A Literary Joke By R.L.S.

Interpretation and Commentary

LOUIS L. CORNELL

IT IS NOW nearly three quarters of a century since Robert
Louis Stevenson died in Samoa—time enough, one would
think, for the world to make up its mind about a writer's
worth. But Stevenson's reputation, so exalted for a while and then
so savagely debunked, has come to an uneasy rest in one of litera¬
ture's anterooms. Everyone knows about Stevenson: the heroic
invalid, the author of Treasure Island, the mannered stylist of a
handful of essays that used, long ago, to be imposed upon college
freshmen as models of fine writing. Bracketed with Louisa May
Alcott, A. A. Milne, Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, R. L. S. has
been relegated to the classics that no one need take seriously: he
has been exalted—and reduced—to the status of a great writer for
children.

And yet Stevenson has never lacked readers who refused to
accept this valution of his work. Thirty years ago Edwin Muir
could write, "Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession.
He is still read by the vulgar, but he has joined that band of writ¬
ers on whom, by tacit consent, the serious critics have nothing to
say." But Muir had something to say; and he was not the last: the
years since the Second AVorld War have given us David Daiches's
critical study, excellent editions of the poems and letters by Janet
Adam Smith and others, and, best of all, J. C. Furnas's splendid
biography to lay the ghosts of old imaginary scandals. More to the
point, as the sentimentalized image of the sweet suffering nursery
poet fades, new generations of readers succumb to the dark power
of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston, or find that Treasure Island's
surf rings in their ears long after the children have gone up to bed.
Without question there is a Stevenson who wrote for adults, a