Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 8

the scene is the very reverse
of dark, and certainly the very reverse of indefinite. Just as all the form
can best be described as clean-cut, so all the colour is conspicuously
clear and bright. That is why such figures are so often seen standing
against the sea. Everybody who has been at the seaside has noted how
sharp and highly coloured, like painted caricatures, appear even the
most ordinary figures as they pass in profile to and fro against the blue
dado of the sea. There is something also of that hard light that falls full
and pale upon ships and open shores; and even more, it need not be
said, of a certain salt and acrid clearness in the air. But it is notably the
case in the outlines of these maritime figures. They are all edges and
they stand by the sea, that is the edge of the world.
This is but a rough experimental method; but it will be found useful to
make the experiment, of calling up all the Stevensonian scenes that
recur most readily to the memory; and noting this bright hard quality in
shape and hue. It will make it seem all the stranger that any
ornithologist could have confused the raven of Poe with the parrot of
Long John Silver. The parrot was scarce more reputable; but he was a

bird from the lands of bright plumage and blue skies, where the other
bird was a mere shadow making darkness more dark. It is even worth
noting that when the more modern pirates of The Wrecker carried away
with them a caged bird, it had to be a canary. It is specially observed
when Stevenson is dealing with things which many of his
contemporaries made merely shadowy or unfathomably mysterious;
such as the Highland hills and all the lost kingdoms of the Gael. His
Highland tales have everything Scotch except Scotch mist. At that time,
and even before, writers of the school of Fiona Macleod were already
treating such peoples entirely as the Children of the Mist. But there is
very little mist on the mountains of Stevenson. There is no Celtic
twilight about his Celts. Alan Breck Stewart had no yearning for any
delicate vapour to veil his bright silver buttons or his bright blue French
coat. There was hardly a cloud in the sky upon that day of doom, when
Glenure dropped dead in the sunshine; and he did not have red hair for
nothing. Stevenson is even moved to mention that the servant behind
him was laden with lemons; because lemons are bright yellow. This
sort of making of a picture may not be conscious, but it is none the less
characteristic. Of course I do not mean literally that all the scenes in
any novel could have the same scheme of colour, or occur at the same
time of day. There are exceptions to the rule; but even these will
generally be found to be exceptions that prove the rule. A time of _A
Lodging for the Night_ is not unnaturally at night; but even in that
nightmare of winter in mediaeval Paris the mind's eye is really filled
rather with the whiteness of snow than the blackness of darkness. It is
against the snow that we see the flaming mediaeval figures; and
especially that memorable figure who (like Campbell of Glenure) had
no right to have red hair when he was dead. The hair is like a scarlet
splash of blood crying for vengeance; but I doubt whether the doomed
gentleman in Poe's poetry would have been allowed to have red hair
even when he was alive. In the same way, it would be easy to answer in
detail, by finding some description of night in the works of Stevenson;
but it would never be the night that broods eternally on the works of
Poe. It might be said, for instance, that there are few more vivid or
typical scenes in the Stevensonian tales than that of the duel at
midnight in The Master of Ballantrae. But there again the exception
proves the rule; the description insists not on the darkness of night but

on the hardness of winter, the "windless stricture of the frost"; the
candles that stand as straight as the swords; the candle-flames that seem
almost as cold as the stars. I have spoken of the double meaning of a
woodcut; this was surely, in the same double sense, a steel engraving.
A steely cold stiffens and steadies that tingling play of steel; and that
not only materially but morally. The House of Durrisdeer does not fall
after the fashion of The House of Ussher. There is in that murderous
scene I know not what that is clean and salt and sane; and, in spite of