SOURCE: "The Toy Theatre, Romance, and Treasure Island: The Artistry of R. L. S.," in English Studies in Canada, Vol. VIII, No. 4, December, 1982, pp. 409-21.

[In the following essay, McKenzie examines the influence of the nineteenth-century toy theatre upon Stevenson's aesthetic sensibility. She focuses on elements of excitement, imagination, chance, and playfulness in both the toy theatre and Stevenson's fiction.']

Treasure Island, a six-part romance first published in a boys' paper, has been charming readers as a kind of archetypal adventure tale for a century. Its rapid but¹ predictable incidents, swashbuckling characters, and exotic settings combine with the enthusiasm of the young narrator to create the impression of a youthful day-dream rather than a serious quest. The story's² apparent naivete, however, conceals interesting elements of the author's carefully considered ideas about art and life that were then influencing his developing literary theories. Its construction also foreshadows in unsophisticated form some of the striking techniques that find mature expression in his later fiction. The book is not designed to teach a lesson about morals or even to expose the irresponsibility of the adult members of the "faithful party": its straightforward simplicity points to Stevenson's views that art unravels life's complexity, not by direct imitation, but by providing patterns whereby the imagined world reflects certain aspects of the familiar one. As he began to put this idea into practice in writing fiction, he frequently relied on some of the conventions of melodrama as they had become familiar to him through the toy theatre. "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" (1884) indicates the part the toy theatre played in shaping his own aesthetic sense, while many of his discussions of the art of fiction between 1874 and 1888 suggest how closely, if unconsciously, he associated his experience with the toy theatre with his expectations of romance. The art of both the toy theatre and Stevenson's fiction exerts a fascination that completely absorbs the reader; both cater to his love of excitement; both depend upon the imagination to reveal patterns of meaning beneath the welter of reality; both celebrate the precedence of circumstance over will and both derive from man's love of play. Finally, the technique of Treasure Island, particularly the point of view of Jim, through whose eager and dazzled eyes we see setting, incidents, and climactic scenes, demonstrates for us not only the delights of a fanciful yarn, but also the writer's ability to say something fairly serious in a pleasant way.

As a boy, Stevenson enjoyed playing with the Juvenile Dramas published by Skelt for the toy theatre. This widely popular amusement was a favourite of a host of nineteenth-century children including Dickens and Ellen Terry; Charles Dodgson had a model imported from Germany and somewhat later both Churchill and Chesterton fell under its spell. For many Victorian children, as for Stevenson, the flamboyant sheets of characters and settings, which apparently evolved from the popular theatrical portraits of the early part of the century, afforded the only possible introduction to the theatrical world. The earlier custom of taking even very young children to see the regular repertoire declined as the Victorian penchant for protecting the morals of the innocent increased. Nevertheless, the Juvenile Dramas continued to flourish and to be considered suitable entertainment for the young. There is a certain irony in their respectability because of their close resemblance to the actual performances. In his History of the English Toy Theatre, Robert Speaight points out the similarity in order to show what a marvelous introduction to the melodrama the plays provided. He writes: "The Juvenile Drama grew out of the Adult Drama, the toy theatre was just exactly the big theatre in miniature; actors, costumes, scenery were all copied from actual performances on the London stage, and reproduced for their miniature performance."³ And so, even though young Stevenson's Calvinist background obviously precluded his attendance at the theatre, his fascination with melodrama, that staple of the nineteenth century, was nurtured by its toy counterpart.⁴ Among the plays he enjoyed in this way he lists such popular melodramas as The Miller and His Men, Der Freischütz, The Waterman, and My Poll and My Partner Joe, all also offered repeatedly on the legitimate stage. In their toy representations, the characters, like their counterparts on the real stage, were decked out in vivid costumes representing their simple moral natures and posed against brilliantly coloured copies of the stage sets. The combination of characters and settings, designed to convey emotions ranging from terror to joy, manages to evoke a mixture of excitement and mystery.

The long-range effects of these pictures on Stevenson's imagination were various, although all relate to his abiding affection for melodrama. In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties, a period overlapping that of the composition of both Treasure Island and "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured," he and Henley collaborated on a series of melodramas set in the reign of George III. Although only three were completed, largely because of Stevenson's lack of enthusiasm for writing plays, this "attempt to recreate the Romantic Drama in terms of prose," as Henley later described⁵ it, indicates Stevenson's interest in the relation between melodrama and romance. Around the same time, Stevenson also rekindled his interest in the toy theatre by visiting shops in London where Juvenile Dramas were still sold. From these visits came the essay "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" where he celebrates the enchantment of his childhood, now clearly connected in his mind with "O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama" (XIII, 118). While describing in detail the child-purchasers' reactions to selection, viewing and colouring, he slights the importance of both text and performance. It is the pictures of settings and characters that embody the "staginess" or "Skeltery" that he claims is "a quality of much art." The plates immerse him in the theatrically exciting period earlier in the century with which he associates "the presence of a great unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind" (XIII). The boldness of the adjectives strikes the keynote of Stevenson's requirement for a vigorous art in an age that was to applaud its own decadence. His glorification of the world of make-believe at the expense of "cold reality" suggests the direction his own fiction would take in presenting the truth he so prized.

To the Juvenile Drama Stevenson gave the credit for a good measure of his adult capacity for aesthetic pleasure. Of its immediate effects he writes: "The world was plain before I knew [Skelt], a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance" (XIII). One can indeed speculate that the life of a sickly, coddled Edinburgh boy who secretly longed for adventure was much enlivened by the escapades of the cardboard characters, but Stevenson suggests that the influence went deeper than the immediate relief of childhood tedium: "Indeed, out of the cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment . . . acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances" (XIII). Skelt supplied him with archetypal images of delight with which to compare both nature and art, so that in later years even "a good old melodrama" was "but Skelt a little faded" (XIII). The origin of his joy in this art form was physical, specifically the visual impact of the bold colouring; the result was spiritual. The images, embodiments of joy, remained "in the silent theatre of the brain" until an adult experience called them forth.

This enchantment of the eyes and consequent captivation of the imagination and memory form one element in which the art of Skelt coincides with Stevenson's aims for romance. In fact, he makes several parallels between playing with the pictures and reading romances. Looking at them is "like wallowing in the raw stuff of story books" (XIII); they delight like Arabian Entertainments; they are "budgets of romance." Although he laments the passing of the age when they were more readily available, "in the mind of their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past" (XIII). Here he repeats the metaphor of the "kaleidoscopic dance of images" from "A Gossip on Romance" where it explains the power of romance to transport us "clean out of ourselves" (XIII). In the same essay he had used another comparison emphasizing the power of romance. While the changing pictures charm the mind's eye, "the words . . . should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers" (XIII), and in "A Humble Remonstrance" he writes of the "luxury" of being "submerged by the tale as by a billow" (XIII). The sea with its mystery, constant motion, and potential threat offers him an image for both life and art as well as a favourite setting for fiction. It performs the latter function in Treasure Island where Jim Hawkins describes its constant turmoil: "The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night" (VI). This noise is a prominent element of Jim's "worst dreams" after the conclusion of the adventure. Through the boy's sensitivity, Stevenson presents the onomatopoeic "thundering" of the sea as a symbol for the lure of adventure and the "great billow" of romance that answers that longing by engulfing the reader-adventurer.

In its use of the sensational rather than the humdrum, Skelt's melodrama offered Stevenson another element he required of romance. To engage in challenging activity appeared to him at once a source of life's delight and a virtue; therefore, excitement was, he thought, an important ingredient of any art seeking to represent life. "Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals," he writes in "The Day After To-morrow," where he goes on to lament that "already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living" (II, 252-53). Romantic art, recreating exciting action in unusual settings, not only provides an escape from the ordinary, but, according to Stevenson, it also does great good for the reader by enlarging the compass of his views beyond his personal experiences and biases. In "Victor Hugo's Romances" he praises⁶ that writer's art for showing readers "a larger portion of life . . . one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided," by bringing them to "some consciousness of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the average man in ordinary moods" (V). Travel played an important part in expanding the writer's own understanding, while his frequent use of the journey as a structural device in his fiction suggests its metaphoric function in delineating the escape from the limiting confines of immediate surroundings to a clearer perception of larger possibilities. The voyage in Treasure Island removes adventurers and readers from the predictable world to one where the inescapable demands of the situation challenge their accustomed responses.

This extension of the reader's vision in both melodrama and romance depends upon the power of the imagination to illuminate certain "general relations" that a close scrutiny of details tends to obliterate. Stevenson's understanding of this function of the imagination led him to accord it a central role in the search for truth in both life and art. A consideration of reality charged with duality, ambiguity, and changeability led him to conclude that the enunciation of any view inclusive enough to be called true poses a great difficulty for the writer. His statement in 1887 that "a human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays" (XXVII) is typical of his comments on this matter, yet, paradoxically he always urges "truth to the fact" as a sacred duty incumbent on the writer. Both science and religion, he thought, fall short of the truth because their tendency to "pin the reader to a dogma" limits his view and, in a certain sense, deceives him. While allowing in "Books Which Have Influenced Me" that "works of fiction are the truest in their influence," he specifies that it is works where the imagination forms the design that lead to truth, for "they repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life" (XXVII). Implicit here again is the writer's criticism of the Realists and Naturalists and his choice of romance as a genre more beneficial to society. Writing in "The Lantern Bearers" of his own romantic view of the imagination derived largely from Hazlitt, he describes it as a "great search-light" directing man's considerations beyond the actual and the specific to the larger and more significant patterns that underlie existence: "For no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chambers of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls" (XIII). The writer, then, must lead his readers into this realm, not by transcribing observable details into recognizable literary imitations of reality, but by giving the imagination the freedom to create a new reality. Stevenson was very outspoken in his distaste for the Realists' aims, taking issue even with James for his suggestion in "The Art of Fiction" that a novel must "compete with life." A novelist, Stevenson insists in "A Humble Remonstrance," must "bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity" (XIII).⁷ Seeking patterns of "significant simplicity" for his own fiction, he was frequently to turn, as he did in Treasure Island, to the world of melodrama so vividly impressed on his memory by the art of Skelt. The stereotypes and exaggerations of melodrama, which Skelt's pictures highlight, make little pretension to realism, while the essential excitement and the fragility of human affairs permeate the art.

In the immobility of the pasteboard characters Stevenson perhaps found an image of the essence of his conception of man's relation to reality: the limits of his will. Using his favourite figure of the breaker, he writes in "A Gossip on Romance": "Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstances, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future" (XIII), and concludes that involuntary dealings with situations predominate over deliberate control of them in human experience. Because so small a part of life consists of deliberate decisions that control one's fate, moral considerations need not occupy a prominent place in literature. While he insists in "A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's" that "there is no quite good book without a good morality" (XIII), he also points out in "A Gossip on Romance" that "there is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply non-moral" (XIII). Just as Skelt's characters are limited by the confines of a static art form, so man's choices in life occur only within the perimeters of "circumstances," including, as he points out in "Victor Hugo's Romances," nature, national interests, and "the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle" (V). The writer of romance views life from the perspective of "problems of the body and of the practical intelligence," whereas the serious dramatist or realistic novelist stresses "the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience," he continues in "A Gossip on Romance," declaring that "Drama is the poetry of conduct; romance the poetry of circumstance" (XIII). His preference for the latter as both truer and more delightful is evident in all his discussions of the matter. By placing man at the centre of contending forces where he cannot and need not control his destiny by acts of the will, the romancer can write "lively, beautiful, buoyant tales . . . where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it" (XIII, 134). In his own career, writing a boys' story such as Treasure Island with its innocent young adventurer and lack of interior analysis gave him an opportunity to test his theory by excluding moral considerations. Particularly through his use of the boy as narrator, he focusses our attention almost entirely on how things happen while suspending our desire to ask why.

The spirit of play which underlies Stevenson's conception of an imagined world where action freed from moral dilemmas predominates provides a further link between his fascination with the toy theatre and his aims as an artist, one that has a direct connection with the composition of Treasure Island. In order to emphasize the unquestioning faith the artist must have in his work, he used the image of children at play. Literature, he claimed, is make-believe, but make-believe that must be taken seriously in order to succeed. In the face of the difficulty of conveying the truth to his readers, the writer must never give way to doubt in the power of his art: "Is it worth doing?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist" (XXVII). This metaphor of the playing child is by no means an attempt to trivialize the artist's efforts. Stevenson believed in the particularly human quality of play deriving from its freedom from external necessity which philosophers have recognized from Heraclitus to the present. In our time, J. Huizinga has shown the relation of play to the development of culture through the ages, pointing out that because of its voluntary, disinterested nature, "play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil" and so "into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection." We ⁸recognize here Stevenson's requirements for non-moral subject matter as well as his conviction that art seeks the truth through simplification rather than by direct imitation. In play with its spontaneity and seriousness, its flight from the actual and its accordance with its own laws, he found an essential element of his art.

Both the inspiration for Treasure Island and its actual composition relate to play. First, there is the game of the map drawn by the author with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne's paints during a rainy season in the Highlands. In "My First Book: Treasure Island," he describes his own reaction to the imaginary place: "The shape took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island" (VI). Commenting on the evolution of the novel, he writes: "The map was the chief part of the plot," for from its features emerged first the terrain of the island, then the characters and finally the incidents as a list of chapter headings. In the novel itself, Jim's accidental discovery of the map, "shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up" and bearing "every particular" (VI) for the adventure, initiates the game of treasure hunting which enchants both the squire, who unhesitatingly flings himself into it, and the doctor, who cautions secrecy. A similar spirit of play seized the Stevenson household where three generations offered suggestions and criticisms of the emerging tale. In the mornings Stevenson wrote; in the afternoons he read to an admiring audience that included Lloyd, the author's father, and Dr. Alexander Japp, who recommended the story to Henderson for publication in Young Folks. About halfway through the tale, as inspiration failed, the family made their usual move to Davos for the winter. On the way Stevenson probably visited a toy theatre shop in London, for Mrs. Stevenson tells in her Preface to the South Seas Edition of the novel how they carried with them to Switzerland some penny plain sheets and paints for Lloyd in the same box with the unfinished manuscript and how she and her husband spent one whole night during the trip colouring the sheets (VI). Once arrived in Davos, he resumed his writing, filling in the leisure hours by playing complicated war games with Lloyd. The origin of the novel, then, was surrounded by playfulness both in Stevenson's imagination and in his activity. It seems, more than any of his other fictions, to provide the source for his remarks in "A Gossip on Romance" two years later: "Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance" (XIII). In its spirit of play, then, Jim Hawkins's enthusiastic account displays a quality that lies close to the heart of the author's idea of romance.

In Treasure Island, the incorporation of this playfulness with Stevenson's aim of absorbing the reader in a pattern of imagined activity that yields meaning depends largely on three techniques relying on visual appeal which are outlined in "A Gossip on Romance." The influence of the toy theatre is clear in Stevenson's discussion of these techniques, namely the necessity for vivid settings, the primacy of incidents that can be visualized and the dramatic possibilities of the sensational scene. Rapid action, filled with danger and suspense, answers man's longing for escape from routine to an expanded vision of reality. However prominent incident may be in romance, alone it is insufficient to woo the reader out of himself. The physical atmosphere is equally important and the reader's ability to see it in his mind's eye is part of the magic of romance. "There is a fitness in events and places," he writes, "certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck" (XIII). The impression made by romance depends on its mysterious power arising from the combination of exciting material and artistic control. This interaction leads to Stevenson's own adaptation of the sensational scene of melodrama to what he calls "the epoch-making scent" in fiction where "the threads of the story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration" (XIII). In these scenes the action is arrested in a manner that is "remarkably striking to the mind's eye" (XIII). As Stevenson gained more control over this last device in his later fiction, it became the hallmark of his mature dramatic strength, while Treasure Island offered opportunities for experiment with it.

Jim, the boy-narrator, is the poet of circumstance unifying setting, incident and scene in an absorbing "kaleidoscope of changing picture." The characters, like Skelt's stereotypes, lack psychological depth and contribute to the visual effect rather than the moral meaning of the tale. Occasionally Stevenson escapes from the limits of the youthful point of view by endowing Jim with ironic insights that do not accord with his character, but for the most part the simplicity of straight-forward narration prevails. The boy's role as narrator exemplifies the author's idea that life offers more opportunities for skillful collaboration with circumstances than for deliberate control over them. His enjoyment of the story he tells is largely that of an onlooker while even his active participation is more involved with what he sees and hears than with what he does. In contrast, the doctor's narrative, which occupies three chapters, gives a matter-of-fact account of the sensible and tedious activity in which he engaged with the faithful party in Jim's absence. The boy's most memorable intervention in the action is his opportunity to warn his friends of the mutiny; his information is acquired entirely by the coincidence of his presence in the apple-barrel while Silver is discussing his plans. In this situation the involuntary quality of Jim's action is emphasized both by the rocking of the boat that lulls him to sleep and the lurch of Silver against the barrel that awakens him. From his first glimpse of Billy Bones to his last backward glance at the island, he is an observer escaping physical combat and moral commitment almost completely. Even his sallies away from his friends are mostly efforts to get a better view of the action, while the capture of the Hispaniola consequent on his second escape is a kind of happy accident. The doctor's excessive praise and the pirates' accusing threats, both reported by Jim, of course, really show more about his braggadocio than his efficiency. On three occasions the boy is threatened physically and must act; his narration of these events through the author's device of the "epoch-making scene" expresses visually the indeliberateness of his action in all three situations.

The boy's daydreams about the island frame the story and highlight its location in "the warm phantasmagoric chambers of the brain," while his highly visual recollections of it as the setting for his adventures display its power over his emotions. Before he leaves his familiar world, the island lives in his imagination as a marvelous place of challenging conflicts all happily concluded: "Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventure" (VI). After the episode on the island, the place remains in his memory to visit him in dreams of "the surf booming about its coast" and the parrot screaming "pieces of eight" (VI). Between these two dreams of the island the actual adventure there takes place under the shadow of the pirates' treachery. The island's appearance reflects and intensifies Jim's emotional shifts from eager anticipation to apprehension and to the joy of exploration. Its fascination seems to lessen even further his ability to control his fate deliberately. He first regards it as a rather disappointing spot "with its grey, melancholy woods, and wild stone spires" (VI). Here Stevenson, the ironist, invests the scene with extra foreboding by his use of images of church architecture derived from his own experience of the massive Edinburgh edifices that he associated with gloom. Jim has to admit: "From that first look onward, I hated the very thought of Treasure Island" (VI). When he does set foot there, however, the exoticism of the place overrides his fears and the "joy of exploration" supersedes antipathy. Trees, plants and animals fascinate him and even the poisonous rattlesnake appears interesting and innocent. Jim is not a mythical wise child; he does not recognize rattlesnakes any more than he was able to see beneath the veneer of Silver's geniality. But he is susceptible to the enchantments of the toy theatre setting.

The theatrical world impinges upon the adventure world particularly in the matter of colouring, which evokes once again the flamboyance of Skelt. Commenting on the flourishing art of scene and costume painting that was a significant aspect of the spectacle of melodrama, Speaight writes: "The plays themselves are, I suggest, the least important things about the early nineteenth-century drama; the subject becomes a fascinating one if it is approached from the viewpoint of the audience, and as a vehicle for the magnificent impressionism of scene painters and costumiers." In "A Penny Plain ⁹and Twopence Coloured" Stevenson names the three primary colours, "gamboge," "crimson lake," and "Prussian blue," whose various combinations created all the vivid effects, while he also recalls that colouring was indeed a great part of the joy. In Jim's narrative, gamboge, a "hated name, although an exquisite pigment," according to the author (XIII), is associated with the initial disappointing appearance of the island; crimson dots the cap of Israel Hands's mate both as he climbs the stockade and later fights and dies on the ship, while blue distinguishes Silver's garb from that of the other pirates. The green that Stevenson praised for "such a savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it" (XIII), lends a "poisonous brightness" to the swamp and colours the "tossing foliage" (VI). Scanting detail was part of Stevenson's rejection of the method of the Realists, and Jim's transposition of sweeping visual effects from toy theatre to fiction directs the appeal of the setting to the reader's sense of unity and capacity for absorption.

Jim's positions for viewing the main incidents of the action are significant in emphasizing his role as a fascinated observer, like a child playing with toy theatre plates, or watching a show through a small opening. Places of concealment are his usual observation posts, sometimes of his own seeking, sometimes provided by circumstances. In the early chapters he watches Black Dog and Billy Bones from behind a door and observes Blind Pew's first approach from the inn entrance. Creeping out from beneath the bridge that conceals his mother and himself on the night the buccaneers storm the inn, he is an eye-witness to Blind Pew's death beneath the trampling hooves of the revenue officers' horses, a sudden end to that man's wicked ambitions. Later he hesitates on the doorstep of the inn at the sign of the "Spy-Glass" to get a clear view of the person his imagination had pictured to him "in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions" (VI) now a "plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling" host (VI) bent on genial conversation with his customers. During his first "French leave" to visit the island, he peers through "an aperture among the leaves" (VI) to watch Silver strike Tom with his crutch and dispatch him with a knife. Displaying great agility in the bouncing coracle, he grabs a rope dangling from the Hispaniola to look in a cabin window where Israel Hands and his mates are "locked together in a deadly wrestle, each with a hand upon the other's throat" (VI). Once on board, a swinging boom and the cover of a companionway give him further sheltered views of scenes that reveal his danger. On shore, a loophole in the stockade affords an excellent observation post for two thrilling scenes: the arrival of Silver in his "immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons" (VI) to treat with Smollett when the faithful party controls the fort, and the later pirates' conference to depose Silver during his command of the same fort. Of the first episode, Jim comments: "It was as good as the play to see them" (VI), while the parallel between the two scenes underlines the rapid changes of fortune. Finally, having chosen to remain in Silver's captivity rather than attempt to escape with the doctor, Jim has a marvelous opportunity to view the futile treasure hunt and the triumph of the faithful party. His inability to act is ensured by the rope on which Silver leads him "like a dancing bear" (VI), while his danger is increased by Silver's shifting loyalties. Throughout the novel, these clearcut, vividly realized scenes pass before the boy's eyes evoking for the reader an underlying pattern of the limits of the protagonist's will and the instability of human affairs. Several times the boy comments in wonder on how quickly decisive events change men's lives as, for example, after the violent death of Tom when everything looks the same, he can scarcely believe "murder had been actually done" (VI).

The power of circumstance and the fragility of fortune are further exemplified in those few parts of the action where Jim is physically engaged. Stevenson turns to an early version of his "epoch-making scene" with its antecedents in the sensational scene of melodrama and the arrested action of the toy theatre. The prototype of such scenes was probably the explosion of the mill in The Miller and His Men which appears in the toy theatre version as a horrifying affair in red and yellow signalling the defeat of evil. Treasure Island offers¹⁰ some examples of such scenes where stillness at the height of emotional and physical tension replaces any spectacle such as an explosion. Stevenson climaxed the action in "The Pavilion on the Links," a story written shortly before Treasure Island, with a fire, but his finest "epoch-making scenes," such as those in The Master of Ballantrae, are invested with a stillness that heightens the impact of emotion.

Three scenes in Treasure Island make spectacular use of arrested action to convey the limits of the protagonist's will at crucial moments amid rapidly changing fortunes. In his clash with Anderson during the defence of the stockade, Jim sustains only a scratched knuckle and escapes harm by a fortuitous tumble down the hill. His passivity even in action is revealed in his remarks when he regains his feet: "Well, so short had been the interval, that when I found my feet again all was in the same posture, the fellow with the red night-cap still halfway over, another still just showing his head above the top of the stockade. And yet, in this breath of time, the fight was over, and the victory was ours" (VI). The passage conveys a curious sense of the separation of the surface action from the really important changes that are unseen. The splash of colour, the head peeking above the stockade show that everything looks the same, while the impersonal phrases "the fight was over" and "the victory was ours" force upon us the impression of great changes beyond the control of human will. On the Hispaniola, Jim is "pinned by the shoulders to the mast" where, immobilized in body and will, he shoots Israel Hands: "In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands" (VI). Besides neatly absolving him of any suggestion of guilt, Jim's sense of powerlessness intensifies our sense of the strength of circumstance. Through lighting effects, Stevenson lends a touch of sensationalism to the scene where Jim blunders into the stockade unaware that Silver now controls it. "An immense fire" offers a clue that the boy misses and upon his stealthy approach "the red glare of the torch . . . showed me the worst of my apprehensions realised" (VI). The silence is shattered by the parrot and once again Jim is confronted with a view of things whose whole significance has changed while their appearance remains the same: "There was the cask of cognac, there were the pork and bread, as before" (VI), but in the glance of that terrible moment they are now signs of tragedy, not security.

After the doctor's ingenious solution of the conflict, the Hispaniola sails away from Treasure Island; Silver disappears at a port of call on the way home; the island recedes to a dream in Jim's memory; and the reader closes the book. Stevenson, following the lifelong "mania" described in "My First Book," has made "a plaything of an imaginary series of events" (VI), attempting to draw the reader out of himself into an imagined world filled not only with the fantasy of rollicking adventure but with some general resemblances to our own. For underlying the colour, rapid movement and excitement of the action, the limits of the human will and the fragility of fortune emerge as patterns of reality. By endowing the reader with the vision of an adventure-struck boy who sees everything without having to make many serious decisions, the narrative skirts moral issues and submerges the reader in "the poetry of circumstance" which in Stevenson's view is the essence of romance. This method, which unifies the visual and emotional power of setting, incident and scene, derives at least in part from the author's enjoyment of the art of Skelt, while illustrating the truthful simplicity that is the aim of his own art.

Notes

¹Treasure Island was first published in Young Folks, 18 and 20 (1 October 1881-28 January 1882). It was republished in book form in 1883. All references to Stevenson's works will be to The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, South Seas Edition, 32 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925).

² David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson (Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1947), and Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), Chapter II, "Adventure as Boy's Daydream," both discuss the relation of the novel to the genre of adventure fiction. Hayden W. Ward, "Pleasure of Your Heart: Treasure Island and the Appeal of Boys' Adventure Fiction," Studies in the Novel 6 (1974), 304-17, considers the continuing appeal of the novel to adults. Irving S. Saposnik, Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1974), pp. 107-09, reads the novel as "a paradigm of that commercial spirit which has become the basis of modern capitalism" in which the "metaphor of money dominates the action," concluding that "like its author, it stands midway between a fanciful impulse towards romantic adventure and a necessary acknowledgement that the greatest adventure is the life we endure."

³ Robert Speaight, The History of the English Toy Theatre, revised ed. (London: Studio Vista Ltd., 1969), p. 14.

⁴ Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 4th ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), p. 135, notes that there is no record of Stevenson having visited a theatre before December 1874, when he was twenty-four years old.

⁵ W. E. Henley, "R.L.S.," Pall Mall Magazine 25 (1901), 513.

⁶ E. San Juan, "Toward a Definition of Victorian Activism," Studies in English Literature 4 (1964), 548, suggests that Stevenson's love for travel is related to his philosophy of life: "The instinct for travel served a moral purpose for him besides reasons of health and survival, for in the journey itself he sought the variety of life so that he might inform his conscience of such contrasts and oppositions that make existence a continuing challenge."

⁷ James modified the phrase "compete with life" which he used in the original Longman's Magazine (September 1884) version of "The Art of Fiction" to "represent life" when the essay was reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

⁸ Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 6 and 10.

⁹ Speaight, p. 33.

¹⁰ Speaight, p. 68.