Antique words
Sir: Inevitable misprints apart, exactitude is almost everything. Mr Benny Green in his review on January 5 of Professor Daiches's Robert Louis Stevenson and His World, refers to Stevenson's use of the word 'horologist' in Markheim, where what Stevenson said was — "and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock."
This sentence, I suggest, is an instance of a skill which — whatever differing views there may be about its worth — Stevenson developed to a high degree and over a wide range. I can only call it an onomatopoeia not of sound alone, but of sight, action and process as well.
The quoted sentence, especially in its context, suggests the regular rhythm of a pendulum and escapement brought abruptly to a stop. (Was 'horologist' quite so antique a word in even Crane's time?) ". . in my precipitous city" (dedication to Hermiston) and "wilderness of tumbled boulders" (Fontainebleau) picture in sharp or rounded vowels the scenes which they describe. The "brutal instant of extinction" (Hermiston) tells the jerking fall of a hanged man. "The sea bombards their founded towers" marks out the surges which still, as then, wash against the Bill Rock and Skerryvole. "The rain erases and the rust consumes" the inscriptions and fittings of a family tomb.
One cannot deny that there is much in the criticism of Stevenson's use of antique words, but it is not the whole
story. W. H. McCulloch
2 Trinity Grove, Edinburgh
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