Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, and: Dr. Hyde And Mr. Stevenson (review)

Robert Louis Stevenson died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, and (ten years later) so did Anton Chekhov. Despite the enormous differences between them, including Chekhov's greater stature as a writer, they had many things in common besides fragile health. Both were gregarious men, gifted with generous capacities for friendship and humor; both were cheerful, unostentatious humanitarians; and both had the particular kind of mind and manners which enables a grown person to get on well with children.

As to children's literature, Chekhov had firm views; here he is sending two dog stories ("Kashtanka" and "Whitebrow") to a friend for use in an anthology of works suitable for children:

I don't like what is known as children's literature; I don't recognize its validity. Children should be given only what is suitable for adults as well. Children enjoy reading Andersen, The Frigate Pallada, and Gogol, and so do adults. One shouldn't write for children; one should learn to choose works suitable for children from among those already written for adults—in other words, from genuine works of art.

(Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Heim and Karlinsky, p. 372)

In these terms, Stevenson's best poems perform a difficult triple feat: they are suitable for children; they are genuine works of art fit for adults; and they are about children, sensitive Romantic works about the helpless isolation and luxurious privacy of childhood ("Romantic" because the isolation and privacy are felt and cherished by the poet, too).

The selection, editing, design, and introduction of Helen Plotz's volume meet the requirements of Chekhov with taste and good sense. The book makes plain that Stevenson (again like Chekhov) is a less melancholy, less soft, and less twilight-bound figure than conventional opinion would have him. He has a charming, Lennon-McCartney side, as in the poem "My Wife and I, in One Romantic Cot," with its cool, poised closing lines:

Harvests of flowers o'er all our garden-plot,She dreams; and I to enrich a darker spot,—My unprovided cellar; both to swellOur narrow cottage huge as a hotel,That portly friends may come and share our lot—My wife and I.

On the one hand, this tone is sophisticated, and on the other hand a quick-witted child will enjoy the gentle surprises. It is not necessary to know literary history to be amused by the couplet:

My wife and I, in one romantic cot,The world forgetting, by the world forgot,

when it is picked up a few lines later by the amusing deflation of the rhyme word in:

I pledge my'votive powers upon a yacht.

The open, affectionate irony and the fresh use of tired diction are what call to mind the Beatles.

Even when treating the Romantic themes I mention above, Stevenson is not soft or false; retreat into the microcosm of childhood and fantasy is seen accurately as retreat; the consciousness of sickness is there in the brilliantly-chosen adjective in "The Land Of Counterpane":

And sometimes for an hour or soI watched my leaden soldiers go.

And a consciousness that the word "pleasant" is somewhat sick, that the retreat into dreamy stillness and fantasy is somewhat sick, animates the poem's superb final stanza, with its hypnotic tense-change:

I was the giant great and stillThat sits upon the pillow-hill,And sees before him, dale and plain,The pleasant Land of Counterpane.

Without inflating such poems, one can say that they are emotionally complex works of art about childhood, available to children. The retreat into fantasy and its microcosm is not seen in sweet pastels, and neither is the awakening into a large adult world—as these lines from "The Little Land" show:

When my eyes I once againOpen...