But no one has dealt more drastically with Stevenson than Mr. Swinnerton himself, and no one has said nastier things about him and about those who persist in admiring him. Doubtless he knows what he is about. He calls it criticism, but he means war. Stevenson persists in enchanting readers generation after generation. He fails to "senesce" as a writer should do who has been before us so long. Mr. Swinnerton desires to give him a knock-out blow and to drag him out of the circle of his glamour, so that there will be elbow room and attention for "the modern school of novelists." But let the Stevensonians consider the mortal nature of such thrusts as these—if they really reach home, if they really touch the man we know:
The teaching of the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals; it is the doctrine of that "state of life" which finally ends in a good-natured passivity not unlike the happy innocence of the domesticated cat. . . . With all his writing he took the road of least resistance, the road of limited horizons; because, with all his desire for romance, his desire for the splendor of the great life of action, he was by physical delicacy made intellectually timid and spiritually cautious. He was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after. . . . His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances—all are seen nowadays to be consumptive.
In short, this R. L. S., it seems, was a swathed, coddled, and timorous weakling of a tedious virtuosity, consciously fashioning toys and polishing truisms "fit to be culled and calendared for suburban households."
Now, I confess that I enjoy the clash of school with school in a struggle for survival, and I like encounter
