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Robert Louis Stevenson-Part4_Walter Raleigh(1861-1922)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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Like loud waters everywhere),



Meeting mine own image there

Face to face,



Send it from that place to her!'

but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays



bare before him his motives and history. At the close of that

wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's



achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police.

These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how



Stevenson's imagination quickened and strengthened when it played

full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great



romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games.

III. MORALITY. - His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel



Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise

and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his



narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate

vehicles of his morality. He has left no work - unless the two



short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions - in which

romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole,



nothing that can be put beside THE SCARLET LETTER or THE MARBLE

FAUN for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his



essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom,

are ranked by some critics above his stories.



A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is

no question in art of police regulations or conformity to



established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide.

Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all



acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a

man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance



to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is

bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can



no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be

broken by the fall of china - the morality without which life would



be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each

other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of



society. For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high

gifts of imagination are necessary. Shakespeare could never have



drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder,

without some sympathy for the murderer - the sympathy of



intelligence. These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to

Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are



gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life,

from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously



that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion

of homily. In THE BLACK ARROW, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of



Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he

had taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke



of Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-

mongers,' yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to



Arblaster.

' "Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more



than ships or liquor. Say you forgive me, for if your life is

worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune.



Come, I have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish."

' "An I had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and



safe on the high seas - I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship,

gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in



russet shot him down, 'Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again.

'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him



passed. 'A will never sail no more, will my Tom."

'Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to



take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch.




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