Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling

It is very tempting to begin by paraphrasing D. C. Muecke on irony and say that so many critics have already not defined Modernism that there seems to be little point in not defining it all over again. Equal circumspection about its beginnings would then be enjoined upon one as a matter of course. The trouble is that the argument against such an elegant evasion of the issue has been compellingly set out by Stevenson himself. In a devastating review of J. Clarke Murray's 'The Ballads and Songs of Scotland' he writes: 'Now, modesty is a good thing in itself; but the same modesty which withholds a man from resolving a question, should certainly keep him back from publishing the fact of his indecision to the world in more than two hundred pages of type'.