114 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
essay “Youth and Age” he writes that when an old man
wags his head and says to a youngster, “Ah, so I thought
when I was your age,” it should be competent for the young
man to reply, “My venerable sir, so I shall probably think
when I am yours,”—meaning that one is as likely to be right
as the other, one as likely to be wrong. Stevenson was forty-
four when he died, and a wise man; but in his feelings he
never got beyond twenty-five, perhaps never beyond fifteen.
That is why he was England’s greatest writer of real litera-
ture for boys. He never stopped feeling like a boy.
The secret of his art, like the secret of his spirit, —for I
am drifting away from the spirit of the man to considera-
tions of his art,—is this unwearied youthfulness. I am about
to quote again from Mr. Chesterton, my only apology for
doing so being that I was not clever enough to think of this
before Mr. Chesterton had said it. Chesterton is contrast-
ing the placid and passive state of childhood with the active,
adventurous state of boyhood, and is noting that although
there is an abundance of art for children, there is little true
art for boys: “The finest and most peculiar work of Steven-
son is rather that he was the first writer to treat seriously
and poetically the æsthetie instincts of the boy. He cele-
brated the toy gun rather than the rattle. Around the child
and his rattle there has gathered a splendid service of lit-
erature and art : Hans Andersen and Charles Kingsley and
George Macdonald and Walter Crane and Kate Green-
away. . . . And then he [the boy] is suddenly dropped
with a crash out of literature and can read nothing but ‘Jack
Valiant among the Indians.’ For in the whole scene there
is only one book which is at once literature, like Hans An-
dersen, and yet a book for boys and not for children, and
its name is ‘Treasure Island.’ ”
Stevenson quotes from a stricture by Mr. James on