Up in the Green Dome

ROBERT Louis STEVENSON (196 pp.)--David Daiches--New Directions ($2).

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a handbarrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail jailing over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. . . .

Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which was first published in book form in 1883, is one of the western world's most popular books. But the high, old tottering voice of literary criticism has either ignored it or rated it as the literary equivalent of scooters and bubble gum. Now, Cornell Lecturer David Daiches (Poetry in the Modern World, The Novel in the Modern World), like Stevenson an Edinburgh expatriate, has made an attempt to increase his countryman's stature with a careful, interesting, but rather timid analysis of Stevenson's works.

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, glamorous places to which his scooter carried him.

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.

Unrealistic Realists. It was an escape of which he was not in the least ashamed. "There is an idea abroad among moral people," he wrote, "that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy--if I may."

His 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."

The 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 all."

It is 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, The Gold Bug and The Three Musketeers.

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