Even the best of fathers must be resisted; that seems to be the rule in literature, if not always in life. For every bemused and indulgent Mr. Bennett, there are a dozen domestic monsters whom their offspring must defy simply in order to survive. But the defiance always exacts a price. Oedipus certainly paid it, and we can easily imagine that Isaac, long after that little excursion with Dad to Mount Moriah, flinched whenever Abraham reached for the carving knife. But what happens when the father is not only the embodiment of awesome probity but a hanging judge as well?

This is the harsh dilemma Robert Louis Stevenson was exploring in his last, and perhaps finest, novel. “Weir of Hermiston” remains a fragment; even so, this unfinished tale shows what Stevenson, too often classified as a “children’s author,” could do with a theme that engaged him to the very quick. Sentence for sentence, “Weir of Hermiston” constitutes one of the greatest narratives in the language. It lacks a conclusion, of course, but by virtue of its hurtling momentum from start to finish, we sense with a shudder how Stevenson would have ended it.

Available in several inexpensive paperback editions (Penguin; Oxford World’s Classics; Everyman), “Weir of Hermiston”occupied Stevenson fitfully during his final years in Samoa – as if, no matter how far he traveled, he couldn’t shake off the piercing mists of the Scottish hills or the grim magnificence of the Edinburgh of his childhood. In the landscape of memory, those bleak vistas represented not merely nature at its starkest but the vivid contours of the Calvinist faith of his parents, as though every crag or moor were the physical expression of some bitter article of faith or thorny dogma.

Stevenson broke with his parents over belief, especially with his father, who resorted to “praying down continuous afflictions” on his erring son’s head.The phrase occurs in a letter Stevenson wrote on February 2, 1873, following a showdown with his parents, and the painful theme recurs throughout his correspondence. His incomparable letters, which occupy eight volumes in the critical edition, are most conveniently available in “Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson,” edited by Ernest Mehew (Yale University Press, 626 pages, $19.95).

Though Stevenson suffered various illnesses from childhood on, and often wrote while spitting blood or weakened by hemorrhage, he never succumbed to the bitter resignation of a cheerless predestinarianism. His outlook, in writing as in life, was robustly joyful, and this belief in the importance of joyfulness shaped his literary aesthetic. In a superb letter of October 30, 1885, he declared to a more pessimistic correspondent:

Not only do I believe that literature should give joy, but I see a universe, I suppose, eternally different from yours: a solemn, a terrible but a very joyous and noble universe; where suffering is at least not wantonly inflicted, though it falls with dispassionate partiality, but where it may be and generally is nobly borne; where, above all, any brave man may make out a life which shall be happy for himself and, by so being, beneficent to those about him.

“Weir of Hermiston” tells the tale of the dread judge Adam Weir and his baffled son, Archie. The judge is a monster of the law: inflexible, relentless, and terrifying. He not only condemns the guilty but takes relish in condemnation. Love – let alone pity – is foreign to his nature; as Stevenson puts it,”He did not try to be loved, he did not care to be; it is probable the very thought of it was a stranger to his mind.” Archie, by contrast, is a creature of “shivering delicacy,” coddled by his fearful mother; as a little boy, steeped in his mother’s engulfing piety, he comes not only to fear but to condemn his father. If, he reasons, the Gospels teach us to “judge not,” how can a good Christian be a judge, and a hanging one at that?

The conflict between father and son culminates when Archie attends a trial at which his father condemns a man to death. Stevenson is a supreme master of the vivid touch, here conveyed by a scrap of cloth. Archie studies the condemned man in the dock and notices that

there was pinned about his throat a piece of dingy flannel; and this it was perhaps that turned the scale in Archie’s mind between disgust and pity. The creature stood in a vanishing point; yet a little while, and he was still a man, and had eyes and apprehension; yet a little longer, and with a last sordid piece of pageantry, he would cease to be. And here, in the meantime, with a trait of human nature that caught at the beholder’s breath, he was tending a sore throat.

The lord-justice his father, by contrast, is appareled in “the red robes of criminal jurisdiction, his face framed in the white wig.”When his father pronounces the sentence of death, he mocks and jeers at the condemned man from the bench and takes “a savage pleasure” in his task, pursuing his victim “with a monstrous, relishing gaiety.” Here Stevenson interjects the lapidary remark, “It is one thing to spear a tiger, another to crush a toad; there are aesthetics even of the slaughterhouse.” Archie, overcome by pity and horror, condemns his father loudly both in court and at the hanging, and this impulsive outcry estranges father and son forever.Archie, barred from a legal career, is banished to Hermiston, the family estate in a wild corner of the moors. Against this ominous background Archie’s actual story begins.

None of this sounds particularly “joyful.” Even Stevenson noted that his novel was “in a very grim vein.”Yet every detail of this little work has the luster of perfection, from pungent depictions of character, often no more than two or three lines, to the look and feel and smell of the courts to the austere evocations of the Scottish landscape, all rendered in a chaste prose laced with rumbustious Scotticisms. The joyfulness lies not only in artistic mastery but in its immense concentration of “felt life,” to use the phrase of Stevenson’s friend Henry James.

“Weir” has no ending. I suspect that Archie would have ended up in the dock with his own father forced to sentence him to the gallows.Yet the book breaks off in mid-sentence with the phrase “a wilful convulsion of brute nature.” These were the last words Stevenson wrote on December 3, 1894, the day he died at the age of 44, as though by attributing willfulness to brute nature he could still refute the solemn logic of fatality.

eormsby@nysun.com