Classical allusions and narrative guidance in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped

Abstract

Kidnapped is the most Scottish novel Robert Louis Stevenson ever wrote. Set in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden (1746), a watershed in Scottish history, it integrates actual with fictional characters and events and features a gallery of regional types. The adventures of the autodiegetic narrator, David Balfour, unfold against the topography of the Highlands, which is minutely and accurately described; when the novel first appeared in book form, Stevenson specified that the illustrations should include a map (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: vi, 40). Insofar as language is one of the novel’s concerns it is with the difference between English as spoken by Englishmen and by the lowland Scots, and the interplay of both with the Highlanders’ Gaelic (Menikoff 1999: lv). Yet despite its regional ambiance Kidnapped is imbued with classical references that broaden its focus, illuminating issues of class and education within the story and of genre and narrative structure without.

Knowledge of Latin literature and the Latin language proves critical to the (fictional) protagonist at a decisive moment. As the novel opens seventeen-year-old David Balfour has travelled from his natal village to Edinburgh; he is on the point of claiming his birthright as laird of the estate of Shaws when he is kidnapped at the behest of his wicked uncle and imprisoned on a ship bound for America. David forges an alliance with Alan Breck Stewart, an outlawed Jacobite (and historical figure) who is taken on board the ship; survives the vessel’s shipwreck off the island of Mull; inadvertently witnesses the shooting of one of King George II’s hated overseers (a documented event known to history as the ‘Appin murder’) by an unknown assailant; and spends two months in Alan’s company as the pair flee toward the lowlands, both of them wanted men being pursued by British redcoats.

At the end of the novel, David returns to Edinburgh and seeks out Mr. Rankeillor, the family lawyer, in order to pursue his interrupted claim. He realizes, however, that he is filthy, dressed in rags, and has ‘no grounds to stand upon; and no clear proof of my rights, nor so much as of my own identity’ (Kidnapped, ch. 27: 173).¹ When David proposes to recount his story to Rankeillor, the skeptical lawyer urges him (ch. 27: 174–75) to ‘be brief and come swiftly to the point. Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ovo—do you understand that?’² David not only understands the Latin tag but also recognizes its source, as he shows by replying with a phrase drawn from the very next line of Horace’s Ars Poetica: ‘I will do even as Horace says, sir [ … ], and carry you in medias res’.³ In an additional unobtrusive proof of his competence in Latin, David’s choice of the verb of motion ‘carry’ displays his understanding that in when constructed with the accusative case signifies ‘into’ (not ‘in’, as in many modern mistranslations of this well-known phrase). As David recounts, his answer impresses Rankeillor, who ‘nodded as if he were well pleased, and indeed his scrap of Latin had been set to test me’. Demonstrating a knowledge of Latin is one of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘rituals of class recognition’ (Skilton 1988: 42), so the young man’s apt response establishes if not who he is, at least what he is: if not his identity as heir of Shaws, at least his status as an educated gentleman.

The Latin tags proliferate as the conversation continues. When Rankeillor quips, ‘Fui, non sum’ (‘I was, [but now] am not’, ch. 27: 176), he repurposes an Epicurean epitaph whose subject is mortality to explain that he was formerly the lawyer of David’s Uncle Ebenezer, but is so no longer. He follows up with imberbis juvenis custode remoto (‘a beardless youth, with his guardian out of the way’, Ars Poetica 161), in reference to the period David spent on the lam in the Highlands. He comments on the relationship of David to his comrade Alan Breck Stuart by way of two quotations from Vergil’s Aeneid.⁴ Furthermore, David notes that he has edited the lawyer’s discourse in his retelling, for Rankeillor ‘was more pedantic than I can represent him, and placed more scraps of Latin in his speech’ (ch. 27: 177). By the end of their interview the lawyer has accepted that despite his unprepossessing appearance, his visitor is the legitimate heir of Shaws. He invites David to wash up and offers him a change of clothes; after showing him to a bedroom in his house, ‘here, with another apposite tag, he left me to my toilet’ (ch. 27: 179).⁵

In their subsequent colloquy (ch. 28: 180) Rankeillor slightly misquotes Martial’s Odi te, quia bellus es, Sabelle (‘I hate you, Sabellus, because you are good-looking’, Epigram XII.39), to confirm what he has already ruefully acknowledged: he himself was a homely young man, in contrast to David’s handsome uncle Ebenezer. Multum gementem (‘groaning mightily’, with reference to Ebenezer’s youthful grandiosity), adapts Aeneid 4.395 and 12.886, and majora canamus, (‘let us sing of loftier matters’, which serves Rankeillor as a narrative transition) comes from the first line of Eclogue 4. Finally, a tag from the Ars Poetica underscores the importance of that poem to Stevenson’s novel.⁶

Latin tags were ubiquitous among the educated elite during the eighteenth century in which Kidnapped is set, as well as the nineteenth century when Stevenson was writing. The quotations could on occasion be absurdly irrelevant, exposing the speaker’s ignorance rather than displaying his learning, but Rankeillor’s, as David affirms, are ‘apposite’.⁷ In what follows I consider the pertinence of the lawyer’s tags to three different contexts: to their initial task of characterization; to the larger story of Kidnapped; and at the meta-fictional level, where they stake a claim about the novel’s genre and forestall potential objections to its ending.

The tags as characterization

Rankeillor is not only a new acquaintance both to the protagonist and to the novel’s external audience but also the first ‘reputable burgher’ (ch. 27: 173) to make an appearance; to this point David’s company has consisted of seamen, outlaws and rustic Highlanders.⁸ Rankeillor’s predilection for Latin tags characterizes him economically and humorously as a distinguished but pedantic lawyer. Stevenson may well be poking fun at a type. He may even be poking fun at himself, since he trained for the law at Edinburgh University, although he never practiced. Although Stevenson’s Latin was admittedly shaky,⁹ it offered ‘a means of aligning himself with the learned, and more specifically with the professional classes, the lawyers, doctors, and scientists amongst whom his formal education was conducted in Edinburgh’ (Poole 2018: 252). He was fond of Latin tags (Chislett 1916: 267), which he deployed with subtlety and skill (see Poole 2018: 253–5). He even tried his hand at Latin doggerel (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: i, 86–7).

If Rankeillor’s ‘scraps of Latin’ serve as a handy device for characterizing both speaker and author to the external audience, internally they are indispensable, as noted, to establishing their addressee’s social position. Christopher Stray (2005: 208) observes that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England ‘the authority of Latin was both social and cultural. Latin was used to reinforce the boundaries of social groups: solidarity within, exclusion without’. Harrison (2017: 20) discusses ‘the gentlemanly status and cultural capital […] conferred by possessing and demonstrating a knowledge of [Horace]’. Gentlemanly status is what David, however improbably, can claim; although raised in poverty in Essendean, a village outside Edinburgh, just before being kidnapped he discovers that he is the heir of Shaws, ‘an ancient, honest, reputable house, peradventure in these latter days decayed’ (ch. 1: 8). Moreover, he has received an education from his father that approximately befits his social class. Alexander Balfour was employed as the village schoolmaster, but as his friend the minister remarks, he did not have ‘the manner or the speech of a common dominie’ (ch. 1: 8). Why this cultivated man spent his life in obscurity and privation is not disclosed either to David or to Stevenson’s external audience, who must await the end of the novel for an explanation.

In contrast to that narrative deferral, an early chapter of Kidnapped lays the ground for the classical knowledge that David subsequently displays to Rankeillor. After the young man has sought out his uncle he spends a day in his house, where he discovers ‘a great number of books, both Latin and English, in which I took great pleasure all the afternoon’ (ch. 4: 22). The topic of David’s education continued to preoccupy Stevenson, for he elaborated on the issue in Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped that appeared seven years later. In that novel the young man apologizes to Catriona, the young woman he has fallen in love with and will eventually marry, for his ignorance of the art of fencing: ‘It is most misconvenient at least […] and I think my father (honest man!) must have been wool-gathering to learn me Latin in the place of it’ (Catriona, ch. 10: 108). Fencing is not the only desirable skill that David lacks; he is so unfamiliar with polite society that when he is introduced to the daughters of the Lord Advocate of Scotland he lectures them, to their boredom and derision,¹⁰ on ‘some of the principles of the Latin grammar’ (Catriona, ch. 19: 223). David’s competence in Latin points in two directions: it marks him as a member of the educated elite, but also suggests the inadequacy of his rustic upbringing and his ignorance of the mores that are appropriate to his class.

Latin versus Alan’s silver button

David’s identity as a gentleman is only assured at the end of Kidnapped, when he convinces Rankeillor that he is the legitimate heir of Shaws. While Latin serves as the catalyst for this transformation, prior to that point he has been associated with a different talisman. After David saves Alan Breck Stewart’s life (first by warning him that the ship’s captain and crew are plotting to kill him, and subsequently by fighting at his side to rout them), Alan cuts a silver button off his coat and bestows it on David.¹¹ He tells him, ‘I had [the buttons] […] from my father, Duncan Stewart; and now give ye one of them to be a keepsake […] And wherever ye go and show that button, the friends of Alan Stewart will come around you’ (ch. 11: 65). The contrast between the two men’s life experience and allegiances could hardly be greater. David is a Whig, too young to have developed political opinions of his own but raised as a loyal subject of King George II. Alan is a Jacobite twice David’s age, a veteran soldier who, while living in exile in France, returns secretly to Scotland every year to collect funds for the Stewart cause. Furthermore, their temperaments are opposed: David is cautious and wary, whereas Alan is bold and impulsive (Harmon 2005: 315). Alan’s gratitude to David, however, overrides these differences. When the two become separated in the aftermath of the shipwreck, Alan leaves ‘clues and messages’ (ch. 18: 112) with his friends to assist David, whom he identifies as ‘the lad with the silver button’, in his wanderings. As a native Highlander and member of the Stewart clan, Alan can draw on a network of kinfolk and allies for shelter and protection during his flight, whereas David is a solitary, bewildered stranger. In these circumstances the silver button comes repeatedly to his aide, allowing him to recognize those from whom he can expect help and also, just as importantly, those who are ignorant of its significance.

It is not long before the button proves its usefulness. A few days after the shipwreck David, exhausted and starving, sets foot on the island of Mull. The first person he encounters is an old man who has received a visit from Alan a short time earlier. Before David thinks to reveal himself, the man ‘clapped his hand to his brow, and cried out that I must be the lad with the silver button’ (ch. 15: 90). This recognition is the prelude to generous hospitality from the old man and his wife, who in spite their poverty lavish their visitor with food and drink, and allow him to rest until he has regained his strength. This episode not only proves the efficacy of the silver button but also gestures toward a generic affinity. I return to that aspect below.

In a subsequent encounter on Mull, the button gives David no help; instead, Latin comes to his rescue as an alternative talisman. The innkeeper at Torosay ‘finding me to be something of a scholar, tried me first in French, where he easily beat me, and then in Latin, in which I don’t know which of us did best. This pleasant rivalry put us at once upon friendly terms…. I tried him, as if by accident, with a sight of Alan’s button; but it was plain he had never seen or heard of it’ (ch. 15: 95). David appears to conclude from this ‘trying’ or testing that the silver button and a command of Latin are mutually exclusive; in other words, that loyalty to the Jacobite cause is not compatible with the status of gentleman.¹² This assumption leads him to offend Neil Roy, the skipper of the boat that ferries him from the island to the mainland, by offering him money (ch. 16: 98):

‘“I am seeking somebody”, said I; “and it comes in my mind that you will have news of him. Alan Breck Stewart is his name.” And very foolishly, instead of showing him the button, I sought to pass a shilling in his hand. At this he drew back. “I am very much affronted”, he said; “and this is not the way that one shentleman should behave to another at all…” I saw I had gone the wrong way to work, and without wasting time upon apologies, showed him the button lying in the hollow of my palm. “Aweel, aweel”, said Neil; “and I think you might have begun with that end of the stick, whatever! But if ye are the lad with the silver button, all is well…”’

The final appearance of the silver button in Kidnapped lends support to David’s supposition. After the two friends are reunited, Alan needs to get in touch with an illiterate Jacobite who can procure them money for their journey. Borrowing the button back from David, Alan devises a non-verbal message, explaining that his confederate ‘will see my button, and that was Duncan Stewart’s. And then he will say to himsel’, ‘The son of Duncan is in the heather, and has need of me’ (ch. 21: 131). Alan’s scheme proves successful, but that is the last appearance of the button in the novel; the fugitives’ adventures now take a different turn, as they hide in the mountain cave of an outlawed clan leader and then crawl through the heather to escape the British soldiers who are scouring the countryside for them. Once arrived in Edinburgh, David leaves behind his identity as the lad with the silver button in favour of his new status: not only as the heir of Shaws but also as a legatee of the classical tradition.¹³

Issues of genre

The target audience and the genre of Kidnapped are both contested; its classical allusions make a contribution to the debate. Not only Stevenson’s contemporaries (Maixner 1981: 233–42) but also Stevenson himself (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: v, 89) described the novel as an adventure tale for boys, and the reasons why are not far to seek. Like Treasure Island, with which it was regularly paired and compared, Kidnapped features an adolescent hero, eschews romantic interest, and was serialized in the magazine Young Folks before being published in book form. Furthermore, the end of Catriona reveals that the internal audience for both books is David and Catriona’s family of four young children. In dedicating Kidnapped to his friend Charles Baxter, Stevenson suggests that Baxter might not ‘like this tale, but perhaps, when he is older, your son will’ (Dedication: 3). Stevenson was not disparaging his novel when he envisioned children as its ideal audience, for he regarded them as possessing fresher perception and a more vivid imagination than adult readers (see Norquay 2007: 87–96). The novel features elements, however, that are out of place in a juvenile adventure story—the detailed account, based on contemporary sources, of political and social conditions in the Highlands after the battle of Culloden, and in particular of the murder of the king’s overseer—and no less a judge than Henry James, who was Stevenson’s friend and admirer, rejected the notion that Kidnapped was intended for boys (Harmon 2005: 313).

Modern critics often describe Kidnapped as a generic hybrid. Eigner (1965: 80) regards it as ‘part adventure story, part travel book, part social satire, and part serious psychological romance’.¹⁴ Daiches (1973: 66) concludes that the book is not only a topographical novel, but also ‘a historical novel and a psychological novel probing the differences between Lowland and Highland mentality and sensibility’. Harmon (2005: 315) describes it as ‘both a romance and a novel of realism’, while Norquay (2007: 160) comments on its ‘generic ambivalence’. For Jaëck (2014: 87) the work is ‘a daring formal experiment’ that aims ‘to colonise and appropriate the territory of the historical novel…and come up with a new dissenting literary form’ that draws attention to England’s imperialist conquest of Scotland. Encoded in the plot, however, is the claim that Kidnapped belongs to a single, traditional, lofty genre, that of epic.

The novel is shot through with epic motifs. Like the Odyssey, it is a story of return (nostos): David travels to Edinburgh, is stranded in the Highlands after the shipwreck and makes his way back to Edinburgh, enduring hardships and dangers along the way (Duncan 2014: ix). The episode on the island of Mull in which David is welcomed by the elderly couple whose hut is ‘thick with the peat-smoke and as full of holes as a colander’ (ch. 25: 121) recalls the motif of hospitality (xenia) that is a feature of the Odyssey and other classical epics. In particular, by suggesting that ‘the most generous are those with the least to offer’ (Menikoff 2005: 45), the scene brings to mind a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8. 616–724) wherein an aged pair named Philemon and Baucis welcome two strangers (in reality Jupiter and Mercury in disguise) to their humble cottage after wealthier homes have closed their doors to the travellers, and ply them with the best of everything they possess.¹⁵

Another epic motif that Kidnapped shares with both the Odyssey and the Aeneid is the relationship between fathers and sons. Odysseus’ son Telemachus plays a crucial role in the Homeric epic,¹⁶ as does Aeneas’ father Anchises in the Aeneid.¹⁷ When Kidnapped gets underway David, who had previously lost his mother, has just buried his father, and critics such as Grenby (2012: 281) suggest that Alan functions as a ‘surrogate father’ to his younger friend.¹⁸ In the same way that Telemachus resembles Odysseus in his prudence and caution, David’s temperamental qualities recall his father’s. After Rankeillor has accepted that his visitor is the individual he claims to be, the lawyer enlightens David (and the novel’s external audience along with him) about his family history. He explains how Alexander Balfour came to spend his life as an impoverished schoolmaster in a country village: as the elder of two brothers he was in line to inherit Shaws, but he voluntarily forfeited this position after he and his brother Ebenezer fell in love with the same young woman. She chose to marry Alexander who then, in a misguided impulse of recompense, handed over to his brother the title and revenues of the estate.

As Rankeillor points out (ch. 28: 181), ‘this piece of Quixotry’ had no legal force: according to the system of entail Alexander Balfour remained the laird of Shaws, with the title passing on his death to his son David. Alexander’s unnecessary sacrifice condemned him and his family to a life of poverty and also inflicted suffering on the estate’s tenants, who were systematically abused by Alexander’s miserly, cruel, and indeed criminal brother. David manifests a similar quixotic streak when he insists against advice on seeking out the Lord Advocate of Scotland so he can reveal what he knows as an eyewitness to the Appin murder. This is the project he is contemplating as Kidnapped draws to a close; it dominates Catriona, the novel’s sequel. David’s determination to see justice done at whatever cost to himself is futile, for it puts David’s life in danger and does nothing to help the man who has been wrongfully arrested for the crime. It does, however, confirm his resemblance to his father.¹⁹

A final epic motif is that of comradeship. The friendship of David and Alan brings to mind the pairing of Vergil’s Aeneas with his faithful companion Achates.²⁰ In their initial interview Rankeillor draws attention to the parallel by means of two tags from the Aeneid. He quotes (ch. 27: 178) the first four words of the rhetorical question that Aeneas poses to Achates: Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris (‘What part of earth is not full of our trouble?’, Aeneid 1.460), and continues by drawing an explicit analogy between Achates and Alan: ‘It comes—we may say—he was your true companion; nor less paribus curis vestigia figit’ (‘His comrade goes along, and directs his footsteps with matching cares’, Aeneid 6.158). It is neither the first nor the last time that Rankeillor’s Latin tags offer narrative guidance that is not to be found elsewhere.

To be sure, not a few literary works are structured around nostos, include scenes of xenia, explore the relationship of fathers and sons, and feature pairs of comrades. Still, the convergence of these themes, together with one more unusual motif, seems to confirm the novel’s links to epic and, in particular, its intertextual association with the Odyssey. After the murder of the king’s overseer, both Alan and David are wanted men. Accordingly, when Alan brings David to the farmstead of Jacobite friends, he suggests that ‘it will be the better for his health if we give his name the go-by’ (ch. 19: 163). It is tempting to associate David’s anonymity with the Homeric Odysseus’ identification of himself as ‘Nobody’ when the Cyclops asks him his name, a trick that helps save his life.²¹ After hearing David’s account of his adventures Rankeillor comments (ch. 27: 178), ‘This is a great epic, a great Odyssey of yours. You must tell it, sir, in a sound Latinity when your scholarship is riper; or in English if you please, though for my part I prefer the stronger tongue’. His verdict leaves the Homeric connection in no doubt.

Kidnapped and the Ars Poetica

Even more insistently than the tags from the Aeneid, the quotations from Horace’s Ars Poetica carry a self-referential application. As noted, Rankeillor cites the poem three times, with each instance drawn from the opening (and presumably most familiar) section of the poem. Since ‘in the Victorian period (as always) the Odes [were] the most read of [Horace’s] works’ (Harrison 2007: 207), the choice of the Ars Poetica as the source of quotations from Horace seems marked.

Whose preferences does that choice represent? Immediately after reminding David that Homer does not begin his account of the Trojan War with Helen’s birth from an egg, Rankeillor flouts that Horatian directive, for his initial question (‘Where were you born?’) requires David to tell his history ab ovo, as does his follow-up demand for the names of David’s parents. David, for his part, complies with these requests. But beyond the narrative frame it is Stevenson, of course, who determines the novel’s structure. It is Stevenson who takes readers ‘into the middle of things’ at the opening of the novel as David, newly orphaned, locks the door to his father’s house one sunny morning in June 1751, and departs from his natal village on a mission, imposed on him by his deceased father, to deliver a sealed letter to his hitherto unknown uncle. This opening, which leaves so much to be explained later, is not the only occasion when Stevenson abides by Horace’s narrative strictures. The Ars Poetica advocates unity of composition; in the poem’s opening lines (1–5) Horace condemns literary amalgams, drawing the analogy of a painter who joins a human head to a horse’s neck, adds feathers, and creates a female torso ending in a fish’s tail. Like Horace, Rankeillor rejects the notion of generic hybridity. As noted, he associates David’s adventures with two unitary epics, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and when David tentatively suggests that his father’s story is tragic, Rankeillor enlists the Ars Poetica to deny the possibility: ‘Not at all…For tragedy implies some ponderable matter in dispute, some dignus vindice nodus’ (‘a difficulty meriting a [divine] deliverer’, Ars Poetica 191). Reinforcing the lawyer’s opinion is the coda that Stevenson appended to the serialized version and first edition of Kidnapped.²² Referring to his authorial persona as ‘the present editor’ of David’s account, Stevenson engages to write a sequel if the public so desires but in the interim ‘hastens to protest that all went well with both’ Alan and David (Explanatory Notes: 207). The tragic mode, he affirms, is alien to this tale.

In a different context, Stevenson explicitly links his authorial practice to another Horatian directive. Writing to W. E. Henley in 1879 in response to criticism of one of his poems, he avers, ‘I think I’ll lay [the verses] by for nine years, like Horace’ (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: ii, 310). He is referring to Horace’s advice in the Ars Poetica that a literary composition should be exposed to public view only after a prolonged delay: nonumque prematur in annum.²³ Indeed, Stevenson followed the spirit of Horace’s advice in connection with the sequel to Kidnapped, for Catriona appeared only in 1893, after a seven-year gap.

Horatian models and the ending of Kidnapped

The ending of Kidnapped rankled some critics from the outset. After saying goodbye to Alan on the outskirts of Edinburgh, David returns to the city and wanders through the streets of the Old Town in a melancholy frame of mind. The novel ends with a paragraph consisting of a single sentence: ‘The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company’s bank’, where Rankeillor has arranged a line of credit for the hitherto penniless David (ch. 30: 194). Although William Morris admired other aspects of the novel, he complained that ‘the book [doesn’t] end properly’ (Maixner 1981: 248). A recent critic agrees (Hahn 2015: 323): ‘The book … has only one major flaw, its lack of a definite ending, Stevenson finding it impossible to conclude it satisfactorily, and in effect breaking it off with David’s return’. Harmon (2005: 316–17) suggests that the author himself was dissatisfied with the conclusion: ‘The last chapters of Kidnapped were churned out by Stevenson “without interest or inspiration, almost word by word”, as he wrote to George Iles in 1887. It shows: the novel stops rather than ends, with a sentence that is the beginning of a new paragraph...’. Two factors, however, support a different interpretation both of Stevenson’s assessment of his ending and of the ending itself.

The first factor is temperamental: Stevenson habitually affects a mode of self-depreciation. Addressing Henry James, for example (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: v, 42) he belittles himself as ‘a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished […] as you’. To Austin Dobson he writes (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: v, 78): ‘I wished to acknowledge…a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes…’ In a statement that is often misinterpreted,²⁴ he observes (1887: 59) that when he was teaching himself how to write he ‘played the sedulous ape’ to Hazlitt, Lamb, and other illustrious predecessors.²⁵ In these and many similar instances he seems almost reflexively to downplay his talent and accomplishments.

Yet Stevenson also had a keen sense of his own literary worth. In a letter to T. Watts-Duncan (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: v, 313–14) he describes his compositional process: ‘I began [Kidnapped], partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler, and suddenly it moved. David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended’. Here pride and humility contend in an account that is too ambivalent to be taken literally.

The second factor that colours Stevenson’s comments on Kidnapped can be found in the passage that his biographer cites in misleadingly truncated form. Quoted in full (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: vi, 48), Stevenson’s account of the novel’s closing chapters runs as follows: they ‘had to be put together without interest or inspiration, almost word for word, for I was worked out’ [emphasis added]. Rather than condemning his final chapters, Stevenson seems here to distinguish between the élan that marked his embarking on the novel, and the hard slog that was required to complete it. After all, earlier in the same letter he has stated that the novel is ‘to me infinitely my best, and indeed my only good story’. Although the contrast between beginning and end is particular to Stevenson, who started many more writing projects over the course of his career than he completed (Harmon 2005: 108–9), the distinction between inspiration and toil is not. Arguably Stevenson is riffing on the contrast that Horace draws in the Ars Poetica between ingenium and ars, imagination and technique. Horace asks rhetorically whether natura fieret laudabile carmen an arte (‘does an exemplary poem come into existence through nature or through art?’, Ars Poetica 408–9). He concludes that both are necessary; the two elements operate in tandem.

Stevenson’s answer is no different. He regularly emphasizes the hard work involved in writing. Thus, he reminds Henry James of the ‘deliberate artifice and painful suppressions’ involved in transmuting situations and dialogue from life into effective literature (Booth and Mehew 1994–95: v, 42); and in an essay addressed to his stepson, who aspired to a literary career, he describes the professional writer as someone who ‘day after day […] recasts and revises and rejects’ (Stevenson n.d.: 250). He does not suggest that the end product is inferior as a consequence, but rather that in the process of writing, labour is as important as inspiration.

Stevenson also gives inspiration its due, as in his comment that ‘David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world’. According to the account given by Stevenson’s first biographer, the salient elements of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to the author in a dream (Harmon 2005, 295). It is no anomaly that Stevenson credits both imagination and toil as components in the writing of Kidnapped.

Beginnings, middles, and ends

A final intertextual connection with Horace may be found in two lines from the Ars Poetica that Rankeillor and David do not quote but that follow immediately upon the two lines that they do. As he concludes the topic of Homer’s narrative technique, Horace summarizes: atque ita mentitur, sic veris falso remiscet,/primo nec medium, medio nec discrepet imum (‘and so he invents, and combines facts with fiction, such that the middle is not inconsistent with the beginning, nor the end with the middle’, Ars Poetica 151–52). Stevenson probably knew these lines, if only in translation, but whether he did or not they mirror his technique. In his dedication to Kidnapped Stevenson telegraphs his compound approach by drawing attention to three fictions that he has embedded in the novel: a change of date for the Appin murder, an instance of topographical license, and David Balfour’s status as a fictional figure.²⁶ In accordance with Horace’s advice, these and other invented details are interwoven with historical matter to comprise a unified whole.

If one regards Catriona and Kidnapped as a continuous story (as Stevenson himself evidently did), objections to the ending disappear, for the opening sentence of Catriona establishes that only an hour or two has elapsed since the end of Kidnapped: ‘The 25^th day of August 1751, about two in the afternoon, I, David Balfour, came forth of the British Linen Company, a porter attending me with a bag of money’ (Catriona, ch. 1: 1). Viewed from this perspective, the earlier novel’s beginning, middle, and end coalesce. After an opening that takes the reader in medias res, the closing chapters clarify the puzzle concerning Alexander Balfour’s poverty and occupation. The ending brings David’s story full circle as he returns to Edinburgh, but it can equally be construed as a new beginning for him now that he has come into his title and inheritance. Yet the close also leaves unresolved problems that have arisen in the narrative and will be addressed in the sequel (what David will do about his eyewitness knowledge of the Appin murder, and how he will ensure Alan’s safe passage to France). Accordingly, it constitutes a middle as well as a beginning and an end.

Not only is the ending of Kidnapped artful, it is also historically accurate. Writing to Stevenson in praise of the novel, Sir Edmund Gosse assured him, ‘Your 18^th-century is awfully good’ (Maixner 1981: 233). Since the Ars Poetica was revered as ‘a kind of literary “Magna Carta” for norms and principles that were earnestly applied to literature, drama, and other artforms well into the eighteenth century’ (Laird 2006: 133), the narrator’s adoption of Horace’s narrative principles adds a final elegant and authentic touch.²⁷

References

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Justina Gregory is Sophia Smith Professor Emerita of Classical Languages and Literatures at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She works on Greek tragedy, Greek archaic literature, and classical reception. Her publications include Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (University of Michigan Press, 1991), a commentary on Euripides’ Hecuba (Scholars Press, 1999), an edited Companion to Greek Tragedy (Blackwell, 2005) and Cheiron’s Way: Youthful Education in Homer and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Footnotes