“Talent without genius isn’t much,” remarked Valery, “but genius without talent is nothing whatever.” Robert Louis Stevenson had talent in abundance, and he was touched by genius, but how often the two combined in his work remains a question not easily answered. Stevenson (1850–94) shall soon be dead for fully a century, yet his literary reputation is still unsettled. William Lyon Phelps thought that he belonged with Fielding and Scott, Dickens and George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy. Henry James acclaimed him “an exquisite literary talent.” Yet George Moore, despite the enduring popularity of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, said that Stevenson “imagined no human soul, and he invented no story that anyone will remember,” while John Jay Chapman accused him of merely aping his literary betters with the result that he was nothing more than “the most extraordinary mimic that has ever appeared in literature.” Long moldering in his tomb atop Mount Vaea in Samoa, Stevenson himself may not feel the question of his literary reputation a very pressing one. But to those of us who have a minor mania (if not a full-blown rage) for order, and to whom Robert Louis Stevenson’s career and accomplishments have long seemed as grey and cloudy as a February afternoon in his native city of Edinburgh, the attempt to place Stevenson has seemed long overdue. Besides, as a recent television commercial for America’s leading gutter newspaper puts it, inquiring minds want to know.

Stevenson’s was one of those large, flowing talents