Transcribed from the 1906 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
by
WALTER RALEIGH
professor of english literature in the university of oxford
author of
‘style,’ ‘milton,’ ‘wordsworth,’ etc.
fourth impression
london
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 maddox street, bond street, w.
1906
THE GREATER PART OF THIS
ESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTURE
AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
ON THE 17TH OF MAY
1895
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a nervous generation to ask is the question, ‘Will he live?’ There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable to answer. It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer with the assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with delight. But ‘there is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.’ Let us make sure that our sons will care for Homer before we pledge a more distant generation to a newer cult.