Stevenson and Symonds and Hood and Keats and Sterne were "TB's" and that there must have been something abnormal about Chaucer and Shakespeare—must have been! Thank heaven, there was.
Now, in the case of Stevenson, evidently it was a point of pride and honor to play the part of a well man in life and in letters. So far as possible he suppressed in his public thinking and feeling, and even in his private consciousness, the fact that on his body a "damned defeat" had been made. Latter-day critics ridicule his point of honor; declare him unsuccessful in his gallant pretense; "explain" him by tracing everything to his illness; and—quite absurdly, in my opinion—attempt the destruction of his literary reputation by the same stroke. I doubt whether Stevenson himself was fully aware in how many ways and how deeply his art was affected by his disease. But that is another question. Our point now is that he based his honor and his philosophy and his art upon the assumption that he possessed a normal mind, equal to all hazards, and also competent to furnish sound entertainment to healthy people.
Mr. Powys is of another generation, which attacks the "problems of life" from a different angle. I fancy he is consciously somewhat anti-Stevensonian. He speaks, at any rate, superciliously of the "courtly collect," "Virginibus Puerisque," which Stevenson wrote at the Davos Platz sanatorium. I can even imagine his swearing, with a round Elizabethan oath, that he will have none of this "gallant pretense." As for him, his honor, his philosophy, his art, are to be fashioned in absolutely open recognition of this stunning fundamental fact of his bodily circumstance: that he, a young fellow to whom life has just feigned to wish the
