Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

there he makes friends with the king of the island. 19 And here something happens that is somewhat magical: a few years earlier, Stevenson had published
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and there was a priest, a French Jesuit, who had spent his life in the leper colony in that region, FatherDamien. A Protestant minister with whom Stevenson dined one night revealed to him certain irregularities, we could call them, in the life of Father Damien, and for sectarian reasons, he attacked him. Stevenson wrote a letter in which he praised the work of Father Damien, and in it he says that it is the duty of all men to throw a cloak over his guilt, and that what the other had done, attacking his memory, was despicable. It is one of Stevenson’s most eloquent passages. 20
    Stevenson dies when the conflict between the Africans in the south and the English started, and Stevenson believed that the Dutch were in the right, that England’s duty was to retreat. He published a letter in the
Times
saying just that, which made him very unpopular. But Stevenson did not care. Stevenson was not a religious man, but he had a strong sense of ethics. He believed, for example, that one of the duties of literature was to not publish anything that would depress its readers. This was a sacrifice on Stevenson’s part, for Stevenson possessed a great tragic strength. But he was most interested in the heroic. There is an article of Stevenson’s titled “Pulvis et Umbra,” in which he says that we do not know if God exists or not, but we do know that there is a single moral law in the universe. 21 He begins by describing how extraordinary mankind is. “How strange,” he says, “that the surface of the planet is inhabited by bipedal, ambulant beings, capable of reproducing themselves, and that these beings have a moral sense!” He believes that this moral law rules the entire universe. For example, he says, we know nothing about bees and ants, nevertheless, bees and ants form republics, and we can guess that for a bee and an ant, there are things that are forbidden, things they shouldn’t do. And then he turns to man, and says, “Think about the life of a sailor”—that life Dr. Johnson said had the dignity of danger—“think about the difficulty of his life, think about how he lives exposed to storms, putting his life on the line. How he then spends a few days in port, getting drunk in the company of the lowest sort of women. Nevertheless, this sailor,” he says, “is ready to risk his life for his companion.” Then he adds that he does not believe in either punishment or reward. He believes that man dies with his body, that physical death is the death of the soul. And he anticipates the argument that says: From any lesson whatsoever nothing good can be expected. If we are hit on the head, we do not improve, and if we die there is no reason to believe that something rises from our decay. And Stevenson also believes this, and he says that in spite of all that, there is no man who does not know intimately when he has done a good deed and when he has done a bad one.
    There’s another essay by Stevenson, which I wish to speak of, about prose. 22 Stevenson says that prose is a more complex art than poetry. The proof of this is the fact that prose comes after poetry. In poetry, each line, Stevenson says, creates an expectation and then satisfies it. For example, if we say, “
Oh, dulces prendas por mí mal halladas, / dulces y alegres cuando Dios quería, / conmigo estáis en la memoria mía, / y con ella en mi muerte conjuradas
,” the ear is already waiting for the
conjuradas
to rhyme with
halladas
. 23 But the task of a prose writer is much more difficult, says Stevenson, because his task consists of creating an expectation in each paragraph, while the paragraph has to be euphonic. Then, he must disappoint this expectation, but in a way that is also euphonic. Using this, Stevenson analyzes a passage fromMacaulay to show that from the point of view of the prose, it is a weak passage, because there are sounds that are repeated too often. Then he analyzes a passage fromMilton, in which he discovers a single error, but in everything else, in the use of vowels and consonants, it is admirable.
    In the meantime, Stevenson continues to correspond with his friends in England, and as he is Scottish, he is full of nostalgia for Edinburgh. There is a poem to the cemetery in Edinburgh. From his exile in the Pacific, he sends all his