Time after time he did the same thing. In fact he was on his way home from Samoa and he had reached Sydney when symptoms developed that made further flight impossible. His reason for selecting Samoa instead of Tahiti or Honolulu was supremely childish, “it was awful fun.” It must be borne in mind that adult infantilism displays itself far oftener in the emotional side of the individual’s make-up than in the intellectual. Geniuses, particularly in the realm of the fine arts, are often emotionally infantile. It accounts in a measure for the quarrels, tantrums and vagaries of artists, and entirely for their reputation of being neither practical nor provident.

Any one who would convince himself that many emotional and a few physical characteristics of infancy clung to Stevenson in his maturity should read the Essay Child’s Play in the volume Virginibus Puerisque.

Mr. Steuart harbours the delusion that he has brought to light something new about Robert Louis Stevenson. One person familiar with everything that Stevenson wrote and practically everything that has been written about him fails to find it. To be sure he found out the name of the bonny lass with whom Stevenson fell in love while she was an earning guest of Mrs. Warren in Edinburgh, but he should be ashamed for having published it. He found out also that Stevenson did not live a strictly continent life, either before or after marriage. That is no business of Steuart, and it does not concern readers of Stevenson.

One feels on reading the chapter in which “Claire” is introduced that writing it, Mr. Steuart experienced a kind of salacious exaltation and his apology in behalf of Stevenson makes one creep. Why Wordsworth is dragged in, no one save the author knows. He must be aware that it was not pruriency or pathological inquisitiveness that gave rise to the Wordsworth-Vallon story. Critics and interpreters had sought for explanation of obscurities in the philosopher-poet’s work. The story explained them.

Mr. Steuart is satisfied that he did a Sherlock Holmes turn about the Henley-Stevenson break. Let us admit it. How do the details that he gives make Stevenson’s personality clearer to us? Mrs. Stevenson did not like Henley, just as Mr. Steuart does not like Mrs. Stevenson. Henley wrote Stevenson a letter and requested that it should not be shown to anybody, a thing which would indicate that, though he was captain of his fate and master of his soul, he did not know the a. b. c. of the matrimonial game. Stevenson showed it to his wife and “der Tag” dawned for her. The battle was fought and Stevenson won, but at the expense of his peace of mind and happiness. The reparations have not been made. No one can yet tell who will finally be called the moral victor, but unless all signs and portents are to be distrusted it is R. L. S.

Mr. Steuart’s book is interspersed with homilies on education and on British valour; bromidic reflections: “As all the world knows, the Casino at Monte Carlo is the centre of life and excitement to that gay community”; platitudinous moralisations: “In such matters fathers are apt to forget they were once young themselves”; and “adversity, it has been said, is the true test of manhood”; meticulous explanations such as the varieties of solicitor in Scotland; and studied padding, as an example of which may be cited seven-eighths of what he says about George Meredith. Some people may be glad to hear what he thinks of Meredith as a novelist and as a person, but there will be fewer probably after his book on Stevenson has been read.

“It is certain,” writes the author, “that Vailima, with its ever increasing strain, did much to kill Stevenson.” Not nearly so much as these two volumes, which were intended as a monument to him, have done! Had Mr. Steuart talked with every old woman in Scotland who had ever seen Stevenson, had he searched the register of every lupinaria of Stevenson’s day in Edinburgh, and had he spent twice as much time as he has in reverence before a bust of Henley, he could not understand Stevenson the man or Stevenson the romancer.

Finally there is something patronising and condescending in his attitude toward Stevenson, something contemptuous toward Mrs. Stevenson and something studiously neglectful of Lady Colvin that is very irritating. The reader who can rise from Mr. Steuart’s volume without feeling that the author takes himself with sibylline seriousness is fortunate, and the reader who can peruse the closing line without a smile should take a cholagogue. His salute of Stevenson makes one think of a wood-pecker taking leave of an eagle.

V
POETS

Trobadour, by Alfred Kreymborg.
William Blake in this World, by Harold Bruce.
John Keats, by Amy Lowell.
Poe—Man, Poet and Creative Thinker, by Sherwin Cody.
Edgar A. Poe, A Psychopatic Study, by Dr. John W. Robertson.
Rimbaud, by Egdell Rickword.