Lay Morals, and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
Philosophy
Lay Morals, and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Short stories
One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon—six cuts, weird
and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout a pale and stockish
figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects. There is no better
devil of the conventional order than our artist’s Apollyon, with his
mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and terrifying
expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the first you see him
afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable in suggestion.
Cut the second, ‘The Fiend in Discourse,’ represents him, not reasoning,
railing rather, shaking his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced,
his tail writhing in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while
Christian stands back a little, timidly defensive. The third illustrates
these magnificent words: ‘Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole
breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter: prepare
thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no
farther: here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming
dart at his breast.’ In the cut he throws a dart with either hand,
belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and
straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who
has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against
such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth
cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and
pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the
battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt
that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but ‘giving
back, as one that had received his mortal wound.’ The raised head, the
bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing relaxed in
agony, all realise vividly these words of the text. In the sixth and
last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim is seen kneeling with
clasped hands on the betrodden scene of contest and among the shivers of
the darts; while just at the margin the hinder quarters and the tail of
Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discounted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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