A Stevenson Companion

432 Le Queux, Rider Haggard, and A. Conan Doyle. Kipling and Conrad merely presented the satisfactions of these authors in a more refined form. Chesterton saw the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow fiction and came to the defense of the latter. To him, adventure was part of his view of imagination and of "the nature of choice and responsibility." When he insisted on the value of the dramatic and the romantic it was because he believed that it was the ultimate nature of human life. Coates has read Chesterton widely and deeply and has an obvious enthusiasm for his material which overcomes any faults one might find in his organization or style. Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis in not as accessible as Chesterton himself, but it repays the effort made on the part of the careful reader. It does what Chesterton tried to do in his Dai Iy News articles: present a familiar subject with a fresh face. It is recommended to all who would see Chesterton as "more than" a roaring journalist with controversial opinions. J. Randolph Cox R^lvaag Memorial Library St. Olaf College 5. A STEVENSON COMPANION J. R. Hammond. A^ Robert Louis S te venson Companion: A_ Guide to the Novels, Essays and Short Stories. New York: Macmillan , 1984. $16.95 The clue to what is amiss with J. R. Hammond's guide to Stevenson is found on the front cover of the dust jacket where the reader is told that the book is a guide to the "whole range" of Stevenson's "best work." The statement, minus the contradictory disclaimer, is reiterated in the "Preface," but here the reader is promised considerably more--"a guide to the whole range of his prose--novels, romances, essays, and short stories." At some point prior to the production of the dust jacket, someone seems to have realized that the promise of the "Preface" was not fulfilled. A companion should be a guide to the whole range of an author 's life and work. When it limits itself to titles that are deemed the "best" it becomes a very unreliable companion, clouded by subjective selection, and its value as a reference tool diminishes proportionally. For readers unfamiliar with the extensive literary domain that Stevenson claimed for himself, Hammond's Companion will be informative and convenient. For it does manage to communicate in a rather perfunctory fashion a sense of the 433 continuity of Stevenson's work conjoined with the hoboing charm of his travels. The vision of Stevenson as a Romantic fugitive from civilization sailing the salt, salt sea in quest of the hygienic serenity that would enable him to lay bare and examine the moral ambiguities of his race is what the general reading public usually thinks of Stevenson. Hammond 's Companion does nothing to alter that conception; nor perhaps should it, since it seems to have been written as a companion for the general reader and is, consequently, ideally suited for a secondary school and undergraduate audience. For the more discriminating student of Stevenson's works, however, it is disappointing, marred by noticeable omissions, critical naivete, and occasional sections that are conspicuously short on pertinent information. For instance, Hammond does acknowledge the problematical nature of discussing Stevenson as a writer of romance, but he never comes to grips with the genre, deferring instead to the simplistic three paragraph note on romance in Benet's 1965 edition of The Reader's Encyclopedia. Even a work designed with the general public in mind could benefit from an acknowledgment , at least, of Edwin Eigner's lengthy study of Stevenson and the romantic tradition at this point. There is no need to grapple with the more cryptic critical works on the romance genre that have appeared in the last twenty years, but one would expect more than an appeal to Benet in a work that claims to be a reliable literary companion. The book is also dotted with references to unsubstantiated allusions to the existence in relief, or so it seems, of Dickens, Wells, and Defoe in Stevenson's fiction. There are numerous observations on Stevenson's debt to Defoe in Kidnapped, for instance; none of which is substantiated. Yet...