Lay Morals, and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
Philosophy
Lay Morals, and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Short stories
It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his drawings.
He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He, too, will draw anything,
from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the courts of Heaven. ‘A
Lamb for Supper’ is the name of one of his designs, ‘Their Glorious
Entry’ of another. He has the same disregard for the ridiculous, and
enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style, so that we are pleased
even when we laugh the most. He is literal to the verge of folly. If
dust is to be raised from the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will
‘fly abundantly’ in the picture. If Faithful is to lie ‘as dead’ before
Moses, dead he shall lie with a warrant—dead and stiff like granite; nay
(and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of the author), it
is with the identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells the
sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at once distinguish in the text by
their names, Hopeful, Honest, and Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as
against By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other,
are in these drawings as simply distinguished by their costume. Good
people, when not armed _cap-à-pie_, wear a speckled tunic girt about the
waist, and low hats, apparently of straw. Bad people swagger in
tail-coats and chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large
majority in trousers, and for all the world like guests at a
garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands
before Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.
But above all examples of this artist’s intrepidity, commend me to the
print entitled ‘Christian Finds it Deep.’ ‘A great darkness and horror,’
says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless deathbed
with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and conflicts of
his hero. How to represent this worthily the artist knew not; and yet he
was determined to represent it somehow. This was how he did: Hopeful is
still shown to his neck above the water of death; but Christian has
bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness indicates his place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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