"No one can know what Stevenson's life was, except, perhaps, Stevenson, who no doubt had glimmerings from time to time."

When Robert Louis Stevenson was a little boy, he once made the following remark to his mother: "Mother, I've drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?" This remark bears some traces perhaps of that over-formalised Scottish religion in which a man's soul was not so much himself as a very delicate younger brother whom he had to save at all costs.

But the remark has, nevertheless,a great deal of cogency in the question of all biographies, and especially in the biography of a man like Stevenson. Even if Mr. Graham Balfour's Life be the best ever written of one man by another, we cannot escape from the reflection of how strange it is to call such a thing a man's life. A man's life is held to mean what he did, the whole external pantomine of his existence. But this is in fact the most lifeless part of him, being the furthest removed from the centre of life. No one can know what Stevenson's life was, except, perhaps, Stevenson, who no doubt had glimmerings from time to time. The only biography that is really possible is autobiography. To recount the actions of another man is not biography, it is zoology, the noting down of the habits of a new and outlandish animal. It is most valuable and interesting, but it does not deal with the spring and spirit of a man's existence. It may fill ten volumes with anecdotes without once touching upon his life. It has drawed a man, but it has not drawed his soul.

-from an article in the Daily News, written in 1901
Collected in A Handful of Authors (1953)