion confronts the emptiness of beach and sea on a remote Scottish shoreline, presided over only by seagulls and the sea, and by ever menacing quicksands. It is against this backdrop that the love plot must be worked through, with the protagonist Frank Cassilis and his erstwhile friend Northmour in bitter rivalry for the affections of the banker’s daughter. Frank seems curiously boyish for a 30 year old, even one who has hitherto renounced society and women, and the changing dynamics between himself and his violent friend Northmour seem stronger in this dream-like isolation than the ostensible love-interest or the ramifications of the revenge plot. —Here, too, I think, are prescient echoes of Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins, of David Balfour and Alan Breck, of the Master of Ballantrae and Henry Durie.

‘The Merry Men’ takes a not dissimilar setting, but in placing it in the past – sometime after the 1745 rising – Stevenson seems to bring it much closer to the deep, rich and ambiguous Calvinist roots which nourish the other stories in this collection. Once again the ‘other’ is given its due in a story of great symbolic complexity. The other may indeed be the devil, or more likely he is just a ‘black man’ mistaken for the devil, in the fevered mind of old Gordon Darnaway, who lives on his remote little island off the west coast of Scotland.

As a once pious Calvinist, Darnaway is demented by guilt and a sense of his own religious bad faith, for he has found God’s hand at work in the tempests which have wrecked ships on his shore, and he has become greedy for their treasure or just, perhaps, for the sight of what he takes to be divine justice at work. The tide-ripped reefs where ships meet their doom are known as ‘the merry men’ and the island’s name is Aros, or ‘Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it means the House of God ’. This is the place where the Holy Spirit foundered as the great galleon Espirito Santo went down, and it’s where the Christiania or perhaps the Christiana ran aground, which old Darnaway can only read on splintered wood as Christ-Anna.

Narrated by Gordon Darnaway’s nephew, ‘The Merry Men’ has a much more complex vision of duality than ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Body Snatcher’ or ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, for the whole landscape has been re-imagined by Stevenson’s art to make it a theatre for his vision of the horror of the sea, and ultimately of existence itself. Old Darnaway’s conscience may conjure up fears of the devil as a black man, or he may dread the shape of a fish lurking like a ‘bogle’ below his boat, but these are only the shadows of his own guilt, coloured by his Cameronian past. In Stevenson’s text it is the actual physical world of the sea and the sea coast which moves us most as a place of terror and personified energy, where white waves are ‘the skipper’s daughters’ and ‘the merry men’ spout and dance on the deep with a roar like mirth or ‘portentous joviality’.

Young Charlie realises that ‘God’s ocean’ is also a ‘charnel ocean’, a place of constant change like life itself, where indeed we all perch, like his uncle, drunk with glee ‘out here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff … head spinning like the Roost … foot tottering on the edge of death … ear watching for the signs of shipwreck’. For in the last analysis the sea is only a mirror of ourselves, and in calmer moments its ‘sea-runes’ reflect no more than our own preoccupations. We may choose to interpret the drama around us in Manichaean terms, seeing it as old Darnaway does, as a struggle between God and the devil. But Stevenson’s eye and his fine descriptive powers, give us only one world, and it is this world, as mad and senseless as the storms of Aros Jay, with none other than God Himself ‘riding on the tempest’. This imagery of sea and storm with humankind perched, terrified or exalted, on the edge of a cliff is the most unforgettable aspect of Stevenson’s tale. It will return, although subdued, in our next story.

From the terror of being to the terror of personal identity, ‘Markheim’ takes us a step closer to Dr Jekyll. Written in late 1884, three years after ‘The Merry Men’, and intended as a Christmas story to ‘curdle the blood’ (as was Jekyll and Hyde scarcely more than a year later) this story was not published until 1886. The circumstances of Markheim’s plan to rob the old dealer, not to mention his extremely disturbed state of mind at the time, are very reminiscent of Raskolnikov’s visit to Ilyona Ivanovna, the old money lender whom he murders in Crime and Punishment, and his subsequent meeting with Svidrigaylov, the debauched ‘other’ who seems to know his inmost heart so well. It’s more than possible that Stevenson had already read the Russian novel in a French translation, and we know from his letters that he had certainly read Le Crime et le Châtiment by the spring of 1886. Questions of influence or attribution are less significant however, than the imagery which ‘Markheim’ shares with ‘The Merry Men’, and these links show that Stevenson has his own way of looking at questions of the stable and unstable self.

The angel, daemon, devil or double who appears at the end of ‘Markheim’ is characteristic of Stevenson’s tendency to give material form to the ‘other self, just as the old Covenanters never doubted the literal presence of the devil in the world all about us. Even if ‘the visitor’ is only a projection of Markheim’s disturbed conscience, Stevenson still took the literary decision to externalise that presence as if it were a real person ‘who bore a likeness to himself. Yet despite the fact that Markheim’s visitor seems to have supernatural powers (he foresees the return of the maid) he seems resolutely tied, with ‘his strange air of the commonplace’ to the material world. In his eyes petty failings and grand crimes ‘differ not by the thickness of a nail’, for death ends all, and ‘when life is done my interest falls.’

This is a very materialistic devil, who favours death-bed repentances because they encourage others to sin and hope for forgiveness, when (in his eyes at least) nothing but what happens in this world is truly real. Here Stevenson’s roots in the dualistic tendencies of Scottish Calvinism seem to have led him to propose that the world belongs to the devil. (Technically this is akin to the Cathar heresy, but we shouldn’t forget that the visitor may turn out to be the devil anyway.) Indeed, the visitor goes on to argue very like a perversely inverted Calvinist, when he suggests that ‘the bad man is dear to me, not the bad act …’ Only Markheim’s surrender at the end can refute this reversed theology, whereupon the visitor’s features ‘brightened and softened with a tender triumph’, and we begin to wonder if the daemon was not an angel after all.

Yet, as was the case with Dostoevsky’s writing, the devil may still have the best tunes in a Stevenson story, for the imagery of Markheim’s disturbance is so much more memorable than the tale’s moral denouement manages to be. The images and symbols of disturbance start with the amorphousness of the fog in the streets outside, and go on to the little mirror, that ‘hand-conscience’ which Markheim cannot bear to look into, even before his sense of self is still further destablised by the murder he commits:

In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him …

In later passages, Markheim fears the ‘besieging army’ of people in the street, just as he fears other mens’ ‘observing eyes’, as if ‘the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doing like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch.’ Such a ‘wilful illegality of nature’ seems possible in his morbid and excited state, and indeed the same disturbance animates the inanimate world itself, from the dead dealer, that ‘bundle of old clothes, and pool of blood’ which begins to find ‘eloquent voices’, to the ‘many tongues’ of the striking clocks in that ‘dumb chamber’.

Vision and speech are at the heart of individual identity and social intercourse, but they are little comfort to Markheim, for everywhere he turns he can find only visions of himself as a spy, or of others ‘overlooking, while the inanimate world rings with voices of accusation. Of course these fears, like the ’visitor’ he meets, are only ‘a shadow of himself, rather as the black man was for old Darnaway. Yet ‘Markheim’, like ‘The Merry Men’, suggests a greater than merely personal disturbance at the heart of being, for an imagery of the sea, that symbol of universal unrest in the latter story, invades ‘Markheim’ too. In the first instance this is clearly part of the protagonist’s own hyper-excited state:

… the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea … the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water.

Identity crumbles at such moments, as when the murderer is terrorised by a knock at the shop door and feels himself to be ‘sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound.’ Yet this is no more than he has felt about life all along, and as Markheim tries to make conversation with the dealer in the opening pages it is difficult not to recognise a more universal insight in his remarks:

‘It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure – no not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliffs edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it – a cliff a mile high – high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity.’

—Every second is a cliff, indeed, and the dealer’s shop is full of clocks whose eloquent voices remind him that time ‘which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer’. He shuns mirrors after such a fall because humanity has indeed been dashed from his own features, and his life passes ‘soberly before him … ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley – a scene of defeat.’ By comparison, death seems like ‘a quiet haven for his bark’ and he welcomes it ‘with something like a smile’.

Fog and the terrors of unstable identity reappear in Stevenson’s most famous story of doubleness and dissolution, compounded by a sense, too, of the protagonist’s loneliness in a maze of respectable streets and squares and noisome wynds and hidden entrances. Set in London as it undoubtedly is, our last tale could not be more clearly marked than it is by the Calvinist forces and the narrow Edinburgh vennels of Stevenson’s upbringing.

‘Conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks’, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was produced in ‘white-hot haste’ in the early winter of 1885. Pressed for money and ideas with equal urgency, Stevenson seems to have made the imaginative breakthrough by means of a screaming nightmare from which his wife awoke him. He wrote the dream down straight away, as a ‘fine bogey tale’ in which the identity of Hyde served simply as a disguise behind which Jekyll could sally forth to commit crimes. This draft was destroyed, however, when Stevenson, prompted by his wife, began to realise that his subject had a much richer symbolic dimension to offer. Despite the ill health which tied him ‘between bed and parlour’ in his house at Bournemouth, the ‘chronic sickist’ immediately poured all his energies into a second version of the story.

The rewritten tale gave him what he had long been moving towards, namely, ‘a body, a vehicle for that strong sense of man’s double being, which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature’. This fascination was already present in ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Merry Men’ and ‘Markheim’, nor should we forget the play about the secret life of the notorious Deacon Brodie which Stevenson and W. E. Henley had drafted together in the late 1870s. With Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, however, the author’s interest in man’s double being become completely explicit, and it was to be further developed in the tension between Alan Breck and David Balfour in Kidnapped (published six months later), and again in the deadly enmity between the two Dune brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, which appeared in 1889.

Intended as a paper-bound ‘shilling shocker’ for the Christmas market, the little book was held back by Longman’s for a month because the bookstalls were already replete with seasonal issues. So it was January 1886 before the Strange Case was first heard of in the streets of London and New York – where it had been published by Scribner’s four days earlier. After a slow start – its cheap paper covers did not commend it – the work came to the attention of critics in the quality press, who declared themselves to be ‘strongly impressed’ by its ‘very original genius’ and a ‘faultlessly ingenious construction’. Other readers responded to what they took to be the tale’s moral force, and before long it was being cited as a parable from pulpits throughout the country – a more than ironic fate, surely, since it was Dr Jekyll’s mistaken notion of Godliness which led to his dangerous experiments in the first place. Within six months over 40,000 copies were sold in Great Britain alone, while the story was parodied in Punch and quickly adapted for the stage on both sides of the Atlantic.

What Stevenson called his ‘Gothic gnome’ has led a hardy life ever since, and to this day many people know it mainly from its cruder versions on film, while ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has passed into common speech, even among those who have never heard of its author. The end result of such success is that few of us can experience the text as its first readers must have done, and we may never be able to recapture the original thrill of horror and discovery when Jekyll’s dual identity is finally revealed. Yet it is a story of considerable power and subtlety, and one that touches the very core of its author’s insight: ‘the gnome is interesting’, he wrote, ‘and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears’.

Nineteenth-century European literature is haunted by images of duality, especially in the form of the Doppelganger, or man’s second shadow self. This late Romantic theme is particularly striking in Dostoevsky’s psychological novella The Double (1846), while it also features in the relationship between Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment (1866), and in the German tales of E. T. A. Hoffman, especially The Devil’s Elixirs (1813-16). Most powerful of all these forerunners was James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), for although he owes a debt to Hoffman, Hogg moved beyond supernatural and psychological romance to place his vision of duality firmly within the darker prospects of Scottish Calvinism.

Of course Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is set in the squares and alleyways of London, and there is no doubt that it also tells us something about Victorian society and its anonymous cities where respectability and depravity rub shoulders without acknowledging one another, but the story’s roots are deeply Scottish. Stevenson knew the pressures of godliness at first hand, after all, for had he not, like Hogg himself, been weaned on tales of the Covenanters? And then again, as a Bohemian student he had pursued a Villonesque career in the narrow streets of old Edinburgh, to the entire horror of his proper, professional and God-fearing parents. ‘Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes,’ wrote Henry Jekyll, ‘while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures ‘(my italics). The puritan Scottish connection could not be more clear.

It is not duality, however, so much as a misconceived notion of unity which drives Dr Jekyll to his frightful experiments. At the age of fifty, after a life of’effort, virtue and control‘, he is still not satisfied with the ’incoherency’ of his nature, not to mention a certain ‘impatient gaiety of disposition’. The desire ‘to carry my head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’ finally prompts his recourse to ‘transcendental medicine’, by which he attempts to filter out his psyche as if it were some sort of chemical suspension of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ ingredients. The experiment succeeds after a fashion, for Mr Hyde, ‘so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll,’ is certainly ‘more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance, I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine’. But the good Doctor himself remains mixed, as all people must be, and it is his weaknesses as ‘an ordinary secret sinner’ which draw him back to Mr Hyde, as if that personality were some addictive drug, all the more potent for its terrible purity. — ‘I was the first that could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into a sea of liberty.’ This passage reintroduces the sea as an existential symbol, spiked with erotic overtones in this case, even as it echoes another line about the dissolution of responsibility, ‘civilisation’ and identity, as when King Lear throws his garments to another storm, crying ‘Off, off you lendings’.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment that chemistry was the most potent of the sciences in the 1880s, and that Stevenson’s fascination with the physical aspects of Jekyll’s potion is more profound in its implications than the foaming and fizzing special effects which have featured in so many film versions might at first suggest. First of all, his tale takes on the possibility that the roots of behaviour might be physically or chemically determined, rather than a matter of education or the presence (or absence) or moral strength. Then again, what Jekyll discovers is that we are made of malleable stuff, that our sense of self, and even our very flesh, can melt and change with terrible speed. In late Victorian times, sexual disease, alcohol abuse and drug addiction – from genteel doses of laudanum to the stupor of opium− were as vivid a nightmare for many citizens as ever AIDS, crack or heroin might be today. The outwardly visible and physical dangers of ‘pleasure’ added more than a frisson to the power of moralising from the pulpit; and there was always a sense – made more vivid by popular (mis) interpretations of Darwin’s theory of natural selection – that we do cling to a cliff, barely balanced between our ideals and our appetites, only just above a fall which would indeed ‘dash us out of every feature of humanity’. At such times one drink, one step, might make all the difference.

Yet Jekyll’s old pleasures were hardly extreme. At worst they had been undignified – ‘I would scarce use a harder term’. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they quickly become ‘monstrous’; nor does the Doctor accept responsibility for his alter ego’s actions, for ‘it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty’. In the same fashion he confuses being beyond detection and the law with being beyond fate itself – sure evidence that he has confused morality with respectability from the very start. In this context it is very important that even old Utterson, through whose investigations the tale unfolds, can be seen as a better balanced man, for despite his dry and dusty lawyer’s nature and a positively Caledonian dedication to austerity, the old fellow keeps in touch with the bon viveur Enfield, admits to a love of good wine, and is generally tolerant of the failings of his fellow men. (He does mortify his pleasures a little, mind you, by choosing to drink gin when alone, saving his finer vintages for company.)

In the early stages of the mystery, Utterson, Enfield, and Lanyon are convinced that Hyde is somehow blackmailing Jekyll for some misdemeanours in his past. They think none the worse of their old friend, but seek to help him as best they can. The whole story is told through the overlapping reports of other people, a remarkable device which serves to create a social web of concern around Jekyll’s trials, while he alone insists on setting himself apart, in pursuit of a tragically mistaken notion of singleness and consistency in his own life.

Stevenson’s narrative, on the other hand, introduces hints of duality from the very start, with Utterson’s joking reference to Cain and Abel; or that sinister courtyard, the back door to Jekyll’s laboratory, situated in the midst of a cheerful street of little shops; or Jekyll’s own house, which shows a wealthy and comfortable front in a square of much decayed grandeur; or Hyde’s lair in a dreadful Soho slum, which turns out to be comfortably appointed and tastefully furnished. Even in moments of action Stevenson shows his extraordinary gift for unsettling contrasts, as when Utterson and the butler burst into Jekyll’s laboratory, the source of so many strange groans and cries and desperate footsteps, only to find a cheerful fire with a kettle singing on the hearth, books and paper neatly laid by the chair, and all the things laid out for tea – ‘the quietest room, you would have said … that night in London’. And then of course, in the middle of it all, they find the twitching body of Edward Hyde, with a phial of poison still in his hand.

In his darkest hour, Henry Jekyll longs for what he has lost and imagines himself once more restored, resting safely in ‘all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved – the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home’. It is a poignant vision, but a revealing bourgeois and materialistic one. This is a man who feels that his own nature is like a bundle of ‘incongruous faggots’, bound together by someone else’s hand, but capable of being split up and more fittingly rearranged. On behalf of this narrow concept of consistency, and on the principle, perhaps, that tidiness is next to Godliness, he was ready to shake ‘the very fortress of identity’, admitting that ‘I for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and one direction only.’

Jekyll pursues this exclusive definition of the whole spirit only to discover – and he cannot conceal his distaste – that ‘man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarous, incongruous and independent denizens’. In the last analysis, the old Calvinist constructions of duality are not enough to catch the multiplicity and the incoherent, inchoate nature of being. It is Jekyll’s tragedy, and our warning, that in the attempt to deny human nature and to refine himself into a unique and unmixed subject, he releases only the pure and single-minded self of Edward Hyde with a mindless ‘love of life’, which is as terrible in its indifference as the ‘joviality’ which young Charles Darnaway heard in the voices of the merry men. The final twist to the tale comes when we realise that it was an unpredictable (and unrecoverable) impurity in one of the drugs in Jekyll’s potion that actually released the terrible singleness of Mr Hyde in the first place.

Old Utterson recognises a much better model of human assimilation, coherence, and release, as he sits by the fire with a very different elixir – no dualistic ‘transcendental medicine’ for him – but a bottle of vintage wine made fine by humble craft, and time, and a thousand untraceable steepings:

In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.

Roderick Watson