第70章 LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM(1)

NOTHING could perhaps be more wearisome than to travel o'er the wide sandy area of Stevenson criticism and commentary, and expose the many and sad and grotesque errors that meet one there.Mr Baildon's slip is innocent, compared with many when he says (p.

106) TREASURE ISLAND appeared in YOUNG FOLKS as THE SEA-COOK.It did nothing of the kind; it is on plain record in print, even in the pages of the EDINBURGH EDITION, that Mr James Henderson would not have the title THE SEA-COOK, as he did not like it, and insisted on its being TREASURE ISLAND.To him, therefore, the vastly better title is due.Mr Henley was in doubt if Mr Henderson was still alive when he wrote the brilliant and elevated article on "Some Novels" in the NORTH AMERICAN, and as a certain dark bird killed Cock Robin, so he killed off Dr Japp, and not to be outdone, got in an ideal "Colonel" JACK; so Mr Baildon there follows Henley, unaware that Mr Henderson did not like THE SEA-COOK, and was still alive, and that a certain Jack in the fatal NORTH AMERICAN has Japp's credit.

Mr Baildon's words are:

"This was the famous book of adventure, TREASURE ISLAND, appearing first as THE SEA-COOK in a boy's paper, where it made no great stir.But, on its publication in volume form, with the vastly better title, the book at once 'boomed,' as the phrase goes, to an extent then, in 1882, almost unprecedented.The secret of its immense success may almost be expressed in a phrase by saying that it is a book like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, and ROBINSON CRUSOE itself for all ages - boys, men, and women."

Which just shows how far lapse as to a fact may lead to critical misreadings also.

Mr Hammerton sometimes lets good folks say in his pages, without correction, what is certainly not correct.Thus at one place we are told that Stevenson was only known as Louis in print, whereas that was the only name by which he was known in his own family.

Then Mr Gosse, at p.34, is allowed to write:

"Professor Blackie was among them on the steamer from the Hebrides, a famous figure that calls for no description, and a voluble shaggy man, clad in homespun, with spectacles forward upon his nose, who it was whispered to us, was Mr Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician, A WATER-COLOUR PAINTER OF SOME REPUTE, who was to die in 1878."

Mr Sam Bough WAS "a water-colour painter of some repute," but a painter in oils of yet greater repute - a man of rare strength, resource, and facility - never, perhaps, wholly escaping from some traces of his early experiences in scene-painting, but a true genius in his art.Ah, well I remember him, though an older man, yet youthful in the band of young Scotch artists among whom as a youngster I was privileged to move in Edinburgh - Pettie, Chalmers, M'Whirter, Peter Graham, MacTaggart, MacDonald, John Burr, and Bough.Bough could be voluble on art; and many a talk I had with him as with the others named, especially with John Burr.Bough and he both could talk as well as paint, and talk right well.Bough had a slight cast in the eye; when he got a WEE excited on his subject he would come close to you with head shaking, and spectacles displaced, and forelock wagging, and the cast would seem to die away.Was this a fact, or was it an illusion on my part? I have often asked myself that question, and now I ask it of others.

Can any of my good friends in Edinburgh say; can Mr Caw help me here, either to confirm or to correct me? I venture to insert here an anecdote, with which my friend of old days, Mr Wm.MacTaggart, R.S.A., in a letter kindly favours me:

"Sam Bough was a very sociable man; and, when on a sketching tour, liked to have a young artist or two with him.Jack Nisbett played the violin, and Sam the 'cello, etc.Jack was fond of telling that Sam used to let them all choose the best views, and then he would take what was left; and Jack, with mild astonishment, would say, that 'it generally turned out to be the best - on the canvas!'"

In Mr Hammerton's copy of the verses in reply to Mr Crockett's dedication of THE STICKIT MINISTER to Stevenson, in which occurred the fine phrase "The grey Galloway lands, where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, his heart remembers how":

"Blows the wind to-day and the sun and the rain are flying:

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how.

"Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, Hills of sheep, and the HOMES of the silent vanished races, And winds austere and pure.

"Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! and to hear again the call -

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-weet crying, And hear no more at all."

Mr Hammerton prints HOWES instead of HOMES, which I have italicised above.And I may note, though it does not affect the poetry, if it does a little affect the natural history, that the PEE-WEETS and the whaups are not the same - the one is the curlew, and the other is the lapwing - the one most frequenting wild, heathery or peaty moorland, and the other pasture or even ploughed land - so that it is a great pity for unity and simplicity alike that Stevenson did not repeat the "whaup," but wrote rather as though pee-weet or pee-

weets were the same as whaups - the common call of the one is KER-

LEE, KER-LEE, and of the other PEE-WEET, PEE-WEET, hence its common name.