BOOKS
Scotch, Sir, Scotch
By IAIN HAMILTON
AIOTI IER book about Robert Louis Stevenson is not the thing to set the heather on fire or scorch the shrubs of Surbiton. Not now. Mr. Richard Aldington's publishers state fairly enough that his Portrait of a Rebel* will fascinate the numerous admirers of Stevenson. They will no doubt be relieved and delighted to learn that Mr. Aldington's approach is sympathetic; although it is possible—if there is anything of the old strength left in the cult—that they will not be wholly gratified by the brisk common sense which he brings to the job of sketching Stevenson in a form which the day and age can stomach. The question is, will it fascinate, or even interest, those who are something less than admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson? Those of later generations, I mean, who, although they gulped down Treasure Island and followed Alan Breck and his prissy young companion through the heather, never fell for the velvet-jacketed Victorian Bohemian, and whose enjoyment of much of his other work was effectively spoiled by the raptures of the fan club? I think it may and I hope it will.
Mr. Aldington's essay is good-humoured and urbane. It is only when he is dealing with the social conventions of Victorian Edinburgh and the Presbyterian zeal which informed them that he goes so far as to boggle. You can almost see his eyes. popping out of his head in some of the sentences about Stevenson's nurse, Alison Cun- ningham, or his father, and their relish for that good old witches' brew that made the respectable to prosper and the merely human to sink de- servedly into that poverty which was a fitting prelude in this world to the hellfire that would be roasting their toes in the next. I think he may take this a shade too heavily. At any rate, he gives the impression that he finds it hard to believe that people could have held such beliefs so strongly as to inflict them upon an innocent and ailing child. But they did, and some still do, and perhaps it is better not to allow moral indigna- tion, even of Mr. Aldington's humanist sort, to influence inquiry into them and their doings. They were human, too, although it is certainly not always easy, looking into the Victorian ' photo- graphs, to believe it.
Reared in those dwellings have brave ones been; Brave ones are still there wrote Sheriff Alexander Nicolson of the black houses of Skye, and the same might be said of that grim dwelling of the spirit which has so far changed itself of late that many people actually consider it fit to become a sort of outhouse of the palaces of Canterbury and York.
But this is by the way. Mr. Aldington's • Evans Brothers, 21s. astonishment, however justified, is not likely to be echoed by any Scot who has taken for granted, in full or modified strength, the sort of environ- ment in which Stevenson grew up. Of course he rebelled against it. People are still rebelling against it today. Any kind of artist would have to rebel against it or anything like it. Too much can be made of this rebellion of Stevenson's in the way of explaining his development. Boozing and fornicating have always been popular sports among the Scots, a passionate race, not least among the devout (see the Holy Willies of Burns and others), and I feel that to dwell upon Stevenson's rebellion at too great a length today serves to divert attention somewhat from more interesting aspects of that scrupulous writer.
Hopelessly entangled in apron-strings. Drinks plenty. Curses some. Temper unstable. Manners purple on an emergency, but liable to trances. Essentially the common old copy-book gentle- man of commerce; if accused of cheating at cards, would feel bound to blow out brains, little as he would like the job. Has been an invalid for ten years, but can boldly claim you can't tell it on him. Given to explaining the Universe—Scotch, sir, Scotch.
So from Samoa he described himself to Barrie at a time when he was learning to the full what it meant to be Scotch, sir, Scotch.
It is no longer a small school at this late hour which feels that with the first pages of Weir of Hermiston Stevenson finally shrugs off his adolescence and the last of the rather spurious `romantic' trappings, rids his writing of that `style' which holds the reader of today at arm's length, and moves into his unadorned power. -If he had lived, could he have sustained it and realised one of the great novels of the nineteenth century? On the basis of what there is and our knowledge of how it was done, I think it fair to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that his death cheated us of a complete masterpiece sui generis, Scottish, and untainted by 'style.' However that may be, and it seems to me a point- less activity to argue the toss about whether or not Stevenson would have carried it through to a triumphant conclusion, the fact is that in the great fragment we have there is a power and a compassion stronger and deeper than anything that has come before. Mr. Aldington is sur- prisingly canny about this late and sudden but undeniable leap into the shoes of a major writer, referring merely on p. 199 to 'Weir of Hermiston, which many enthusiastic readers of Stevenson think his best book,' and on p. 219 to 'Weir of Hermiston, which many admirers believe was his greatest achievement in novel-writing.' Per- haps he felt that he had dabbled enough in the Scottishness of Stevenson in dealing with his early years, and thought this too debatable a ground for an outsider to set foot in. And yet I should imagine that to most people of MY generation, whether Scots or not, it is this un- finished work which is Stevenson's one certain masterpiece, and the one book in which he realised his Scottishness with unmannered ease, as the great Russian writers had realised their Russianness and English writers their English- ness.
For any lengthy study of Stevenson leads in the end to some sort of consideration of the un- comfortable question : how is a Scottish writer to be himself? There are two short essays bY Virginia Woolf on Scott that always come to mind whin I think of Stevenson and Weir of Hermiston. In one she draws a Peacockish Pic- ture of a soiree • at Abbotsford. But the scene changes when Scott begins to recite the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. 'The guitar stopped; Sir Walter's lips trembled as he came to an end. So it happens, too, in the novels—the lifeless English turns to living Scots.' In another she writes, while discussing The Antiquary, of the extraordinary contrast between Scott's style when dealing with the genteel, established and Englified, and that other which comes magnificently into play when he writes of his own country and fellow-countrymen; then, says Virginia Woolf, 'never was a change more emphatic; never one more wholly to the good.' Whenever the Scots come on to the stage, `images, anecdotes, illustrations drawn from sea, sky and earth, race and bubble from their lips. They shoot every thought as it flies, and bring it tumbling to the ground in metaphor. Sometimes it is a phrase—"at the back of a dyke, in a wreath o' snaw, or in the wame o' a wave"; some- times a proverb—"he'll no can haud down his head to sneeze, for fear o' seeing his shoon always the dialogue is sharpened and pointed bY the use of that Scottish dialect which is at once so homely and so pungent, so colloquial and so passionate, so shrewd and so melancholy into the bargain.'
So with Stevenson, when at last he came fully to grips—from a far distance—with the land his bones were made of. So also with Yeats when he grew out of alien and languorous fashions and wrote without ado in lines that had his own accent. All this is not to say that a Scot cannot write anything worth reading unless it is in a mixture of the Makars, Burns and Sir Harry Lauder, or that he should devote his career to the propagation of `Wha's like us? De'il the ane !' but merely to suggest that he can waste a lot of time in false starts, however saleable the immediate results may be, before he finds his own true voice and the subjects he can move among with the ease of a man in his own house. It is not Stevenson the 'stylist' who is the great one; it is the Stevenson who throws 'style' through , the window and is content at last with the heather in his ears.
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