Talk:The Wrecker (Stevenson)

Reviews

 * The Nation, Oct. 6, 1892: It is an excellent rule for a novel-writer to sustain the facts bearing on his case, no matter what the cost in repression of great ideas. A rigid observance of the rule will not make his novel more like the whole of any life, most of whose incidents are totally irrelevant to the main facts, but it will make more satisfactory and agreeable reading, besides what we call, perhaps for want of a more definite phrase, a better work of art. As there are occasional people born with such a store of vitality that they continue to live exultantly, almost for ever, in insolent defiance of every rule laid down by the wise for the preservation of health, so there are, though even more rarely, people born with such an astounding literary gift that they can afford to fling to the winds the best of rules and every conceivable theory of art. Of these were Sir Walter and Victor Hugo and Thackeray, and of these {pace, idolaters of the splendid past!) is the author of 'The Wrecker.' 'The Wrecker,' it is true, owns two authors, but, however valuable Mr. Osbourne's collaboration may have been, the long yarn as it is spun in print is Mr. Stevenson's. It is a curious fact, and not specially comforting to Mr. Kipling, that the very same faults which irritate and exasperate the reader of 'The Naulahka' appear in aggravated form in 'The Wrecker,' where their effect is to inspire deep and lasting joy. The first shift of the scene, from the Marquesas to the "Muskegon Commercial Academy," rudely shocks the sense for literary propriety; but, at this point, the office of literary critic is promptly vacated by a person of feelings and given over to Dryasdust, with his flair for faulty articulation. We pass from Muskegon to the Latin Quarter in Paris, back to San Francisco by way of Uncle Adam's respectable household in Edinburgh, and have recovered from the agitating auction of the Flying Scud before we reflect that we have been invited to read the tale of a wrecker, and have only now, after two hundred pages, got fairly on his trail. The extraordinary bidding for the wreck on Midway Island is the first hint that we are approaching the knot of the story, and, when the wreckers have inspected their purchase, driven hard over a coral reef and stuck head down in the sand, we perceive that the knot is a very tight one. Leisurely and rambling is the process of untying, dooming to hopeless confusion the mind that insists on placing the hero of each startling" adventure and attaching him definitely to the Nora Creina, or the Flying Scud, or the Currency Lass. The author's skill in investing whatever he chooses to tell with absorbing interest is more noticeable in the last half of the book even than in the first, for the consciousness that there is a mystery of abysmal depths naturally rouses an intolerance of digressions. Here the only digression which is not diverting is the account of the journey undertaken by Dodd and the shyster, Bellairs, to find Carthew, the man who could tell all if he would. A great many men of widely different nature and character appear in the story (there is no woman worth mentioning), and this Bellairs is the only unreal one among them. Pinkerton shows exaggeration and a superficial acquaintance with the model, yet he is, on the whole, impressively real. But Bellairs is a tiresome wretch, no more like any one you might happen to meet than are Uriah Heep and similarly objectionable persons. Dodd could have found Carthew quite easily without Bellairs, and he was of no sort of use in forcing Carthew's hand. Carthew parts with his secret perhaps a trifle too readily, but the temptation to tell his wonderful tale once in a while must have been irresistible. In his climax he positively revels in carnage and drenches all hands with gore. But supposing that mercy had been shown to the crew of the Flying Scud, and that even Brown had not "gone the same way," what would have become of Carthew and the rest of the mild-mannered castaways? In such a desperate strait there was only one way out—the way which the author foresaw when he contrived the situation. There is no doubt that, for a person of uniformly gentle sentiment, Mr. Stevenson takes a strange delight in a fight to the death, and that he would not experience a qualm at the sight of the whole Pacific turned red with human blood.