Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s compliment lands with the clipped grace of a man praising with one hand and filing a complaint with the other. “Pretty good” is the bait; “though” is the blade. He’s not disputing Henry James’s talent so much as pinning him to a period like a specimen: nineteenth-century, “and that glaringly.” The jab isn’t that James is old-fashioned in the quaint sense, but that his very excellence is inseparable from the century’s mannerisms - its moral upholstery, its elaborate social choreography, its belief that consciousness can be rendered through patient, well-lit sentences.

The adverb matters. “Glaringly” suggests something that refuses to blend in, an aesthetic anachronism visible at a glance. Stevenson, an adventure writer with a taste for speed, incident, and muscular clarity, is registering a stylistic mismatch as cultural temperature. James’s intensities happen indoors, in drawing rooms and in minds; Stevenson’s happen on roads, seas, and in bodies. So the line doubles as a tiny manifesto: literature should feel alive to its moment, not embalmed in the formal certainties of the previous one.

There’s also a competitive subtext. Late-Victorian writers were sorting themselves into camps - realism, romance, psychological interiority, popular narrative - while “seriousness” was being renegotiated. Stevenson grants James the status, then quietly refuses to be governed by James’s model of prestige. Admiration, yes; deference, no. The sentence performs what it argues: brisk, skeptical, allergic to reverence, and keenly aware that style is history showing through.