And
yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he
would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling,
though with many healthy hesitations; but he would not have liked the
triumph of Kipling: which was the success of the politician and the
failure of the poet. Yet when we look back up the false perspective of
time, Stevenson does seem in a sense to have prepared that imperial and
downward path.
I shall not talk here, any more than anywhere else in this book, about
the "sedulous ape" business. No man ever wrote as well as Stevenson who
cared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,
in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purely
philosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which he
himself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglect
romance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase of
one of his letters "our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:
it drops so much out of a man." On the whole he concluded that what had
been dropped out of the man was the boy.
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