ABSTRACT
Deacon Brodie is the worst sort of melodramatic amateur psychology; Macaire is Robert Louis Stevenson's love for French wit gone haywire; Admiral Guinea says something about slavery, but not much. While Edgar Allan Poe treats perversity as a psychological phenomenon, Stevenson's Presbyterian sensibility associates it with the theological condition of original sin and 'the war between the members' of good and evil. The story of Stevenson's triumph over chronic bronchial illness to become a distinguished Samoan — 'Tusitala' - is certainly that of a man with a genius for life against often fearful odds. Most early products of his pen, and some later ones, offer more elegance than thematic meat. Complete professionalism and stylistic accomplishment are his only consistencies. A precursor of the moralistic symbolic fantasies of George MacDonald, the story is a biblically cadenced parable of Scottish religious sado-masochism and personal guilt which implicitly acknowledges the violence done to Stevenson's parents by his renunciation of the church.
