It is a curious psychological fact that men with interests almost entirely intellectual will suffer a sense of inferiority and shame from a purely physical defect, which will sometimes cancel their whole work. There are cases, naturally, where that shame has not been disastrous, but none the less it has been present. Byron was driven by his lame leg to a bitter isolation and to satire: from the calm, but somewhat too facile loveliness of ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ to the tortured medley of buffoonery and grandeur which he called Don Juan. Byron’s shame was our gain. Stevenson, however much he might sound the brazen trumpet of his heroics, was ashamed of his consumptive body. ‘Shall we never shed blood?’ he asked, only half-humorously, and he hoped that in the swords’ clash of Kidnapped, his readers would forget that one man, by no stretch of imagination, could ever put himself in the round house with Alan Breck. And yet, because he too was forced like Byron, though by more material circumstances, into isolation, we have gained a level controlled prose as likely to endure as that of Addison, and at least one great novel Weir of Hermiston.
