Reassessing Stevenson

68 resorts to a summarizing statement by some previous critic, and always she avoids coming to terms with the undercurrent of Chesterton's fiction. She has nothing to say, for instance, about the recurrent motifs of the Father Brown stories—Chesterton's apparent fascination with twilight, darkness, dreaming, madness and masking. (She mentions Chesterton's interest in the theatre.) However, Dale does remark that "the atmosphere is absurd" in The Man Who Was Thursday and was probably Influential on Kafka's technique (p. 113); neither notion is followed up by Dale, even though both gainsay her attempt to free Chesterton's image from the very implications they suggest. This slip in the argument's consistency, the avoidance of in-depth readings of Chesterton's fiction, the "yes . · . but" qualifications, and the asserted denials are complemented by occasional sleight of hand. For instance , at one point Dale wishes to debunk Garry Wills's and Hugh Kenner's perception of Chesterton as a "metaphysical jester"; her rebuttal reads: "A true metaphysical jester was Nietzsche, who was also insane; there was nothing insane or psychotic about Gilbert Chesterton" (p. 130). By pure assertion Dale attributes the phrase "metaphysical jester" to Nietzsche and then dismisses its applicability to Chesterton on the issue of insanity—an embarrassing example of chop-logic. Equally embarrassing is Dale's instinct against a rational balance in her own arguments. I refer not only to her efforts time and again to sanitize Chesterton' s image but also to her tendency to defame others in an effort to elevate Chesterton's status. At one point, for example, she remarks Chesterton's "masterful analogies, ingenious paradoxes, and epigrams beyond the wildest dreams of his adolescent bête noir, Oscar Wilde" (p. 249). Sometimes Dale even stoops to a form of name-calling, an especially ironic element because she protests so loudly in her book against caricatures of Chesterton as a jolly childlike giant filled with gusto or as a stunted, mad Peter Pan figure characterized by sexual inhibitions; without compunction, however, she refers in passing to H. G. Wells as "the perpetual adolescent" (p. 212). With such problems a biography like Dale's could easily flounder. That her book avoids complete shipwreck is the result of her heavy reliance on the work of others, her own readable style, and her few clarifications of certain moments in Chesterton's life (particularly the time of his conversion to Roman Catholicism). Although the literary scholar will not find her book very useful, the lay reader will be entertained by its account of its subject 's life as well as by its details pertaining to the political ambience of Chesterton's time. Dale's study is not inspired, but (except for the sorts of problems enumerated in this review) it is on the whole well crafted as a narrative. William J. Scheick University of Texas at Austin 4. REASSESSING STEVENSON Andrew Noble, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Vision Press, 1983. $27.50 69 This collection of essays, by a group of Scottish scholars associated with the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has the avowed objective of providing "a stringent revaluation" of Stevenson, avoiding both the adulation accorded him as a master-stylist and story-teller in his own time and the contempt of the Modernist period for his superficiality and romanticadventure puerility. Because Stevenson deserves at least the respect of a careful reassessment, especially of his lesser-known work, rather than the pigeon-holing he has for the most part been subjected to, such a collection has a worthy motive. On the whole it manages to strike a good balance between the usual extremes, bringing out many of Stevenson's virtues and hie faults, without slipping into apologia for him as an eminent Scottish writer —the most eminent novelist, now that Sir Walter Scott's star has declined— or taking satisfaction in scoring off Stevenson's obvious weaknesses. The principal value of the collection, nevertheless, is in its variety, the provision of a shifting set of perspectives from which we may view Stevenson, combined with the skill with which the essayists examine works and relationships not usually analyzed. Nowhere else, so far as I know, can...