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Excerpt from The Eugene Field Myth: Being a Protest Against the Silly, Sentimental Apotheosis of a Man and Writer <p>Ter of Robertouis Stevenson, against displacing the man and setting up an idol, against transub stantiating flesh and blood into a sort of choco late-cream cherub, the true lovers of men and of literature were rejoiced, even though the lady like persons who insist that their heroes shall be flawlessly angelic were sorely grieved. Mr. Henley pleaded for the real Stevenson, whom he knew, against the ideally impossible or impossibly ideal Stevenson, whom most of his worshipers had read about rather than read in his own work. The protest startled for a time, but not for long, as the judicious soon saw that Stevenson was the greater for the peccadilloes his former friend had pointed out. Henley's Lewis grips us to him more firmly than the idealized creature pictured by over-enthusiasticadmirers, so that what the London Saturday Weenie? characterized as a case of literary leprosy, and what hundreds of petty para graphers in England and America called ghoul ishness, ingratitude, and sacrilege has, within a few brief weeks, become recognized as a valuable service to the dead stylist and a use ful contribution to the literature of biography. Ja'wbat had happened or was happening to Stevenson is in danger of happening to Eugene Field. He has been unduly worshiped by the undiscerning multitude. He has been so be praised that criticism of him or his work has been regarded as a crime almost equal in atrocity to speaking disrespectfully of the equator. Field has been unrestrainedly sentimentalized about until the saccharine slavering of his name and fame has become positively nauseating. Everything that he ever wrote - that was printable - has been reproduced in cheap form and indiscriminatingly lauded by those who laud everything. The banal Tribune Primer, with its boyish vulgarities, has been sold by the hundred thousand. Culture's Garland, a piece 2of work that