Word: stevensons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Emigrants & Strangers. Roaming through the streets of Edinburgh, the hills of Pentland, the romantic Highlands, Novelist Stevenson and Critic Daiches are as happy together as two old emigrants swapping reminiscences of the old country. But in most other matters they are temperamentally total strangers. Studious Critic Daiches is chiefly interested in showing that if Stevenson had not been cut off in his prime, he would have parked his little scooter and become as profound and dignified as Sophocles and Shakespeare. Romantic Novelist Stevenson (a tubercular who was to die in Samoa at 43) was chiefly interested in enjoying the lively...
Like most of his literary contemporaries, Stevenson did his utmost to escape from ordinary, everyday life. But he was too little of an esthete to flee into the world of art-for-art's-sake, too much of a romantic to want the grim, bare world of the French realists-a world whose fiction he described, in a rare burst of savagery, as "that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality." After a spell of youthful Bohemianism, Stevenson dropped anchor in his own fair harbor-the world of Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The New Arabian Nights...
...neighbor's happiness usually lay, Stevenson believed, "altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumphs in the arts: all leading another life, plying another trade from what they chose. . . . To look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales...
...prime defect of "realistic" writers was their unrealistic failure to understand that "no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." "True realism," Stevenson concluded, "always and everywhere is ... to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice. . . . For to miss the joy is to miss...
...precisely this joy that solemn Critic Daiches misses. Readers will certainly leave his book convinced that Stevenson, as he grew older, was more interested in problems of human relationships, less absorbed in the fantasies of pure action and adventure. But they may jib at Critic Daiches' regret that Stevenson "arrived so late at the discovery of the kind of writing in which alone real greatness lies." Real greatness is not as choosy as its critics, and Stevenson's best adventure stories share a shelf with the Iliad, the Canterbury Tales, the Arabian Nights, Romeo and Juliet, Robinson Crusoe...