The Three Students

There are, we are told by the new priests of the religion of unassailable and unfathomable darkness, a hundred billion suns in each of a hundred billion galaxies in our universe.  That these pundits are rounding to the nearest happy figure (one with a comet tail of twenty-two zeros) should tell you exactly how sure we are of what is out there and what might actually be hidden from our perspectives.  The students of today are indeed confronted with the dilemma of overspecialization, of realizing from the beginning of their education that they unlike this man of letters or this great philosopher, mathematician and diplomat, cannot possibly learn in a lifetime everything that is worth learning.  Instead, they are advised to choose one small, sniveling category as their Bible and pursue that microcosm with all due alacrity and ferociousness, with man's greatest achievement, literature, being no exception.  Surely – and I may reveal some prejudices with the following statement – each literary tradition needs its experts.  Each language needs diligent men and women gorged on the masterpieces of the tradition in question and sufficiently familiar with everything else of note to derive from this assortment another library of thematic and philological studies.  In smaller and newer traditions, however, there inevitably lurks a paucity of works available to the scholar who wishes to place his countrymen (usually these tasks are best left to a native) on the same shelf with the books of great world literature.  It has been commonplace in the last century and in this one to speak of major traditions as simply those who have been historically blessed over the course of written time.  So the fact that Italy has countless works of art and Slovenia does not (as it were, my grandmother was an ethnic Slovene who spoke both languages) should not make one think that Slovenian literature possesses any less dignity than its Roman neighbor.  Yet given our terrestrial limitations, what is worth learning and what isn't?  Have I been foolish in my choice of Czech (now long since forgotten) and Danish, two smaller traditions rich in culture?  Let us put these questions aside for the moment and turn to this gem of a story that broaches the subject.

From its title, we understand that the tale will involve a university or a school, and likely one of great standing.  This suspicion is confirmed in the opening paragraph when Watson informs us that he and his sleuthing chum had the opportunity "in the year '95 ... to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns."  Holmes profits from the occasion to frequent a library

Where [he] was pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters – researches which led to results so striking that they may be the subject of one of my future narratives.

Although Holmes's academic interests – tire tracks, ash, poisons, inks, and coded languages, to name but a few – are arcane and often only used to propel the story forward, it is always interesting to see a great mind tackle a subject systematically since true learning can only be gotten from such an approach.  Holmes's work is going so well, in fact, that he initially fends off the pleas of a Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer at the College of St. Luke's.  It turns out that, the following day, Soames will be administering an exam in Ancient Greek (including a sight passage from this famous historian) with the best grade to be awarded a scholarship.  Perhaps stupidly, he receives a copy of the Thucydides passage and leaves it unattended on his desk for an hour.  When he returns, he finds a key in the lock of his office and, upon entering, the three slips of paper containing the Greek scattered across the room.  The only other person with a key is the mild-mannered servant, Bannister, "a little, white-faced, clean-shaven, grizzly-haired fellow of fifty" and "absolutely above suspicion."  So the blame must fall to one of the three students for Soames is responsible:  Daulat Ras, Miles McLaren, and a young man named Gilchrist.

Holmes's methods are simple and elucidating, so no more of the plot will be revealed here.  What is most interesting is Conan Doyle's choice of three students, instinctively reflecting three societal currents with which Victorian England as a whole had to contend (women's rights lagged behind just a tad).  Gilchrist, who is never mentioned by his Christian name, is the son of the infamous Sir Jabez Gilchrist, a lord of ill repute "who ruined himself on the turf"; Ras, "a quiet, inscrutable fellow," represents the movement of academics from the Indian subcontinent to the best universities of their erstwhile oppressors and the seed of postcolonialism in general; and McLaren is described as "wayward, dissipated, and unprincipled," but "when he chooses to work, one of the brightest intellects of the university."  To Conan Doyle's credit, little is made of these differences, and the investigation proceeds more along an examination of personality and motive rather than cultural tendency.  Still, we see old England, modern polyethnic England, and modernity's knee-jerk reaction to authority and its preposterous claim to hereditary divine rights.  By the way, the only divine rights that exist are common to all of us, and they involve the right to believe in something greater than ourselves.  Sometimes that means admitting that we cannot understand our universe in full, but that, to paraphrase this writer of genius, we can begin to grasp the outline of a future understanding.  Maybe this sentiment can be pamphletized as follows: read as much as you can, learn as much as you can, but do it with the big picture in mind.  Regardless of how many suns you choose to worship.

Signs and Symbols

Those who love and appreciate art – true art, not the popularized kitsch that pollutes all too many of our modern museums – are blessed in more ways than one.  Art is the pleasure of human ingenuity, thought, feeling and remembrance, but it is also a way of life that encompasses and weds every fabric of our being.  From art  we can derive all the postulates of the Ancient Greeks, all the science of Leibniz and Da Vinci, all the politics and history of every politician and historian that has ever lived.  My hyperbolic waves might cause you to snicker, and snicker you may (I am a staunch believer in freewill).  Yet for many of us art and reality are coterminous.  My world may not be perfect, or even particularly beautiful at times, but sooner or later, out of the corner of my watering eye, I will catch a glimpse of something that will return me to the fold, to the other lambs I call human beings and their love for what is greater than they are.  Literary criticism, that unwieldy shapeshifter, has long been aware of the vicissitudes of its subject matter and has mutated appropriately.  Often it adheres to the spirit of the age or whatever else seems trendy; sometimes, however, it ventures out on a bare, untenanted limb and makes a bold declaration only then to find it in a text written two hundred years earlier.  One of literary criticism's more recent chestnuts, concocted in the mad throes of the modernist interbellum, is a holistic approach to the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Everything is reflected in everything else, a prison of a thousand mirrors with only one original – a solipsistic view as old as literature itself.  What is literature if not the mimicry of the omnipotent?  What is art if not a new universe reinvented at the whims of a minor god?  What if that same god senses that his world is rebelling against him, a conspiracy of trees and grass and air?  One answer can be found in this magical short story.

We are taken, rudely, into the life of three miserable people.  An elderly couple, Russian in culture and language but now residents of a foreign land after a great war destroyed everything they loved, is about to visit their only son.  He is twenty and not well, although his gigantic intellect has not been damaged as much as warped.  The white-garbed priests of the new religion have subjected him to countless doses of unpronounceable medications, ink blots, and other brilliantly subversive tactics with no results except a filing cabinet stuffed with lengthy reports about things that will make you and me wonder what on earth is being taught at modern universities.  Our patient remains sick, if sick is the right word:

In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.  He excludes real people from the conspiracy – because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.  Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes.  Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.  His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees.  Pebbles or stains or sun flecks from patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept.  Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.  Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart .... he must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.  The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

Some may consider the above description a perfect clinical analysis of one of science's great advances in human psychology; others more discerning in their perceptions, however, might see something else.  Instead of a young man with no future, we might be dealing with a young man who sees the future, past, and present simultaneously;  instead of an illness we might see an obsessive and creative part of our consciousness that devours all slaves to art from their first moments of self-awareness to their dying breath; and instead of an arrogant eccentric, we might see the outline of a great artistic soul imperiled by a tidal wave of sensation, the totality of an open mind exposed to an endless universe.  In those cases, as it were, the universe will always win.    

A lesser writer might have said much more about our patient, who is obviously talented (after all, his cousin, perhaps the paranoid protagonist of this novel, is a chess grandmaster) if unsociable.  But Nabokov lets us examine the patient from the point of view of his parents who are impoverished, unable to communicate well in English, and completely distraught over the separation from their beloved offspring.   Mothers tend to take such things a bit harder, and his proves to be no exception:

After all, living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement.  She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

And the story (taken from this magnificent collection) draws to an unexpected close.  The lonesome couple is bent over a kitchen table as a phone rings again and again and a voice asks, rather insistently, a most peculiar question.  We are told little more than that "it was an unusual hour for their telephone to ring" and that "the same toneless anxious voice asked for Charlie."  What is a young girl calling an old couple in the middle of the night about a young man a symbol of?  I for one can think of a few things.  But they, like the thoughts of our clearly sick patient, do not need to be expressed.

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Each year, as life hems its sleeve more tightly around our wrist, we are greeted with tidings of differing sensation.  There are good tidings, pleasant reminders of our privileges; small disappointments that can be mocked to raconteurish ends; and occasionally even wonderful swoons of information, turning points.  If you are a family man, the best news you will ever receive will concern your children and their welfare; alone, or in a quiet couple, hints of love or respect, or even career success might be the most satisfying seconds of life.   But behind each glorious memory lurks the possibility of disappointment which makes that glory all the more fantastic and delightful.  The old aphorism about pessimists' never being disappointed is codswallop: they are always disappointed.  They are saddened by every detail and swerve of our existence and never content with partial success, and for that reason complete success is to them an alien concept.  Whenever someone quips that he does not like to be disappointed, I know immediately that I am dealing with a child.  I know as well that this person will never be happy with anyone or anything because, in his heart of hearts, there is something that he hates about himself. 

The best people on this earth – I am lucky enough to know a few – are happy at all times, fundamentally happy to be alive and healthy, happy that the sun still shines, that we have seasons, that we have fewer wars now than ever before, that the smallness of the world allows us to experience the lives of others in startling new ways.  Disappointments knock on their doors (they have a very distinctive knock), but they don't answer.  After a while, they proceed to a curtained window and watch the monsters skulk away, to knock at other doors.  Sometimes those monsters are ones we love that do not love us back – unrequited love, however selfish, remains the greatest of our disappointments – other times we lose people close to us for a variety of causes, mostly not of our own doing.  As we get older, the monsters tend to stop by more frequently; peering out the same trusted window, we see that they are more varied; sometimes they even come in pairs or threes, plying their trade like any cobbler or haberdasher.  But when we are young and life stretches out before us like that one woman you would give anything to possess, soul and body – and we all have one such person – we cannot allow our coils to be blackened and tarred.  We cannot evince signs of the grave, signs of refusal or indifference to life, because that would mean we were already dead.  This is the premise of arguably the finest short story in the English language.

Our narrator, as opposed to the titular character, is an older man, who "from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best."  He is an attorney at law in what we still call Manhattan, as well as the supervisor of a triptych of oddball characters rightly appropriated from Dickensian annals:  Turkey and Nippers, two Englishmen of sixty and twenty-five, respectively, and of varying tempers, and a young gopher called Ginger Nut.  Their names owe their eccentricity to the narrator's wish for life to be easy and happy; frivolous monikers are part and parcel of jesting with mortality.  Our story thus begins with a sort of caricature of the curious shifts in mood on the part of the narrator's staff: Turkey is well-mannered and diligent before lunch, but a wretched beast once fed; whilst Nippers only manifests the bare bones of courtesy in the afternoon.  The description of Nippers's testiness (which the narrator, in another effort to play down its moral consequences, labels "indigestion") is particularly superb:

[Nippers evinced] especially a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.  Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him.  He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment, by final pieces of blotting-paper.  But no invention would answer.  If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table-lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms.  If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.  In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted.  Or, if he wanted anything, it was to be rid of a scrivener's desk altogether.

This last observation, after a series of comic asides, is quite obviously the truth, but our narrator still makes little noise of it.  When relating the insufferable behavior of Turkey, the narrator similarly obliges himself to lessen our expectations by likening his employee to an animal: "in fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat.  It made him insolent.  He was a man whom prosperity harmed."  A more astute observer would have depicted Turkey's unwillingness to wear his employer's hand-me-down overcoat as a shallow form of pride based on the entitlement of age (especially since, we are told, he and the narrator are practically coevals); but it is the narrator's interest to preserve this sideshow atmosphere for what is to come.  Or, I should say, who.

Demand, that great overlord, progresses to the point that the office needs additional help ("There was now great work for scriveners"), so an ad is placed and quickly answered.  It is here that we first meet the subject of our tale:

In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer.  I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!  It was Bartleby.

From these first lines it is clear that Bartleby is already no longer among the living.  So when the narrator avers that the "mettlesome poet, Byron" could not have sat down with Bartleby to "examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand," he might as well have made Byron the register of all hedonism and sensation that life offers and Bartleby his spiritless counterpart.  By virtue of his name, however, one might be led to believe that Bartleby belongs in an office with a Turkey, a Nippers and a Golden Nut, but this is also completely deceiving.  The newest hire wishes for nothing but the opportunity to carry out his scrivener work unimpeded by the whims of his patron, who "in [his] haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance" elects to give Bartleby some additional, menial business.  And Bartleby responds with one of the most famous retorts in literary history – 'I would prefer not to,' begetting the following reaction:

I looked at him steadfastly.  His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm.  Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him.  Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.  But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors.

The precedent is now set and maintained throughout.  Bartleby cannot possibly accept anything more than the core task of his profession, the copying of documents, as if he himself were a shadow or imitation of life.   His only response to the narrator's requests never changes, and the latter expresses his frustration in a statement that rings truer today than one hundred fifty years ago: "nothing aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."  After numerous roadblocks, the narrator alights upon a curious conclusion:

He is useful to me.  I can get along with him.  If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve.  Yes.  Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.  To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.

The narrator, like the reader, is aware of the duality of his condition.  He should pity Bartleby, and rightly intuits that most others won't; and yet being a martyr has little benefit to himself or others.  Why should it be he that assumes the burden of this dead emotional weight and "mulish vagary"?  Why he and no one else?  For the sweetening of his own regrets and misdeeds?  Perhaps that is not symptom enough to take on this unmindful young man; perhaps the discovery of Bartleby's afterhours whereabouts will sway the narrator in another direction.

If you do not regularly read this author, the greatest artist America has ever produced, I would recommend rearranging your schedule.  More than Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Updike, and Salinger, Melville has no peers, no equals, no one who can touch him when he is at his best.  His greatest work, produced at the staggering age of thirty-two, might have four or five novels worth its value; his poetry is largely unread although equally magnificent; but his greatest contribution might be his short fiction, insofar as Typee, Omoo, White Jacket, and Redburn have an anecdotal quality to them that suggests an exotic necklace of bright beads rather than a wholesome, perfectly contained pearl.  But Bartleby is a pearl, the rarest of gems that has much in common with a Russian short story, also one of the best ever written.  And also one that might spring from the adage: Ah, happiness courts the light, so that we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

The Norwood Builder

Were you to review modern cinema's development of the thriller, you would come across a singularly ingenious topos called the "framing of an innocent fugitive."  Ingenious in that it often involves a situation in which the opinion of the world is so vehemently opposed to considering the fugitive's innocence that he himself thinks he might have committed some wrongdoing in an altered state.  Once upon a time we had demons; now we have drugs, hallucinations or mental illness, but the lack of responsibility or blackout periods remain (indeed, sleepwalking was one of the least satisfying ways of explaining gaps in memory, and is featured as the solution in more than a few prominent nineteenth-century crime novels).  There are, of course, other methods for handling the subject, including the possibility that a mandarin plot is afoot.  This is the worst fate of all, because the conspirator is near-omnipotent and, if truly diabolical, wise to any moves that you might undertake.  Such is the conundrum facing John Hector MacFarlane, a young solicitor who seeks advice and refuge in this story.

Being green and unobtrusive, MacFarlane cannot overcome his amazement when a well-to-do fellow bachelor, Mr. Jonas Oldacre, approaches him in his office one day and asks him to cast his last will and testament "into proper legal shape."  The fifty-two-year-old builder is a verbal stranger to MacFarlane, although  the cantankerous Oldacre was at one time acquainted with MacFarlane's parents. Papers are examined, hands are shaken, and the young man promises to come by Oldacre's house the following night to examine some scrip and housing deeds.  Yet that is not all: the sole benefactor of the will is none other than MacFarlane himself, a condition justified by the relationless Oldacre's having known his family and wanting to reward a "very deserving young man."  MacFarlane proceeds to the builder's estate, staffed only with a housekeeper, and discusses the terms of the will before suspiciously open French windows and a suspiciously open safe.  The examination of the paperwork takes much longer than expected, forcing the young solicitor to pass the night in a nearby inn.  The next morning, by his own account, he learns that Oldacre's estate was damaged severely in a fire that had begun the night before, and that Oldacre himself perished in the inferno.  All of which makes the young MacFarlane a very wealthy and, unfortunately, very wanted man. 

Surely, one might snicker at this "filthy wealth of coincidence" (to use this author's expression); yet upon reflection of most any important event in one's life a plethora of hitherto unnoticed data may surface.  This is a very modern phenomenon.  Our advances in forensics have enabled us to construct situations in which we can identify the culprit from processing all the evidence on hand, regardless of the personality, motives, or relations of the people involved.  Indeed, it is really with the introduction of Holmes and Watson – two men of science – that we begin to do away with what is specifically called Menschenkenntnis in German, or a "knowledge of human nature" (the fact that we have no exact term for it should be explanation enough).  While I applaud any progress made in the field of identifying or verifying criminal perpetrators, one should not forget that these persons, while desperate, ignorant or evil, are still just like the rest of us, that is, motivated by very personal issues and factors that can be grandly categorized but not fully understood without an understanding of how people tend or tend not to do things.  When Holmes became world-famous at the end of the nineteenth century, he was praised by scientific pundits who saw him as a paladin against the Romantic notions of human behavior.  Here was a man who thrived on proving things by testing every physical detail against every other; whose creator and sidekick were both medical doctors; and who shunned theories that encapsulated superstitions, curses, or other unprovable agencies.  But what many forget is that Conan Doyle himself believed in all these forces, and spent the greater part of his life promoting their importance.  Was this a natural recoiling from Holmes's massive shadow?  Was it owing to his realization that he would forever be known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great Sherlock Holmes?

Perhaps, although unlikely.  Despite Holmes's empiricist methods, he is a wise knower of men.  He understands the little details that might turn an otherwise pleasant human being into a criminal, and re-imagines this evolution at its every stage.  As for poor MacFarlane, a preponderance of proof lies against him:  he was the last visitor to see Oldacre; his fingerprints are on the primary documents as well as all over the house; he had no connection to Oldacre, having just met him, and was relatively impecunious and living with his parents; and, of course, he stood to inherit a heaping pile of banknotes as a result of this crime.  And while a new piece of physical evidence cements the police's case, Holmes plows on owing to a hunch that has nothing to do with all the daggers he sees before him.  But it does have to do with that most despicable of human fallacies, the unwillingness to forgive, the opposite of all we should strive for.  And for grudges there is rarely any physical evidence.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Some of us have the unfortunate habit of ignoring those works or manifestos which do not concur with our own.  Only too natural, we might say, because life is short and consecrating time to theories we know to be patently false (for whatever reason) is a waste of our dwindling days.  So bereft of imagination or credibility are many of these decrees that more demanding readers, readers whose main aims are beauty, truth, enjoyment and a moral framework for all aspects of life, are infuriated.  If that sounds like a lot to ask for, you might question why you read at all.  Personally, I read to seek out that one moral law that has always existed within me and is reflected by the starry night above me.  I do not find it often; sometimes it only exists in snippets or flashes amidst a garish carnival of platitudes.  In some rather infrequent cases there obtains a concatenation of detail evoking the shadow of that law, however ignored by the text itself, and the result is what the Greeks called irony.  Rarer still are images of purported truth cast in colors and shapes that could not possibly mean anything more than earthbound pleasures – until you look very closely and see that a few of these pleasures (especially affection, physical attraction, laughter, and friendship) are indeed reflections of something much, much greater.  Thus we are bound to examine all information we come across.  In fact, we can and should assume that within the maze of misperception, bias, and fear there lurks a crazed beast whose roar can bring us something of this law.  Modern psychology, a field with which I am very unfortunately well-acquainted from readings, has taken it upon itself to explain all our dreams, nightmares, waking moments and desires through a children’s set of boxes and crayons.  It has tried (and failed gloriously) to make us think we are all puerile players in a nonstop run of a tasteless musical on the Great White Way, singing the same chants and dancing to the same bongo drums.

Now there is nothing wrong with childhood, but there is something terribly wrong with its ignorant revolt against authority.  Curiosity, optimism, the sense of immortality that many children’s circumstances permit them to enjoy – all of this we should never forget; the love of family, of one’s homeland, of the moments and other souls that make us into responsible adults, all of this we should cherish.  When people long for their childhood, it is either because their childhood was very happy or their current life does not contain this sense of immortality, of unending meadows cascading among unending hillocks.  The assumption of another persona to the psychologist indicates a deep-seated urge to escape one’s existence, although every writer of fiction, like every actor, assumes a myriad of guises over a career and can still be (and often is) very content with his “real” self.  To what other vocation does such an apparent paradox belong?  To those persons of deep faith, those who appreciate their earthbound existence but also look forward to redemption in some higher state; loving one does not mean hating the other.  A lengthy but necessary introduction to one of the finest short stories of the English language.

The basic facts are known even to people who have never opened Stevenson’s text: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a scientist of genius and loner by nature, has acquired a nasty and violent friend by the name of Edward Hyde.  That Hyde might be sponsored by Jekyll is the direct suggestion of the narrator, who culls his details from Mr. Utterson, a London lawyer who hears of an awful crime involving a young girl and a payoff to her relatives from very respectable circles (a strange foreshadowing of these legendary crimes).  Since Utterson is in every way an upstanding Victorian citizen as well as a scholar of the law, this crime of moral turpitude cannot go unpunished.  The trail boomerangs back to Jekyll, who happens to be one of Utterson’s clients as well as an old friend, reminding us of the aphorisms about how well we think we know our dearest comrades. One wonders what the first-time reader might have made of the strange comings and goings of Hyde from a building adjacent to that of Jekyll, and from the physical deformity and abhorrent cruelty that distinguish Hyde from his maker:

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude.  Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity.  The problem he was thus debating as he walked was one of a class that is rarely solved.  Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.  ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman.  ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it.  God bless me, the man seems hardly human!  Something troglodytic, shall we say?  Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?  Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?  The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend!’

The story proceeds in magnificent suspense until a pair of fatal decisions are made, and Utterson is left with a letter from Jekyll detailing his descent into hell.  The letter, which I should like to quote in toto, is such a literary delight that we are struck anew by the ability of its author, and of the temptations of evil in the face of knowledge and progress.  It is here that Jekyll becomes Hyde and Hyde turns into Jekyll, that the two persons once thought distinct appear as anagrams of their own weaknesses.  It is also here that Jekyll reveals why he might have wanted such an escape, and his explanation – for a moment, in any case – appears to be as lucid an ancient codex on combating evil as anything else we might have heard, in this case by grasping, literally and figuratively, at its tenebrous strength.

What one shouldn’t conclude, however, is that the titular bicephalous beast somehow metaphorizes an affliction.  Nor should we suppose that the whole project can be reduced to the modern plight of a small percentage of our population with a misunderstanding of their proper persona, in some cases leading them to conduct their business as totally separate people.  Stevenson, like Utterson, was a lawyer not a doctor, and his interest is in the motives of men not some cerebral malfunction.  That evil and goodness should operate within the same immortal soul is our oldest and still our most critical moral quandary; nevertheless, that a man of superior intellect would generate, in his own nightmare, such a lowlife scum as an alias speaks more of his own inner darkness than any shame he might have had in inducing the transformation.  Despite his claims, Dr. Jekyll is not a good man gone wrong: he is a bad man who finds an outlet in his creative work, in time making himself into his own Frankenstein's monster.  For that reason perhaps is man “commingled out of good and evil,” whereas Edward Hyde, “alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”