Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 5

the quarrel of Stevenson and Henley: and that the true
private life is to be sought not in Samoa but in Treasure Island; for
where the treasure is, there is the heart also.
In short, I propose to review his books with illustrations from his life;
rather than to write his life with illustrations from his books. And I do it
deliberately, not because his life was not as interesting as any book; but
because the habit of talking too much about his life has already actually
led to thinking far too little of his literature. His ideas are being
underrated, precisely because they are not being studied separately and
seriously as ideas. His art is being underrated, precisely because he is
not accorded even the fair advantages of Art for Art's Sake. There is
indeed a queer irony about the fate of the men of that age, who
delighted in that axiom. They claimed judgement as artists, not men;
and they are really remembered as men much more than they are
remembered as artists. More men know the Whistlerian anecdotes than
the Whistlerian etchings; and poor Wilde will live in history as
immoral rather than unmoral. But there is a real reason for studying
intrinsic intellectual values in the case of Stevenson; and it need not be
said that exactly where the modern maxim would be useful, it is never
used. The new criticism of Stevenson is still a criticism of Stevenson
rather than of Stevenson's work; it is always a personal criticism, and
often, I think, rather a spiteful criticism. It is simply nonsense, for
instance, for a distinguished living novelist to suggest that Stevenson's
correspondence is a thin stream of selfish soliloquy devoid of feeling
for anybody but himself. It teems with lively expressions of longing for
particular people and places; it breaks out everywhere with delight into
that broad Scots idiom which, as Stevenson truly said elsewhere, gives
a special freedom to all the terms of affection. Stevenson might be
lying, of course, though I know not why a busy author should lie at
such length for nothing. But I cannot see how any man could say any
more to suggest his dependence on the society of friends. These are
positive facts of personality that can never be proved or disproved. I
never knew Stevenson; but I knew very many of his favourite friends
and correspondents. I knew Henry James and William Archer; I have
still the honour of knowing Sir James Barrie and Sir Edmund Gosse.
And anybody who knows them, even most slightly and superficially,

must know they are not the men to be in confidential correspondence
for years with a silly, greedy and exacting egoist without seeing
through him; or to be bombarded with boring autobiographies without
being bored. But it seems rather a pity that such critics should still be
called upon to hunt up Stevenson's letter-bag, when they might well
think it time to form some conclusions about Stevenson's place in
letters. Anyhow, I propose on the present occasion to be so perverse as
to interest myself in literature when dealing with a literary man; and to
be especially interested not only in the literature left by the man but in
the philosophy inhering in the literature. And I am especially interested
in a certain story, which was indeed the story of his life, but not exactly
the story in his biography. It was an internal and spiritual story; and the
stages of it are to be found rather in his stories than in his external acts.
It is told much better in the difference between Treasure Island and The
Story of a Lie, or in the difference between _A Child's Garden of
Verses and Markheim or Olalla,_ than in any detailed account of his
wrangles with his father or the fragmentary love-affairs of his youth.
For it seems to me that there is a moral to the art of Stevenson (if the
shades of Wilde and Whistler will endure the challenge), and that it is
one with a real bearing on the future of European culture and the hope
that is to guide our children. Whether I shall be able to draw out this
moral and make it sufficiently large and clear, I know as little as the
reader does.
Nevertheless, at this stage of the attempt I will say one thing. I have, in
a sense, a sort of theory about Stevenson; a view of him which, right or
wrong, concerns his life and work as a whole. But it is perhaps less
exclusively personal than much of the interest that has been naturally
taken in his personality. It is certainly the very contrary of the attacks
which have commonly, and especially recently, been made on that
personality. Thus the