R. L. S. FOR ADULTS
R. L. Stevenson. By Janet Adam Smith. (Duckworth. 2s.) STEVENSON at the moment is in the trough of his reputation, and for that his friends have been mainly responsible. Few during his lifetime judged him as sanely as Henry James, who carefully limited his talent when he wrote "he has given to the world the romance of boyhood, as others have produced that of the peerage and the police and the medical profession." Miss Adam Smith, following that illustrious example, has written a short life of admirable common sense and discrimi- nation: I do not see how in the space at her disposal it could have been better done. And curiously enough Stevenson emerges in a form far more worthy of respect than he did from the adulations of his immediate friends.
It was always a mistake to pretend that Stevenson was a moralist, chiefly on the basis of that trivial and embarrassing early volume, Virginibus Puerisque, the essays in which, as Miss Adam Smith remarks, have become "the unhappy and inappropriate models" for school children. The result, of course, might have been foreseen : the long pedantic rather scurrilous research which has gone on of late years to prove that Stevenson had various sexual experiences in Edinburgh before his marriage to Mrs. Osbourne. Miss Adam Smith sensibly dismisses the subject in a couple of pages and does not include in her admirable bibliography the biographer mainly responsible.
The author of Virginibus Puerisque was not a hypocrite, for he never pretended to be an official moralist. If a morality does emerge from his novels—or rather from the omissions in his novels—it is founded on an emotional disgust. Life in Edinburgh was partly responsible, but he has his own deeper explanation of it : Cummy, with her "fairy tale training that makes ignorance a virtue. That was how I was brought up, and no one will ever know except myself the bitter misery it cost me." And in a letter to Bob Stevenson he wrote "as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child ; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing ; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me." He was his own most perceptive critic, he understood far better than Colvin why he could never write a love story. "With all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensation plainly and expressly ren- dered; hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour's fatigue in the heather; My dear Sir, there were grossness—readymade ! "
It is impossible to praise too highly Miss Adam Smith's subtle and illuminating choice of quotations from the huge mass of the published letters. It is to be hoped that she will follow this biography with a critical estimate. A lot of dead flesh— including the dreadful B.B.C. smoothness of his early style— has still to be cut away if we are to appreciate at his proper worth the author of The Body-snatchers, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Catriona, The Ebb-Tide and Weir of Hermiston. I do not think it likely that the Stevenson canon can be extended usefully far beyond these works. He was not a great writer, but we have not his equivalent today. We have only to compare him with the contemporary popular novelists, with Mr. Walpole, Mr. Priestley, Mr. Brett Young, to see his immeasurable superiority in the technicalities of his craft.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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