Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/153

 is all right; probably he meant it. Some thousands of years later I write in my diary: "De profundis clamavi." That is a cliché. When I repeated that trite form, I meant nothing, I felt nothing. Jacob clove to Rachel. All right; probably he liked her. Jones cleaves to Mrs. Jones. All wrong; doubtless he hates her. Dumas created the three musketeers. All right; a bright idea. A Scotch writer describes the search for hidden treasure. All wrong; paste and scissors.

In some such fashion as this many a good man's reputation for being alive has been destroyed or seriously damaged. A very pretty case is that of R. L. Stevenson. I am one of the old fogies, past forty, who are not ashamed to acknowledge that they have preserved their "illusion" about Stevenson, in spite of everything that Henley and the surviving members of the Stevenson family and old Edinburgh gossips have done to smash his image. The illusion of my youth about Stevenson was this: that he was one of the most accomplished and versatile artists of the later nineteenth century—that he could play every instrument in the band, and most of them with a degree of skill beyond the reach of his detractors.

On Mr. Scribner's recent republication of his verse and his short stories in two comprehensive volumes, I tried him again where he is often said to be weakest, as a poet. I record here without shame that I can't get through the poems to-day without feeling once more some such emotional perturbation as