Treasure Island Read Free

the gaunt, remorseless Pew is clearly a figuration of Death itself, much as it is the warrant for the murder of Billy Bones that he comes bearing with him to the Admiral Benbow Inn.
    Pew is testimony that Stevenson could on occasion rival Dickens in the goblin market, but in Long John Silver he created one of the great originals in our literature. Whereas many of his literary characters were derived from romantic prototypes, Silver was inspired (as Stevenson acknowledged) by his friend the crippled poet andeditor W. E. Henley, who overrode his own handicap with terrific personal energy and who was in his personal dealings often egregiously opportunistic and ethically ambivalent. Silver is a rascal so attractive in his makeup as to be the very personification of the amorality that Stevenson claimed for his adventure stories, being romances in which good and evil are much in evidence, with the former triumphing over the latter, but in which complex moral questions are seldom the main issue.
    How else could the author allow Silver, that jovial hypocrite who protests loyalty to his employers even as he plots their destruction, a pirate-brigand for whom a crutch is a deadly weapon and who does not hesitate to murder in cold blood an honest sailor unwilling to join his dreadful scheme, how else, I say, could Stevenson allow such a man to gain his freedom, taking along both his beloved bird and a sack of gold coins, thereby ending his life in modest comfort in the loving arms of his mulatto wife?
    Scott, to whom Stevenson owed an explicit debt, would have had none of that, and would have left Silver with the remnant of his pirate band on the island as a suitably Levitical fate of the kind the barrister author favored, or perhaps he would have abandoned him in the empty treasure pit, futilely clawing the sandy walls around him as his parrot, safe in a tree high above, cries out his litany to the empty air. Nor would Ballantyne, an evangelical Christian of the highest moral caliber, to say nothing of Cooper, for whom of fiction virtue was the root, have forgiven Silver his sins.
    It is this amorality that lends especial interest to
Treasure Island
for adult readers, given that Stevenson wrote during a time when Victorianism was in full funereal flower, for his “lovable rascals,” as one friendly American critic wrote at the time, were a large part of the secret of his success. Silver hearkens back to Falstaff surely, and recalls as well more recent examples of attractive outlaws associated with the stories of Bret Harte. But Harte’s muse in this regard was Charles Dickens, and Stevenson’s pirate somewhat resembles the Artful Dodger, who like Long John Silver is allowed to escape the gallows by being deported to a very large island in the South Seas. None of this indebtedness detracts from Stevenson’s romance; indeed, it provides keys to his genius, as we shall see.
    Stevenson was certainly good at what he did, which was to write stories of adventure that hold the reader to the very end; but havingreached that termination, we look back and wonder what it was really all about, if anything, beyond considerable miching mallecho. Much as there is no moral lesson to be learned, other than the assertion of the traditional British value placed on physical courage in the face of psychic terrors, neither is there the subtextual matter so prized by modern readers, the sort of thing that makes
Moby-Dick
something more than a rattling good whaling yarn or
Heart of Darkness
greater than an adventuresome voyage up and back down the Congo River. Stevenson, it is widely admitted, was a great entertainer, and it was that reputation that caused his champions to mourn the promise of the unfinished
Weir of Hermiston
, which would have proved he was more than that.
    But then there are far worse things to be remembered for than a gift for entertaining readers, and if Stevenson was no Henry James, well, James is on record as having observed wryly