Swashbuckling Forgiveness

Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Black Arrow"

Illustration by H. M. Paget for Stevenson’s The Black Arrow, courtesy of The British Library, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As I write this on Thursday evening, I should be sitting in an airplane with my daughter, flying across the Atlantic to Austria, where she will be studying at a new university after her former college (very sadly) closed last spring. Alas, we woke up bright and early this morning only to discover that our connecting flight to Vienna had been canceled without explanation. After a full two hours on the phone with a rep from United and then another from Austrian Air, we were finally rebooked for Friday, when we’ll try again. Hopefully by the time you read this we will be having better luck.

My children are all old enough by now that I no longer have much occasion to read to them. But Wednesday evening, I took a break from packing in order to finish a read-aloud with my youngest daughter, as we raced to get it done before my anticipated departure. She’d been assigned to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow for an online literature class as part of her homeschool curriculum, and she had found the first couple of chapters tough going. I used to enjoy reading Stevenson but hadn’t read any of his work recently and had never read The Black Arrow. So we decided to read it together.

My first reaction was: she was right! It’s not easy going, especially for a group of young readers in junior high. Right away we meet a “fellow in a russet smock,” discussing a recent “express” who had passed through town “and drunk a pot of ale in the saddle.” Though bearing letters, he had himself been “ignorant of what was forward.” When one of the “ploughfolk” present denies that a nobleman is his “natural lord,” Dick Shelton—the novel’s protagonist—tells him he speaks “with an ill tongue … to miscall your good master and my lord the king in the same libel.” A moment later someone else comes riding up, “heavy of hand and grim of mien, armed with sword and spear, a steel salet on his head, a leather jack upon his body.” All that in the first three pages! All intelligible enough, to be sure, though I could not identify a salet or jack without looking them up. But that prose is pitched pretty high, and Stevenson’s vocabulary certainly leaves mine in the dust. After having initially been disappointed that my daughter was struggling through Stevenson, I decided before a chapter was out that I had done her an injustice.

The book’s historical context raises its own challenges. Set during the Wars of the Roses, it challenges young readers—or their fathers—to know something about the Houses of York and Lancaster. “Crookback” Richard III (with whom Stevenson takes some chronological liberties) plays an important role. My own grasp of fifteenth-century English history is pretty shaky, and I have to imagine that today’s average middle or even high school student would be utterly at sea. We think of a book like The Black Arrow as children’s literature—but perhaps that is also an injustice.

Robert Louis Stevenson in “Cassell’s Universal Portrait Gallery”(1895). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If one accepts the challenge, however, and overcomes any overly simplistic expectations for a so-called children’s novel, The Black Arrow is an enjoyable read (perhaps more for me than for my daughter!), full of action, adventure, and excitement in typical Stevenson fashion. At the heart of its rather complicated plot is Dick Shelton’s conflict with Sir Daniel Brackley, his guardian and lord, but also, we learn, the murderer of Dick’s father and a self-interested turncoat, willing to cast his lot with whichever side appears most likely to triumph in the kingdom’s civil war.

Dick is not the only one to have been wronged by Brackley. Many of the local “ploughfolk” also complain of their oppressive treatment at his hands. A band of them, much in the style of Robin Hood and his merry men, have gathered as outlaws in the forest, seeking revenge upon Brackley and his closest companions. Their signature, from which their leader takes his moniker, is their preferred weapon: a black arrow. Dick falls in with them as they together pursue their common enemy.

But it would be a poor historical romance if there were not, alongside the political intrigue and personal vendettas, a healthy dose of… romance. Early on Dick helps a young boy escape from Sir Daniel. The boy turns out to be no boy at all, however—not the “John” for whom she had given herself out, but rather a spirited and attractive Joanna. She had been kidnapped by Sir Daniel, who intends to marry her off as advantageously as possible. When she again becomes Brackley’s captive, Dick’s desires to win his lady love and avenge his father’s death become intertwined.

Stevenson maintains a fast pace and takes the reader careening through various plot twists and changes of fortune as Dick’s quest for revenge and Richard of Gloucester’s effort to seize the throne converge. Despite this action and excitement, The Black Arrow is an imperfect novel. Dick is often a frustrating protagonist who does not learn from his mistakes as quickly as one thinks he should. The titular “Black Arrow” figure is oddly absent from most of the book, reappearing suddenly at the end at a crucial moment (and then responding to it in a surprising fashion for which the reader is not entirely prepared). At times Stevenson seems to have piled on one or two more plot elements than necessary, and the narrative then loses some of its tightness.

Dick being knighted by (his namesake) Gloucester in another of Paget’s illustrations. Courtesy of the British Library, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The story retains its interest nevertheless, thanks not only to the swashbuckling action but also to its persistent focus, intensifying as the book moves toward its conclusion, on a classic and enduring moral dilemma: the contest between vengeance and mercy. For her class, my daughter had to discuss the novel using some common junior high and high school tools of literary analysis, deciding whether its central “conflict” was a matter of “man vs. man” or “man vs. society” or “man vs.” some other possibilities I do not recall, never having had to learn that particular approach myself (and finding it somewhat artificial, to be honest). In talking it over, we decided that the story’s key turning point—which she also had to identify—was a moment when Dick confronts an unfortunate old sailor whose fortunes his own earlier escapades had destroyed. Dick has just saved the man’s life and thus hopes to make good the harm he had earlier done him, but the sailor is having none of it; as far as he is concerned, Dick can no longer make up for the wrongs he had recklessly committed. Dick, watching the man shamble off,

with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels, … for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence.

Shortly thereafter he has a final meeting with Sir Daniel, who is trying to flee after his forces have been defeated by Gloucester in the decisive battle. At this climactic moment the struggle between vengeance and forgiveness also comes to a head. Will Dick—with the example of Gloucester’s ruthless, iron-willed drive for mastery fresh before him—cut down his enemy, as seems necessary for success in his harsh world of constant warfare? Or will he—now that his “heart had just been awakened” by the encounter with the old sailor—spare the killer of his own father?

You can perhaps guess. But I won’t spoil it by telling you. The Black Arrow may not be Stevenson’s greatest novel, but it’s a fun romp and grapples seriously with a timeless moral problem.

With any luck, by the time you read this in the morning, I’ll be out of the house and on my way to a this-time-not-canceled flight. And who knows, maybe when I next find the chance to post, it will be from Austria. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.