DAMAGING SOULS

Whether Robert Louis Stevenson's place is among the great ones of literature or whether his writings are merely those of an exceedingly clever second-rater must be decided by time and the critics, but the question is not one which concerns his biographer. The facts about Stevenson have all come from persons who were more interested in preserving his character than in portraying the man himself. The result has been the creation of a myth, a paragon of virtues, but nowhere a hint of his limitations, his lapses from the accepted path, which undoubtedly influenced his writings.

The newest biography of R. L. S., styled a "critical biography", and written by Mr. John A. Steuart, sets out two really new ideas about Stevenson. The first is that Stevenson often wrote under the influence of drugs, the second that he was consistently an egotistic poseur. All his life he tried to be as different from other people as possible, not hesitating to pose even before his few intimates. In the face of the rather sordid "underworld" life which Stevenson led in his early years in Edinburgh and London. Mr. Steuart does not, like the more obsequious biographers, turn aside and shudder. He tells the plain facts, and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions.

The tendency in modern biography to be fair instead of flattering, to tell the plain facts instead of forcing the great man to conform to the thesis of the book, began with Lytton Strachey's "Queen Victoria" The new method was so interesting and compelling that later biographies had perforce to copy the manner or fail to arrest attention. But where a man has been made into a myth, as Stevenson certainly has, the task of the biographer becomes doubly hard, for he must go against accepted opinion, and people will only half believe what he says.