Thomas Burke says nothing of his parents; I fancy he did not know them. His first recollections are of his uncle, a gardener with a sense of humour, and of a Chinese with an appearance of mystery who was later deported because he trafficked in opium and morals. He got from the latter what Dostoievsky got from epileptic attacks: a sense of time arrested, crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always, behind the curtain of time, the joy of the moment had been. The secret that Pater attributed to Mona Lisa he learned from Quong Lee. Though Tommy was but ten years old, he knew all the beauty and all the evil of the heart of Asia: its cruelty, its grace, its wisdom. And the contact generated a writer, for from his sixteenth year he has been animated by a single motive: to express in writing one moment in a London side street. He has not yet succeeded to his own satisfaction. As Marcel Proust seeks to revive the memories and reveries associated with incidents and experiences of childhood and youth, Mr. Burke struggles to make come again “the pins-and-needles sensation in the back of my neck” and to have the soul feeling that accompanied it when Quong Lee beckoned him to his shop and gave him a piece of ginger.

Mr. Burke’s life seems to have been without remarkable event. He stalked poverty, and he fell in love with a snob who had an understanding friend of her own sex who shared a flat with her; he made a half-hearted attempt to get on in the City and a whole-hearted one to be a bohemian; and he saw the seams of the seamy side of life burst wide open now and then. But he also met men with hearts, like Mr. Creegan who gave him his first leg-up. This benefactor rescued him from une maison de joie et de jeux where he cleaned boots and ran errands after he left the orphanage; fed him, clothed him, lodged him, got him a job, and started him on the road that led to hobnobbing with Caruso and reminiscing in Monaco. And he met Gracie Scott. If he treated Gracie as he says in his book he did, it will be one of the sweetest memories of his life when that of Cicely shall have gone forever and that of Cosgrove shall have faded.

One of the many precious lies that grown-ups like to tell themselves is that the days of their youth were happy days. Mr. Burke is not addicted to that sort of story-telling. “I had little happiness then, partly because I was young, and partly because I had no friends, no money, bad food, and no hope. There was just one thing I had then which belongs to all youth, however miserable. Though utterly joyless, I had a tremendous capacity for joy.” One may share that tremendous capacity—for he still has it—by reading The Wind and the Rain.

Mr. John A. Steuart has written two large volumes to explain our legacy from Robert Louis Stevenson, which was “a delightful contribution to the romantic literature of the world and an example of courage that will continue to inspire men to remote generations.”

A generation has come and gone since Stevenson died. Of the one now on the threshold even those gifted with imagination and those who understand the impulsiveness of their countrymen, will find it difficult to understand the esteem in which he was held in America in the beginning of the present century. To form any conception of the appreciation, praise and adulation that were bestowed on his writings, they will have to turn to contemporary criticism.

The British “discovered” Stevenson after we revealed him, but when it came to approbation they surpassed us. Then there was an earthquake in the literary world. Henley, the intimate of his early maturity and the doughty champion of his genius, who more than any one else made a public for him, published an article in the Pall Mall Magazine which seemed to give the coup de grâce to Stevenson as a great writer. The blow glanced off Stevenson and stunned Henley; the spectators howled and called the latter traitor, and ghoul. When the excitement subsided dispassionate witnesses reflected upon the matter. Some of them were moved to re-read Stevenson. Others to read him for the first time. The result was that devotees of Stevenson grew less numerous. However, when in 1914 a temperate and generous critic, a novelist of established reputation, Frank Swinnerton, published a critical study of Stevenson which was adverse to his candidacy to immortality, it precipitated a shower of abuse, less inundating than that which submerged Henley, but still disagreeable. However, since that time, indiscriminate adulation of Stevenson has given place to critical estimation. The result to-day is that most judges agree with Swinnerton that it is no longer possible for a serious critic to place him among the great writers because in no department of letters—save the boy’s book and the short story—has he written work of first class importance. His latest biographer would seem to agree, though it is difficult to say just what Mr. Steuart believes, for his writing is so overladen with verbiage, so surcharged with platitudes, so interpolated with irrelevancies and so replete with alleged inside information that one can not see the wood for the trees. But he does not agree that Stevenson was not a “great” man for when “he is summed up, when his qualities, mental and moral, have been analysed and tabulated, it will be found that a superb courage crowns all and from that master-quality flows other virtues in which he was conspicuous—chivalry, generosity, love of justice, an eager humanity, a passion for the happiness of the race. It is valour more than aught else that enchants, inspires, and endears him to the people of two hemispheres.” Probably no one will contest Mr. Steuart’s statement, but surely it is an extraordinary reason for a critical biography. No one would think of writing a life of Meredith or of Heine because they displayed courage that excites our envy and elicits our admiration. Was the courage of Heine or of Meredith inferior to that of Stevenson and what was the quality of Stevenson’s that made it so distinguished? Heine had a disease which, at the time, was never known to end in recovery, Stevenson had only a disease (so far as his latest biographer seems to know) that frequently is cured and nearly always tends to quiescence when given half a chance. Why has John Addington Symonds’ courage not been estimated properly as an asset of greatness?

In truth Mr. Steuart takes himself too seriously. He has not advanced Stevenson’s reputation an atom. Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography of Stevenson may be a barley-sugar effigy of him, and it may make him out a seraph in chocolate as Henley claimed, and the portrait may have been touched up to please the family as Mr. Steuart maintains, but taken in connection with Mr. Swinnerton’s book, Miss Masson’s Life, and the publications of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, it is a competent account of his life and accomplishments.

There is a feature of Stevenson’s personality that has never been touched upon, but which, now that Mr. Steuart has woven a crown of oak leaves for him, must be discussed, and that is his infantilism. It was his curse as it was in a large measure his shame. It showed itself in many ways: in his relationship to his mother, to Alison Cunningham, “Cunny, my second mother,” to Lady Colvin and to his wife; in his speech, dress, manner and imitativeness; in his gestures; in his emotional reactions and determinations; and more than anything else in his inability to display common sense and ordinary prudence. He was always under the dominion of women older than himself and he enjoyed it; they all mothered him. He had no more capacity to get along without mothering than a ten-year-old child has. He was as interested in his appearance as Narcissus. “He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidence any time he passed it; he was never so much in earnest, never so well-pleased, never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself,” Henley wrote and all his biographers agree. That this is a childish trait, no one needs to be told. His speech, manner and dress never failed to attract attention and he took great pains that they should not. Yearning for notice and efforts to secure it are equally well-known infantile traits. Many children invent fictitious parents and forebears. Stevenson was one of them. Mr. Steuart has discovered that one Margaret Lizars of French descent was his great-grandmother, and he naïvely remarks that this explains Stevenson’s oddities. His imitativeness is testified to by the way he taught himself to write and this incident is discussed in the book under consideration in a chapter entitled The Sedulous Ape. It would be difficult to say which was the most childish of all Stevenson’s beaux gestes, but I shall say, harmonious with heredity, the one he did not make; this incident suggests another illustrious victim of adult infantilism, Shelley. All admirers of that genius know that he went single-handed and inexperienced to Ireland to redress her wrongs. Stevenson, on hearing that a Kerry farmer had been murdered by “moonlighters” and his wife and children boycotted, proposed to rent the Curtis farm and to proceed there with his family!

His dealings with his father, his meeting and courtship of Mrs. Fanny de Grift Osbourne, his break with Henley, all conform to the teachings of child psychology and are harmonious with child-behaviour, and they are even more suggestive of infantilism than are the playing with tin-soldiers, and the setting up and operating a toy press, which was his diversion at Davos when, in his thirty-first year, he sought health there a second time.

But nothing shows his infirmity so conspicuously as his inability to look after his impaired health. It is one of the most pathetic chapters in all biography, Stevenson’s imbecilic neglect of his health. No sooner was he benefited by a stay at Bournemouth, Hyères, Davos, Adirondacks, South Sea Islands, than he, with what looks like deliberation, went somewhere or did something which any one but a child would know was suicidal. The climate of Hyères suited him; in later years he declared that it was the only time in his life that he was really happy. He was lazy, yet at the same time productive, and he felt well. But he must go home, and the reason for going was that “he was yearning to get back to her who had so often and so effectively comforted him.”

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.