The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they
have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great,
piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows
them: two miles! it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of
Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in
the distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains his own.
You will remember when Christian and Hopeful "with desire fell sick."
"Effect of the Sunbeams" is the artist's title. Against the sky, upon a
cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent
woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the
splendour--one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands
ecstatically lifted--yearn with passion after that immortal city. Turn
the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of death;
Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and
sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness,
walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly
illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each
pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp--a family Bible at the least for
bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second impulse is to
laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.
Something in the attitude of the manikins--faces they have none, they
are too small for that--something in the way they swing these monstrous
volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some
subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut that
follows after--something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of
Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage no less
than of the glorious coming home. There is that in the action of one of
them which always reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last
glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart. Next come the
Shining Ones, wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the
river; the blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates
Christian. In two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the other
shore; and then, between two radiant angels, one of whom points upward,
we see them mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind
them on the inky river. More angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and
if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others--a
place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light--a place
that haunts solemnly the hearts of children. And then this symbolic
draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude
the first part. In the first the gates close, black against the glory
struggling from within. The second shows us Ignorance--alas! poor
Arminian!--hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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