Walter Raleigh | Page 8

never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrill of pleasure to the reader. Of the value of words he had the acutest appreciation. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE, his first book of essays, is crowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a single word. 'We have all heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England.' You can feel the ground shake and see the volcano tower above you at that word 'TREMENDOUS neighbourhood.' Something of the same double reference to the original and acquired meanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedate electrician,' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of a city; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the IMPASSABLE.'
The likeness of this last word to a very different word, 'IMPASSIVE,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meanings almost leads to punning. In ACROSS THE PLAINS Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes, 'LIQUIDATED at the bar.' This is perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works of Milton.
His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more stirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In THE BEACH OF FALESA the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang;
' "Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain continued. "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. 'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of stick to him: 'John Adams, OBIT eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny."
' "What did he die of ?" I inquired.
' "Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain- Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go - he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again: not strong enough. . . . Poor John!" '
There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in THE WRECKER; and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in KIDNAPPED, CATRIONA, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose.
But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.' And he quotes a passage from Harrington's OCEANA:
'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own hand, is herself King People.'
It was from writers of Harrington's time and