I'.ni] on Rohort Louis Stevenson. 41 



iiiUTiitive style scarcely to be beaten in English prose.) Criticise 

 the invention of the powders as yon will in cold blood, who can read 

 the tale for the first time— or the twentieth — and not feel the awe 

 and horrid thrill of it in his nerves and pulses, and through them in 

 his njind and conscience ? 



Once mort', in '" Treasure Island," people familiar with the sea 

 say that the adventure of Jim Hawkins in the coracle and the capture 

 of the schooner are impossible. The best answer is Stevenson's own: 

 " Of course my seamanship is jimmy ; did I not beseech you, I know 

 not how often, to find me an ancient mariner — and you did nothing 

 for me ? As for my seamen, did Runciman ever know eighteenth 

 century buccaneers ? No ? Well, no more did I. But I have 

 known and sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them ; 

 and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but as a put-up 

 thing has to be made, i.e. to be coherent and picturesque, and damn 

 the expense. Are they fairly lively on the wires ? Then favour me 

 with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim, and no sport ? 

 Then it is I that am silent, otherwise not." 



In this passage Stevenson throws up the defence of his nautical 

 invention, and shifts the ground to a defence of his pirates. Let us 

 pass with him to that other question of his gift as a creator of 

 characters. In the sense of giving certain of his characters a high 

 degree of individual vitality by calculated strokes of admirably adroit 

 and telling art, it is clear that he was a remarkable creator. In the 

 sense of peopling his canvases with a crowd of living figures, as some 

 of the great spontaneous creators in literature have been able to do, 

 or rather seem to have been compelled to do by an unconscious 

 instinct, his gift, it would seem, was less. The only crowded canvas 

 is " The Wrecker," a collaboration story, and in coUalioration he 

 was to my mind never at his best : but here I should say that Jim 

 Pinkerton and Captain Nares at least are full-length figures as well 

 characterised and unforgetable as any in recent literature. Certainly 

 what most distinguishes " Treasure Island " from other pirate stories 

 is the saliency and sharp discrimination of the individual figures ; 

 Long John, the fruitiest and most formidable leader of mutiny in 

 all sea- literature, Ben Gunn, the most delectable of marooned seamen, 

 the Doctor, Captain Smollett, and the rest. In maintaining this 

 quahty Stevenson was no doubt immensely helped by his unequalled 

 ear for dialects and modes of speech. Run your memory over the 

 various strains and styles of language in which his puppets severally 

 deliver themselves. What a range — from the rich traditional Low- 

 land Scots, of which he was one of the greatest masters and perhaps 

 the last, and which comes with such noble and moving eloquence 

 from the lips of the elder Kirstie in the midnight chamber at Her- 

 miston, to the hideous decayed dialect ranted from the ship's boat in 

 the tropic lagoon by the deadly little cockney hell-cat Huish in " The 



this particular trick 



