Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Figures in a Landscape: Scott, Stevenson, and Routes to the Past

 Figures in a Landscape Scott, Stevenson, and Routes to the Past            Scott and Stevenson both wrote “road novels,” fiction that takes its characters on actual and metaphorical journeys through Scotland as a means of drawing together disparate cultures and conflicting histories. Journeys are rooted deep in Scottish literary traditions, and the palpable diversity in the structure of the land, MacDiarmid’s “multiform” Scotland, has been a distinguishing feature of the Scottish literary imagination as it has of the narrative of Scotland’s past. Scott and Stevenson both draw on this rich tradition, consistently exposing their characters to new landscapes and alien environments. How their protagonists respond to the “other” is organic to experience and plot; and is a crucial connection between past and present. Otherness in space is a means of invoking otherness in time. The half century between Scott’s last fiction and Stevenson’s first saw the economic, social and industrial consequences of the technological revolution that was well established before Scott’s death. As a result of agricultural improvement and the large-scale uncovering of the earth that came with increasing industrial activity, the past was simultaneously overlaid and exposed as never before. Humankind’s interference with the natural world accelerated, while, stimulated by an awareness of imminent loss, interest in a preindustrial environment intensified. Scott’s evocations in his poetry of Highland and Border terrain and his conjuring of a mythic history out of mountains, lochs, and ruins, caught the mood exactly. These were real places through which he offered the reader a connection with both nature and the past. Landscape provided dimensions in time as well as space. Scott achieved this because he was still in touch with a preindustrial experience. And the Highland landscape, though widely affected by human activity, did not suffer the same industrial incursions as that of Scotland’s central belt. Stevenson, for all his immersion in environments of the past, did not and could not share the intimate connection that was Scott’s, except in urban Edinburgh. The seventy years between the publication of Waverley and Kidnapped had transformed Scots into a predominantly urban people and inevitably distanced the urban Scot from wild country. In looking at the response to landscape of the two writers, I want to suggest some ways it provides in each a route to the past: in Scott’s Rob Roy (), Waverley () and Redgauntlet (), which between them span the period from before the  Jacobite Rising to ; and in Stevenson’s Kidnapped (), Catriona () and The Master of Ballantrae (), which share the Jacobite context although the timescale is more concentrated. When Edward Waverley makes his journey into the Perthshire Highlands, he has the benefit of a halfway house. The house and parks of Baron Bradwardine are south of the Highland Line, but it is through him that Waverley first learns about the Highlands and their inhabitants. He reflects on the strangeness of it all, as he glimpses a life that is untamed and untouched by his assumptions about social order. “It seemed like a dream to Waverley that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men’s minds, and currently talked of, as falling within the common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain” (Scott : –). Already attracted by “the dusky barrier of mountains,” Waverley considers an “excursion” into this foreign territory (). The word suggests a recreational trip, not a military or commercial expedition but a journey to view exotic terrain and its native inhabitants. When Waverley and Evan Dhu reach the pass between Lowland and Highland, the hint of danger only adds to the adventure: the path, which was extremely steep and rugged, winded up a chasm between two tremendous rocks, following the passage which a foaming stream, that brawled far below, appeared to have worn for itself in the course of ages. A few slanting beams of the sun, which was now setting, reached the water in its darksome bed, and shewed it partially, chafed by an hundred  Scotland and the South Seas rocks, and broken by an hundred falls. The descent from the path to the stream was a mere precipice, with here and there projecting fragments of granite , or a scathed tree, which had warped its twisted roots into the fissures of...