Masters of the English Novel Part 11

Nor is much light thrown on Meredith's path in turning to his personal history. Little is known of this author's ancestry and education; his environment has been so simple, his life in its exteriors so uneventful, that we return to the work itself with the feeling that the key to the secret room must be here if anywhere. It is known that he was educated in youth in Germany, which is interesting in reference to the problem of his style.

And there is more to be said concerning his parentage than the smug propriety of print has revealed while he lived. We know, too, that his marriage with the daughter of Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k proved unhappy, and that for many years he has resided, almost a recluse, with his daughter, in the idyllic retirement of Surrey.

The privacy of Boxhill has been respected; next to never has Meredith spoken in any public way and seldom visited London.

When he was, at Tennyson's death, made the President of the British Society of Authors, the honor sought the man. The rest is silence; what has appeared since his death has been of too conflicting a nature for credence. We await a trustworthy biography.

The appeal then must be to the books themselves. Exclusive of short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of generous girth--for Meredith is old-fas.h.i.+oned in his demand for elbow-room. They are preeminently novels of character and more than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in them is that of the intellect. This does not mean that they are wanting in emotional force or interest: merely, that in George Meredith's fiction men and women live the life of thought as it is acted upon by practical issues. Character seen in action is always his prepossession; plot is naught save as it exhibits this. The souls of men and women are his quarry, and the test of a civilization the degree in which it has developed the mind for an enlightened control over the emotions and the bodily appet.i.tes. Neither does this mean, as with Henry James, the disappearance of plot: a healthy objectivity of narrative framework is preserved; if anything the earlier books--"Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming" and the duo "Sandra Belloni" and "Vittoria"--have more of story interest than the later novels. Meredith has never feared the use of the episode, in this suggesting the older methods of Fielding and Smollett. Yet the episodic in his hands has ever its use for psychologic envisagement. Love, too, plays a large role in his fiction; indeed, in the wider platonic sense, it is constantly present, although he is the last man to be called a writer of love-stories. And no man has permitted himself greater freedom in stepping outside the story in order to explain his meaning, comment upon character and scene, rhapsodize upon Life, or directly harangue the reader. And this broad marginal reservation of s.p.a.ce, however much it is deplored in viewing his work as novel-making, adds a peculiar tonic and is a characteristic we could ill spare. It brings us back to the feeling that he is a great man using the fiction form for purposes broader than that of telling a story.

Because of this ample personal testimony in his books it should be easy to state his Lebensanschauung, unless the opacity of his manner blocks the way or he indulges in self-contradiction in the manner of a Nietzsche. Such is not the case. What is the philosophy unfolded in his representative books?

It will be convenient to choose a few of those typical for ill.u.s.tration. The essence of Meredith is to be discovered in such works as "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Harry Richmond," "The Egoist," "Diana of the Crossways." If you know these, you understand him. "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" might well be added because of its teaching; but the others will serve, with the understanding that so many-sided a writer has in other works given further n.o.ble proof of his powers. If I allowed personal preference to be my sole guide, "Rhoda Fleming" would be prominent in the list; and many place "Beauchamp's Career" high, if not first among his works;--a novel teeming with his views, particularly valuable for its treatment of English politics and certainly containing some of his most striking characterization, in particular, one of his n.o.blest women. Still, those named will fairly reflect the novelist and speak for all.

"Richard Feverel," which had been preceded by a book of poems, the fantasia "The Shaving of s.h.a.gpat" and an historical novelette "Farina," was the first book that announced the arrival of a great novelist. It is at once a romance of the modern type, a love-story and a problem book; the tri-statement makes it Meredithian. It deals with the tragic union of Richard and Lucy, in a setting that s.h.i.+fts from sheer idyllic, through worldly and realistic to a culmination of dramatic grief. It contains, in measure heaped up and running over, the poetry, the comedy and the philosophy, the sense of Life's riddle, for which the author is renowned. But its intellectual appeal of theme--aside from the incidental wisdom that stars its pages--is found in the study of the problem of education. Richard's father would shape his career according to a preconceived idea based on parental love and guided by an anxious, fussy consulting of the oracles. The attempt to stretch the son upon a pedagogic procustean bed fails disastrously, wrecking his own happiness, and that of his sweet girl-wife. Love is stronger than aught else and we are offered the spectacle of ruined lives hovered over by the best intentions. The hovel is an ill.u.s.tration of the author's general teaching that a human being must have reasonable liberty of action for self-development. The heart must be allowed fair-play, though its guidance by the intellect is desirable.

It has been objected that this moving romance ends in unnecessary tragedy; that the catastrophe is not inevitable. But it may be doubted if the mistake of Sir Austin Feverel could be so clearly indicated had not the chance bullet of the duel killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor, dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one overlooks all such, remembering Richard and Lucy meeting by the river; Richard's lonesome night walk when he learns he is a father; the marvelous parting from Bella Mount; father and son confronted with Richard's separation from the girl-wife; the final piteous pa.s.sing of Lucy. These are among the great moments of English fiction.

One gets a sense of Meredith's resources of breadth and variety next in taking up "Evan Harrington." Here is a satiric character sketch where before was romance; for broad comedy in the older and larger sense it has no peer among modern novels. The purpose is plain: to show the evolution of a young middle-cla.s.s Englishman, a tailor's son, through worldly experience with polite society into true democracy. After the disillusionment of "high life," after much yeasty juvenile foolishness and false ideals, Evan comes back to his father's shop with his lesson learned: it is possible (in modern England) to be both tailor and gentleman.

In placing this picture before the spectator, an incomparable view of genteel society with contrasted touches of low life is offered. For pure comedy that is of the midriff as well as of the brain, the inn scene with the astonis.h.i.+ng Raikes as central figure is unsurpa.s.sed in all Meredith, and only d.i.c.kens has done the like. And to correspond in the fas.h.i.+onable world, there is Harrington's sister, the Countess de Saldar, who is only second to Becky Sharp for saliency and delight. Some find these comic figures overdrawn, even impossible; but they stand the test applied to d.i.c.kens: they abide in affectionate memory, vivid evocations made for our lasting joy. As with "Feverel," the book is a piece of life first, a lesson second; but the underlying thesis is present, not to the injury of one who reads for story's sake.

An extraordinary further example of resourcefulness, with a complete change of key, is "The Adventures of Harry Richmond."

The ostensible business of the book is to depict the growth from boyhood to manhood and through sundry experiences of love, with the resulting effect upon his character, of the young man whose name gives it t.i.tle. It may be noted that a favorite task with Meredith is this, to trace the development of a personality from immaturity to a maturity gained by the hard knocks of the master-educator, Love. But the figure really dominant is not Harry nor any one of his sweethearts, but that of his father, Roy Richmond. I must believe that English fiction offers nothing more original than he. He is an indescribable compound of brilliant swashbuckler, splendid gentleman and winning Goodheart. Barry Lyndon, Tarascon, Don Quixote and Septimus go into his making--and yet he is not explained;--an absolute original. The scene where, in a German park on an occasion of great pomp, he impersonates the statue of a Prince, is one of the author's triumphs--never less delightful at a re-reading.

But has this amazing creation a meaning, or is Roy merely one of the results of the sportive play of a man of genius? He is something more, we feel, when, at the end of the romance, he gives his life for the woman who has so faithfully loved him and believed in his royal pretensions. He perishes in a fire, because in saving her he would not save himself. It is as if the author said: "Behold, a man by nature histrionic and Bohemian, and do not make the mistake to think him incapable of n.o.bility.

Romantic in his faults, so too he is romantic in his virtues."

"And back of this kindly treatment of the lovable rascal (who was so ideal a father to the little Richmond!) does there not lurk the thought that the pseudo-romantic att.i.tude toward Life is full of danger--in truth, out of the question in modern society?"

"The Egoist" has long been a test volume with Meredithians. If you like it you are of the cult; if not, merely an amateur. It is inevitable to quote Stevenson who, when he had read it several times, declared that at the sixth reading he would begin to realize its greatness. Stevenson was a doughty admirer of Meredith, finding the elder "the only man of genius of my acquaintance," and regarding "Rhoda Fleming" as a book to send one back to Shakspere.

That "The Egoist" is typical--in a sense, most typical of the fictions,--is very true. That, on the other hand, it is Meredith's best novel may be boldly denied, since it is hardly a novel at all. It is a wonderful a.n.a.lytic study of the core of self that is in humanity, Willoughby, incarnation of a self-centeredness glossed over to others and to himself by fine gentleman manners and instincts, is revealed stroke after stroke until, in the supreme test of his alliance with Clara Middleton, he is flayed alive for the reader's benefit. In this power of exposure, by the subtlest, most unrelenting a.n.a.lysis, of the very penetralia of the human soul it has no counterpart; beside it, most of the psychology of fiction seems child's play. And the truth of it is overwhelming. No wonder Stevenson speaks of its "serviceable exposure of myself." Every honest man who reads it, winces at its infallible touching of a moral sore-spot. The inescapable ego in us all was never before portrayed by such a master.

But because it is a study that lacks the breadth, variety, movement and objectivity of the Novel proper, "The Egoist" is for the confirmed Meredith lover, not for the beginner: to take it first is perchance to go no further. Readers have been lost to him by this course. The immense gain in depth and delicacy acquired by English fiction since Richardson is well ill.u.s.trated by a comparison of the latter's "Sir Charles Grandison" with Meredith's "The Egoist." One is a portrait for the time, the other for all time. Both, superficially viewed, are the same type: a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense.

But O the difference! Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all making the wors.h.i.+p of the ego hateful.

It is interesting that "Diana of the Crossways" was the book first to attract American readers. It has some of the author's eccentricities at their worst. But it was in one respect an excellent choice: the heroine is thoroughly representative of the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic to her for the reason that she seems indigenous. Diana furnishes a text for a dissertation on Meredith's limning of the s.e.x, and of his conception of the mental relation of the s.e.xes. She is a modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts; finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried friends.h.i.+p, comrades.h.i.+p, respect, warming into pa.s.sion that, like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring, splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in the development of society. He has an intense conviction that the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her "intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a mult.i.tude of sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the s.e.x, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works abound in pa.s.sages in which this view is displayed, flashed before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting aside of the marriage bond in certain circ.u.mstances. In both "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to antic.i.p.ate what time may bring to pa.s.s. It is enough here to say that this extreme view does not represent Meredith's best fiction nor his most fruitful period of production.

Perhaps the most original thing about Meredith as a novelist is the daring way in which he has made an alliance between romance and the intellect which was supposed, in an older conception, to be its archenemy. He gives to Romance, that creature of the emotions, the corrective and tonic of the intellect "To preserve Romance," he declares, "we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts ... in days of a growing activity of the head." Let us say once again that Romance means a certain use of material as the result of an att.i.tude toward Life; this att.i.tude may be temporary, a mood; or steady, a conviction. It is the latter with George Meredith; and be it understood, his material is always realistic, it is his interpretation that is superbly idealistic. The occasional crabbedness of his manner and his fiery admiration for Italy are not the only points in which he reminds one of Browning. He is one with him in his belief in soul, his conception of life is an arena for its trying-out; one with him also in the robust acceptance of earth and earth's worth, evil and all, for enjoyment and as salutary experience. This is no fanciful parallel between Meredith and a man who has been called (with their peculiarities of style in mind) the Meredith of Poetry, as Meredith has been called the Browning of Prose.

Thus, back of whatever may be the external story--the Italian struggle for unity in "Vittoria," English radicalism in "Beauchamp's Career," a seduction melodrama in "Rhoda Fleming"--there is always with Meredith a steady interpretation of life, a principle of belief. It is his crowning distinction that he can make an intellectual appeal quite aside from the particular story he is telling;--and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is because we hail him as philosopher, wit and poet that he fails comparatively as artist. He shows throughout his work a sublime carelessness of workmans.h.i.+p on the structural side of his craft; but in those essentials, dialogue, character and scene, he rises to the peaks of his profession.

Probably more readers are offended by his mannerisms of style than by any other defect; and they are undeniable. The opening chapter of "Diana" is a hard thing to get by; the same may be said of the similar chapter in "Beauchamp's Career." In "One of our Conquerors," early and late, the manner is such as to lose for him even tried adherents. Is the trouble one of thought or expression? And is it honest or an affectation? Meredith in some books--and in all books more or less--adopts a strangely indirect, over-elaborated, far-fetched and fantastic style, which those who love him are fain to deplore. The author's learning gets in his way and leads him into recondite allusions; besides this, he has that quality of mind which is stimulated into finding a.n.a.logies on every side, so that image is piled on image and side-paths of thought open up in the heat of this mental activity. Part of the difficulty arises from surplusage of imagination. Sometimes it is used in the service of comment (often satirical); again in a kind of Greek chorus to the drama, greatly to its injury; or in pure description, where it is hardly less offensive. Thus in "The Egoist" we read: "Willoughby shadowed a deep droop on the bend of his neck before Clara," and reflection shows that all this absurdly acrobatic phrase means is that the hero bowed to the lady. An utterly simple occurrence and thus described! It is all the more strange and aggravating in that it comes from a man who on hundreds of occasions writes English as pungent, sonorous and sweet as any writer in the history of the native literature. This is true both of dialogue and narrative. He is the most quotable of authors; his Pilgrim's Scrip is stuffed full of precious sayings, expressing many moods of emotion and interpreting the world under its varied aspects of romance, beauty, wit and drama. "Strength is the brute form of truth." There is a French conciseness in such a sentence and immense mental suggestiveness. Both his scenic and character phrasing are memorable, as where the dyspeptic philosopher in "Feverel" is described after dinner as "languidly twinkling stomachic contentment." And what a scene is that where Master Gammon replies to Mrs. Sumfit's anxious query concerning his lingering at table with appet.i.te apparently unappeasable:

"'When do you think you will have done, Master Gammon?'

"'When I feels my b.u.t.tons, Ma'am.'"

Or hear John Thrasher in "Harry Richmond" dilate on Language:

'There's c.o.c.kney, and there's country, and there's school.

Mix the three, strain and throw away the sediment. Now yon's my view.'

Has any philologist said all that could be said, so succinctly?

His lyric outbursts in the face of Nature or better yet, where as in the moonlight meeting of the lovers at Wllming Weir in "Sandra Belloni," nature is interspersed with human pa.s.sion in a glorious union of music, picture and impa.s.sioned sentiment,--these await the pleasure of the enthralled seeker in every book.

To encounter such pa.s.sages (perhaps in a mood of protest over some almost insufferable defect) is to find the reward rich indeed. Let the cause of obscurity be what it may, we need not doubt that with Meredith style is the man, a perfectly honest way of expressing his personality. It is not impossible that his unconventional education and the early influence of German upon him, may come into the consideration. But in the main his peculiarity is congenital.

Meredith lacked self-criticism as a writer. But it is quite inaccurate to speak of obscure thought: it is language, the medium, which makes the trouble when there is any. His thought, allowing for the fantasticality of his humor in certain moods, is never muddled or unorganized: it is sane, consistent and worthy of attention. To say this, is still to regret the stylistic vagaries.

One other defect must be mentioned: the characters talk like Meredith, instead of in their own persons. This is not true uniformly, of course, but it does mar the truth of his presentation. Young girls show wit and wisdom quite out of keeping; those in humble life--a bargeman, perhaps, or a prize-fighter--speak as they would not in reality. Illusion is by so much disturbed. It would appear in such cases that the thinker temporarily dominated the creative artist.

When all is said, pro and con, there remains a towering personality; a writer of unique quality; a man so stimulating and surprising as he is, that we almost prefer him to the perfect artist he never could be. No English maker of novels can give us a fuller sense of life, a keener realization of the dignity of man. It is natural to wish for more than we have--to desire that Meredith had possessed the power of complete control of his material and himself, had revised his work to better advantage. But perhaps it is more commonsensible to be thankful for him as he is.

As to influence, it would seem modest to a.s.sert that Meredith is as bracingly wholesome morally as he is intellectually stimulating. In a private letter to a friend who was praising his finest book, he whimsically mourns the fact that he must write for a living and hence feel like disowning so many of his children when in cold blood he scrutinizes his offspring. The letter in its entirety (it is unpublished) is proof, were any needed, that he had a high artistic ideal which kept him n.o.bly dissatisfied with his endeavor. There is in him neither pose nor complacent self-satisfaction. To an American, whom he was bidding good-by at his own gate, he said: "If I had my books to do over again, I should try harder to make sure their influence was good." His aims, ethical and artistic, throughout his work, can be relied upon as high and n.o.ble. His faults are as honest as he himself, the inherent defects of his genius. No writer of our day stands more st.u.r.dily for the idea that, whereas art is precious, personality is more precious still; without which art is a tinkling cymbal and with which even a defective art can conquer Time, like a garment not all-seemly, that yet cannot hide an heroic figure.

CHAPTER XIII

STEVENSON

It is too early yet to be sure that Robert Louis Stevenson will make a more cogent appeal for a place in English letters as a writer of fiction than as an essayist. But had he never written essays likely to rank him with the few masters of that delightful fireside form, he would still have an indisputable claim as novelist. The claim in fact is a double one; it is founded, first, on his art and power as a maker of romance, but also upon his historical service to English fiction, as the man most instrumental in purifying the muddy current of realism in the late nineteenth century by a wholesome infusion,--the romantic view of life. It is already easier to estimate his importance and get the significance of his work than it was when he died in 1894--stricken down on the piazza of his house at Vailima, a Scotchman doomed to fall in a far-away, alien place.

We are better able now to separate that personal charm felt from direct contact with the man, which almost hypnotized those who knew him, from the more abiding charm which is in his writings: the revelation of a character the most attractive of his generation. Rarely, if ever before, have the qualities of artistry and fraternal fellows.h.i.+p been united in a man of letters to such a degree; most often they are found apart, the G.o.ds choosing to award their favors less lavishly.

Because of this union of art and life, Stevenson's romances killed two birds with one stone; boys loved his adventuresomeness, the wholesome sensationalism of his stories with something doing on every page, while amateurs of art responded to his felicity of phrase, his finished technique, the exhibition of craftsmans.h.i.+p conquering difficulty and danger.

Artist, lover of life, insistent truth-teller, Calvinist, Bohemian, believer in joy, all these cohabit in his hooks. In early masterpieces like "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker" it is the lover of life who conducts us, telling the story for story's sake:

"My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

Such is the G.o.ddess that beckons on. The creed implicit in such work deems that life is stirring and worth while, and that it is a weakness to repine and waste time, to be too subjective when so much on earth is objectively alluring. This is only a part of Stevenson, of course, but it was that phase of him vastly liked of the public and doubtless doing most to give him vogue.

But in later work like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" we get quite another thing: the skilled story-maker is still giving us thrilling fiction, to be sure, but here it is the Scotchman of acute conscience, writing a spiritual allegory with the healthy instinct which insists that the lesson shall be dramatized. So, too, in a late fiction like "Ebb Tide," apparently as picaresque and harum-scarum as "Treasure Island," it is nevertheless the moralist who is at work beneath the brilliantly picturesque surface of the narrative, contrasting types subtly, showing the gradings in moral disintegration. In the past-masters.h.i.+p of the finest Scotch novels, "Kidnapped" and its sequel "David Balfour," "The Master of Ballantrae" and the beautiful torso, "Weir of Hermiston," we get the psychologic romance, which means a s.h.i.+ft of interest;--character comes first, story is secondary to it. Here is the maturest Stevenson, the fiction most expressive of his genius, and naturally the inspiration is native, he looks back, as he so often did in his poetry, to the distant gray little island which was Motherland to him, home of his youth and of his kindred, the earth where he was fain to lie when his time came. Stevenson, to the end, could always return to sheer story, as in "St. Ives," but in doing so, is a little below his best: that kind did not call on his complete powers: in such fiction deep did not answer unto deep.

In 1883, when "Treasure Island" appeared, the public was gasping for the oxygen that a story with outdoor movement and action could supply: there was enough and to spare of invertebrate subtleties, strained metaphysics and coa.r.s.e naturalistic studies. A sublimated dime novel like "Treasure Island" came at the psychologic moment; the year before "The New Arabian Nights"

had offered the same sort of pabulum, but had been practically overlooked. Readers were only too glad to turn from people with a past to people of the past, or to people of the present whose ways were ways of pleasantness. Stevenson subst.i.tuted a lively, normal interest in life for plotlessness and a surfeit of the flesh. The public rose to the bait as the trout to a particularly inviting fly. Once more reverting to the good old appeal of Scott--incident, action and derring-do--he added the attraction of his personal touch, and what was so gallantly preferred was greedily grasped.

Although, as has been said, Stevenson pa.s.sed from the primitive romance of the s.h.i.+lling Shocker to the romance of character, his interest in character study was keen from the first: the most plot-cunning and external of his yarns have that illuminative exposure of human beings--in flashes at least--which mark him off from the bluff, robust manner of a Dumas and lend an attraction far greater than that of mere tangle of events. This gets fullest expression in the Scotch romances.

"The Master of Ballantrae," for one ill.u.s.tration; the interplay of motive and act as it affects a group of human beings is so conducted that plot becomes a mere framework, within which we are permitted to see a typical tragedy of kins.h.i.+p. This receives curious corroboration in the fact that when, towards the close of the story, the scene s.h.i.+fts to America and the main motive--the unfolding of the fraternal fortunes of the tragic brothers, is made minor to a series of gruesome adventures (however entertaining and well done) the reader, even if uncritical, has an uneasy sense of disharmony: and rightly, since the strict character romance has changed to the romance of action.

It has been stated that the finer qualities of Stevenson are called out by the psychological romance on native soil. He did some brilliant and engaging work of foreign setting and motive.

"The Island Nights' Entertainments" is as good in its way as the earlier "New Arabian Nights"--far superior to it, indeed, for finesse and the deft command of exotic material. Judged as art, "The Bottle Imp" and "The Beach of Falesa" are among the triumphs of ethnic interpretation, let alone their more external charms of story. And another masterpiece of foreign setting, "A Lodging for The Night," is further proof of Stevenson's ability to use other than Scotch motives for the materials of his art.

"Ebb-Tide," again, grim as it is, must always be singled out as a marvel of tone and proportion, yet seems born out of an existence utterly removed as to conditions and incentives from the land of his birth. But when, in his own words:

"The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again."

then, as if vitalized by mother-earth, Stevenson shows a breadth, a vigor, a racy idiosyncrasy, that best justify a comparison with Scott. It means a quality that is easier felt than expressed; of the very warp and woof of his work. If the elder novelist seems greater in scope, spontaneity and substance, the younger surpa.s.ses him in the elegancies and niceties of his art. And it is only a just recognition of the difference of Time as well as of personality to say that the psychology of Stevenson is far more profound and searching. Nor may it be denied that Sir Walter nods, that there are flat, uninteresting stretches in his heroic panorama, while of Stevenson at the worst, we may confidently a.s.sert that he is never tedious. He fails in the comparison if anywhere in largeness of personality, not in the perfectness of the art of his fiction. In the technical demands of his profession he is never wanting. He always has a story to tell, tells it with the skill which means constructive development and a sense of situation; he creates characters who live, interest and do not easily fade from memory: he has exceptional power in so filling in backgrounds as to produce the illusion of atmosphere; and finally, he has, whether in dialogue or description, a wonderfully supple instrument of expression. If the style of his essays is at times mannered, the charge can not be made against his representative fiction: "Prince Otto" stands alone in this respect, and that captivating, comparatively early romance, confessedly written under the influence of Meredith, is a delicious literary experiment rather than a deeply-felt piece of life. Perhaps the central gift of all is that for character--is it, in truth, not the central gift for any weaver of fiction? So we thought in studying d.i.c.kens. Stevenson's creations wear the habit of life, yet with more than life's grace of carriage; they are seen picturesquely without, but also psychologically within.