tells an objective tale with little care for character as such; which is all wrong, since in works like the Master of Ballantrae and Weir characterization is the prime motive; as it is, moreover, in such a creation as his Ebb Tide. This affixion of the romantic tag to Stevenson's coat has given color to the idea of him as one who held his art as a means of pleasure-giving, nothing more. It may be observed in passing that this is by no means necessarily a low ideal; it all depends upon your definition of the Protean word pleasure. But one who stops here with Stevenson is again off the scent. Even if we do not overstep the bounds of the novel, to read the stories ruminatingly and in their full content is to realize that the author is no more romantic than realistic; that he is both objective and subjective; Stevenson, in truth, sums up in his own person the proper relation of ideal to actual. His interest in life as fact and detail was immense, constant; his inferences (in his fiction) were blithely romantic. His own sprightly genius formed the connecting link between those erroneously reckoned contradictions.

Stevenson's tales offer a kind of common meeting-ground for readers of opposing minds and creeds. The lovers of romance sight of folks is here! hail them gleefully, as a matter of course; believers in "realism" yield such fiction at least a grudging approval since, after all, they belong to humankind and enjoy what is enjoyable; while they who stickle for style are fed so high that they do willingly overlook so vulgar a thing as a rattling good plot. He who gets no satisfaction from Treasure Island or Kidnapped is a rarer bird than the Dodo. It is one of Stevenson's merits in such books that he administers ether to the critic who, boy-like, loses sight of technique in pleasure and, coming later out of the swoon, finds his proper joy in tasting quality and detecting the fine art of the performance. The sense of literature is forgotten for the nonce in the sense of the joy of life— the joy which Oswald in Ghosts longs for so piteously, and which every son of woman who is in health and antecedent to his dotage demands at Fate's hands.

IV

It is no belittlement of the fiction, however, to find the realest Stevenson, the most intimate exposure of himself, in the essays and poetry. It is hardly too much to say that one knows him not until he is known here. As an essayist Stevenson has the preserving qualities: charm, rich suggestiveness, wisdom lightly carried, distinction of manner. In the essay an author stands self-revealed; he may mask behind other literary forms, in some measure; but commonplaceness, vulgarity, thinness of nature, are in this kind instantly uncovered. The essay is for this reason a severe test. Character speaks in and through it; the deepest and most winsome of a man comes out often in an essay; he invites you into a confidential, quiet-furnished corner of his soul, there to listen to a conversation that is at once colloquial and confessional. And style, manner, is to the essay what water is to the fish: an element native to its progress. When talking of the essay it is inevitable to consider an author's way of saying things. Lowell once declared

of Sidney Lanier that he had a genius for the happy word; to few could the remark have been applied more fitly than to Stevenson. His diction is not seldom spoken of as if its main feature were co-ordination or general harmony. It is true that it was admirably of a piece: he learned to find and keep the "essential note." Yet this is not his most noticeable hallmark on the side of style. He was startlingly felicitous as a coiner of word and phrase. Swift's narrow definition of style as the right words in the right places leaves untold the more important half of

the story. The "right word is well;

the correct writer acceptable. But there is something besides right and wrong in the selection and marshalling of words for literary purposes: there is good, better, best; we must reckon with the unexpected and the delightsome. To use the right word is a sort of negative virtue: to use the creative word, -unlooked-for, a glad surprise to reader and writer alike, — that is quite another and higher thing. The difference between the two is a measure between talent and genius. Certain critics harp upon what they call the " inevitable"

in diction.

Pace Flaubert! there is no such thing; if there were, literature would be mathematics. Stevenson's pages have these frequent windfalls for us; we mark the passages, and, returning on the page, smack our lips over the more leisurely second tasting. After all, it will not do to forget that to the truly elect of literature expression, if not all, is much; the right turning of a phrase gives such an one a rapture greater than would the taking of a city. To some the joy will seem disproportionate, nugatory; which is but additional proof of the exquisiteness of the experience.

Now, one feels in reading Robert Louis Stevenson's finest papers- careless, inimitable causeries on books, men, life, the moral verities — the theme is naught, handling everything - that here is the manner of a master; a man with infinite good temper, perfect breeding, and character. Not to recognize the character, along with and over and above the style, is, in a way, to announce one's limitations. Follow the essays along the line of Stevenson's artistic and spiritual development; from the slightly self-conscious cloth-of