structor in the game, contributor to its rules and keyer-up of the sporting spirit on the grounds.
That is not our theme. What I wish to inquire is whether this graceful fellow is alive yet or whether he has succumbed to the only thing which really threatened him—the danger of being too much at his ease in Bohemia, too much a play-boy.
A quarter of a century ago I had read everything of Stevenson's then accessible, and in every year since I have reread some portions of his work. In all that time I have not exhausted him, and the violence of reaction against him by the "movement" writers puzzles me. Probably I shall have to be classified as an incorrigible Stevensonian.
Inevitably the long crusade of the anti-Stevensonians against him, his character and his art, and against us—the Stevensonians—our character and our taste, infuriates me. All of them, from the atrabilious W. E. Henley to Messrs. Swinnerton, Steuart[1] and Hellman[2]—all of them say such nasty things about us: about our author and his readers. In general, they are consistent in their very curious line of attack. First, demonstrating that he was an invalid and an immoral man, they contend that his work is invalidated by the fact that it expresses too much of his invalidism and too little of his immorality!
It is true that when last fall Mr. Steuart discharged his double-barreled blunderbuss in Stevenson's direction Mr. Swinnerton took him roundly to task for his bad shooting. (I had taken him to task for his superfluous and exultant repeppering of the straw man set up for his own peppering by the ingenious Henley.)
- ↑ Robert Louis Stevenson, Boston, 1924, two vols.
- ↑ The True Stevenson, A Study in Clarification, Boston, 1925.
