Proust and Stevenson: Natives of an Unknown Country

Over the years we have learned how fatally easy it is to deny Stevenson his due: he makes his writing so accessible and so enjoyable at the most immediate level that we are the less inclined to explore the rich substrata underlying that appealing surface. In a short essay like "Roads", for example, which I intend to give some attention to, there lies a coiled energy which, once released, will transport us far beyond the simple pleasures of - to use his own phrase - a "rural voluptuary". Before doing so, however, I should like to indicate the areas which I shall concentrate on in seeking to make certain bold comparisons between the work of Stevenson and Proust - "bold" because one of them is a giant of modernist writing and the other a proto-modernist whose claims to distinction, though real and substantial, are more modest.