A wonderful anthology of pieces by one of the greatest essayists in the English language and a writer who fascinated Borges. The essay that gives the volume its title was one of William James's favorites. ( )

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, edited by Jeremy Treglown (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), is a collection of essays I happily encountered just a month or so before I was due to teach the new 509 criticism course. I first became interested in Stevenson’s nonfiction when I read his Silverado Squatters in 1999. Because I was thinking about the criticism course, the first pieces I read in this book were two that seemed relevant to critical issues. The first is “My First Book—Treasure Island,” which begins “It was far, indeed, from being my first book, for I am not a novelist alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the great public, regards what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion.” Stevenson talks about the intended audience, the style, and the plot of Treasure Island and the unconscious borrowings he only became aware of later; I used this to start a discussion of authors’ testimony about their own works, the value and especially the limitations of that testimony. Another essay, “A Humble Remonstrance,” is Stevenson’s part in a conversation about the art of prose fiction that began with Walter Besant’s essay and continued with Henry James’s reply to Besant, “The Art of Fiction.” Stevenson has bones to pick with both Besant and James ( )