44 Sir Sidney Golvin [Feb. 10, 



This is not the method of the reahsts. But how often does a 

 writer who attacks hfe by the realistic method get so near to the 

 heart of it as Stevenson in these passages, or many h'ghter passages 

 similarly conceived ? The realist undertakes a formidable task. 

 His book has to be in some way or another a work of art, 

 after all ; he must weave a pattern of some kind out of the materials 

 offered him by life, and to make his pattern he must pick and choose. 

 Sometimes he satisfies his artistic conscience l)y choosing the grosser 

 and more animal, or let us say bestial, parts of life in quite undue 

 proportion to the rest, and, to vary the pattern, thrusts in masses 

 of undigested notes of crude fact, relevant or irrelevant. These two 

 processes, carried out indeed with remarkable vigour, constitute a 

 large part of the art of that early high priest of realism, M. Zola. 

 There are other and duller kinds of realism than that. There are 

 also other and better kinds ; I should like to instance the later works 

 of Mr. Arnold Bennett, as instances of a realism that can faithfully 

 and patiently and inexorably track every daily detail of dull lives in 

 dull surroundings, but yet manages to give them the thrill, tlie sting, 

 the zest, which in fact all living has, and which art must know how 

 to express or cease to be art at all. And realism of the better kind 

 is no doubt in part a necessary and wholesome reaction against the 

 excesses and weaknesses of false and sentimental romance. Senti- 

 mentalism — sugaring, refusing to acknowledge harsh facts— has 

 been the bane and weakness of a vast deal of English art. But 

 neither in life nor in literature was Stevenson the least atom of a 

 sugarer or a sentimentalist. He never shrank from facing the bitter 

 worst of things. His remedy for their bitterness and ])adness was, 

 in hfe, courage, and a kind of stoic faith in a hidden underlying and 

 controlling drift — call it drift or guidance — towards good. The 

 inmost of that faith is expressed in the rugged and intensely felt set 

 of verses, of one of which let me remind you : — 



" If to feel, in the ink of the slough 

 And the sink of the mire, 

 Veins of glory and fire 



Run through and transpierce and transpire, 

 And a secret purpose of glory in every part. 

 And the answering glory of battle fill my heart ; 

 To thrill with the joy of girded men. 

 To go on for ever and fail and go on again, 

 And be mauled to the earth and arise, 

 And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the 



eyes : 

 With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night 

 That somehow the right is the right 

 And the smooth shall bloom from the rough : 

 Lord, if that were enough ? " 



If such was ill life Stevenson's remedy for the bitterness and 

 badness of things, his remedy in art, and the only true remedy, was 



