The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson (read book .txt) 📕

at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed

fancies.

And while I was groping for the fable and the character required,

behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory.

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot,

nine years old. Was there ever a more complete justification of

the rule of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other things, I had

stumbled on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in

stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a story

conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and

Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell

of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole

correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long

ago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the

mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.

My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America

being all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me

except in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee,

a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all

seeing) equally accidental with myself. It was plain, thus far,

that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon a

foot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me

the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at first

intended that he should be Scottish, and I was then filled with

fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my own Alan

Breck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would be

like my Master to curry favour with the Prince’s Irishmen; and that

an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in

India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish,

therefore, I decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was

aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon.

No man (in Lord Foppington’s phrase) of a nice morality could go

very deep with my Master: in the original idea of this story

conceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to

be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) he

was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very bad

Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I to

evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering his services;

he gave me excellent references; he proved that he was highly

fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart,

suggested it was easy to disguise his ancient livery wit a little

lace and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself should

hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to me

memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and

had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very

desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an

extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any

influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a

youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred

to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in

place of entering into competition with the Master, would afford a

slight though a distinct relief. I know not if I have done him

well, though his moral dissertations always highly entertained me:

but I own I have been surprised to find that he reminded some

critics of Barry Lyndon after all… .

PREFACE TO ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’ {19}

Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following

pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a

native; and there are few things more strange, more painful, or

more salutary, than such revisitations. Outside, in foreign spots,

he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had

expected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands

amazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he is refreshed to

see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts

the long streets, with a pang at heart, for the faces and friends

that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence of

what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old.

Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten

with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once

hoped to be.

He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his

last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of

his friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay.

A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that

sounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in

passing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis

on the dining-room wall, brought him to his bed-room with a

somewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr. Thomson sat down a

few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in a

preliminary bumper, he was already almost consoled, he had already

almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable errors, that he should

ever have left his native city, or ever returned to it.

‘I have something quite in your way,’ said Mr. Thomson. ‘I wished

to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own

youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and

withered state, to be sure, but—well!—all that’s left of it.’

‘A great deal better than nothing,’ said the editor. ‘But what is

this which is quite in my way?’

‘I was coming to that,’ said Mr. Thomson: ‘Fate has put it in my

power to honour your arrival with something really original by way

of dessert. A mystery.’

‘A mystery?’ I repeated.

‘Yes,’ said his friend, ‘a mystery. It may prove to be nothing,

and it may prove to be a great deal. But in the meanwhile it is

truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred

years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and

it ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription)

it is concerned with death.’

‘I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising

annunciation,’ the other remarked. ‘But what is It?’

‘You remember my predecessor’s, old Peter M’Brair’s business?’

‘I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of

reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it.

He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest

was not returned.’

‘Ah well, we go beyond him,’ said Mr. Thomson. ‘I daresay old

Peter knew as little about this as I do. You see, I succeeded to a

prodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin boxes, some

of them of Peter’s hoarding, some of his father’s, John, first of

the dynasty, a great man in his day. Among other collections were

all the papers of the Durrisdeers.’

‘The Durrisdeers!’ cried I. ‘My dear fellow, these may be of the

greatest interest. One of them was out in the ‘45; one had some

strange passages with the devil—you will find a note of it in

Law’s Memorials, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, I

know not what, much later, about a hundred years ago—’

‘More than a hundred years ago,’ said Mr. Thomson. ‘In 1783.’

‘How do you know that? I mean some death.’

‘Yes, the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother,

the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),’ said Mr.

Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting. ‘Is that it?’

‘To say truth,’ said I, ‘I have only seen some dim reference to the

things in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer still, through

my uncle (whom I think you knew). My uncle lived when he was a boy

in the neighbourhood of St. Bride’s; he has often told me of the

avenue closed up and grown over with grass, the great gates never

opened, the last lord and his old maid sister who lived in the back

parts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum couple it would

seem—but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring and brave

house—and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some

deformed traditions.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Thomson. Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, died

in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katherine Durie, in ‘27;

so much I know; and by what I have been going over the last few

days, they were what you say, decent, quiet people and not rich.

To say truth, it was a letter of my lord’s that put me on the

search for the packet we are going to open this evening. Some

papers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M’Brair suggesting

they might be among those sealed up by a Mr. Mackellar. M’Brair

answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar’s own

hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative

character; and besides, said he, “I am bound not to open them

before the year 1889.” You may fancy if these words struck me: I

instituted a hunt through all the M’Brair repositories; and at last

hit upon that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose

to show you at once.’

In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet,

fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong

paper thus endorsed:-

Papers relating to the lives and lamentable deaths of the late Lord

Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master of

Ballantrae, attainted in the troubles: entrusted into the hands of

John M’Brair in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of

September Anno Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until the

revolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day of

September 1889: the same compiled and written by me,

EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,

For near forty years Land Steward on the

estates of His Lordship.

As Mr. Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had

struck when we laid down the last of the following pages; but I

will give a few words of what ensued.

‘Here,’ said Mr. Thomson, ‘is a novel ready to your hand: all you

have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and

improve the style.’

‘My dear fellow,’ said I, ‘they are just the three things that I

would rather die than set my hand to. It shall be published as it

stands.’

‘But it’s so bald,’ objected Mr. Thomson.

‘I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,’ replied I, ‘and

I am sure there is nothing so interesting. I would have all

literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Thomson, ‘we shall see.’

Footnotes:

{1} First published in the Contemporary Review, April 1885

{2} Milton.

{3} Milton.

{4} Milton.

{5} As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English examples,

take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms a

chief adornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all too

Roman freedom of the sense: ‘Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae

palliolata vagatur.’