Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Stevenson's Germany: The Case Against Germany in the Pacific
This volume concludes the argument against Germany begun in "The New Pacific" and continued through "The Problem of the Pacific." It is also an effort to place Robert Louis Stevenson before the world as an important witness in the case; and substantially it is a Stevenson book. Yet to get Stevenson into the witness box the history of Germany's thirty years of intrigue and tergiversation, before he reached Samoa, has to be told. This has brought other important witnesses forward. Broadly, therefore, the book is an account of Stevenson's Germany - the Germany he discovered in the Pacific, ruthless and grasping. Stevenson did not imagine, even so, that the brutal Power he had found out could prove "insolent" in the true Greek sense of the word, and run headlong to ruin. Insolence, when applied to himself and his writings, was a word which moved his most vehement protest. Sir Sidney Colvin says that the particular protest under this head, in one of the Vailima letters, was not uttered by the true Stevenson. It was not like him; and the shadow of death upon him was the only explanation. But in Stevenson's denial there was a real appreciation of the meaning of insolence. He said he had frankly supposed the word to be tabooed between gentlemen. He did not use it to a gentleman and he would not write it of a gentleman. But during his five years in Samoa he learned the larger lesson.
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