THE publication of a popular and complete edition gives me a desired occasion to inquire a little into the relations between Stevenson and the "modern" school of novelists and essayists. At the present moment those relations are decidedly strained. My own notion, briefly stated, is that spokesmen of "the modern school" are, as Hamlet remarked of the little eyases, exclaiming "against their own succession." They ought, I think, to be saluting Stevenson as a valiant forerunner in their own movement toward that sharper self-knowledge and that more candid self-acknowledgment which animate the important writers of all periods.
But the "moderns" seem to miss this vital link between their efforts and the effort of Stevenson. They are rather bent on drawing a line than upon establishing a connection. For example, that delightful cockney novelist and shrewd disciple of Gissing, Mr. Frank Swinnerton, strains the relation between Stevenson and his heirs to the breaking point. He expresses the asperity and the condescension of the heirs in a critical study of the testator, bristling with such distinctions as these:
The modern school of novelists . . . provides little enough material for loving hearts. The modern school
