1911] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 39 



to emit flashes that dazzle like the flash of a magnesium light and 

 leave a deeper darkness afterwards, then he was not. He could play 

 those tricks in conversation, no man better, but did not choose to do 

 so in writing. Perhaps in the last twenty years we have had too 

 much of that kind of originality. It has become a literary fashion. 

 Mr. Oscar Wilde began, and Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Chesterton 

 — witty persons both of them, and Mr. Chesterton sometimes, I think, 

 a wise one— have each in his own way continued to play this trick of 

 turning things upside down for us. But it is a trick of which one 

 ends by getting tired. And everything will not bear being turned 

 upside down. You may stand an empty pot on its head, but it is an 

 empty pot none the less, or may be a little the more : a fact which our 

 paradox-mongers sometimes forget. Stevenson's originality was of a 

 different kind. If to be original is to be born with an extreme 

 natural intensity of perception, feeling, and preference, to be in all 

 things acutely yourself, to take nothing at second-hand, to have lived, 

 felt, tested, intensely in experience or in imagination all that you 

 utter before you utter it, to have an instructive and inbred unwilling- 

 ness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional, then he 

 was one of the most original of men. 



As to the question about masterpieces, what is most remarkable 

 about him, you will agree, is not the pre-eminent quality of any one 

 or two or three works, but the vitahty and charm which he was able 

 to give to work in so many different kinds— romances and short 

 tales, both historical and modern, parables and tales of mystery, 

 boys' stories of adventure, the moral, critical and personal essay, 

 travels sentimental and other, memoirs, lyrical and meditative verse 

 both English and Scottish, and even nursery verse, a new vein for 

 genius to work in. All these forms he in his day re-animated by 

 the personality of his own mode of conceiving and handling the 

 vividness of his own vision and temperament. From the first he 

 strongly held imaginative narration to be the true goal and test of 

 his powers : so we are bound to consider his narrative work first. 

 Personally, I should say that if we are to look for what can strictly 

 and technically be called masterpieces in this vein, we shall find them 

 among the shorter rather than among the longer tales. Does there 

 exist a more gothically grim, more intense and vivid, short historical 

 tale, every phrase thrilling and tingling with compressed life, than a 

 " Lodging for the Night," with the rascal poet Francois Villon for 

 its hero ? Or a more true and touching and deftly handled comedy 

 of conjugal relations than " Providence and the Guitar " ? Better still, 

 because searching deeper into the mysteries of life and conscience, 

 are tales with a touch of symbol and allegory like " Markheim," which 

 develops nearly the same idea as Stevenson in another place packs 

 into the proverb, " Shame had a fine bed, but where was slumber ? 

 Once he was in gaol he slept." Or again " Will o' the Mill," the 

 parable of the hanger-back from life and its adventures and responsi- 



