1911] 0)1 Robert Louis Stevenson. 49 



on the fatal morning) — when I read, *' My bosom's lord is literally 

 swipey with elevation," I catch a far off but a genuine note of tiiat 

 flood of mingled poetry and slang which used to pour from him in 

 speech. Whereas in serious writing he was careful above all things to 

 strike a key of expression and keep it, to use no discords but such as 

 might artfully enhance the harmony. 



Of that famous prose style of Stevenson's I do not propose to say 

 much more than has been said by implication already. He began 

 with the resources of a large vocabulary diligently acquired and an ear 

 both naturally sensitive and highly trained for the endlessly variable 

 cadences and harmonies of prose. Ki first he was prone to aim at 

 verbal sweetness above all things— what he afterwards came to call 

 " fluting." But fortunately his sense of things — of life, nature, and 

 human nature — was not less keen and urgent than his sense of words. 

 Hence after the prentice years, the phrases came to him more and 

 more full-charged and vibrating with life and the images and emotions 

 of life, yet without loss of clarity or beauty or music. To possess in 

 such equal balance a command of things — the material of life — and of 

 words — the material of the writer's art — is one of the rarest gifts of 

 the man of letters. We can all think of writers whose genius is above 

 all for words, who have over words a quite magical command, but 

 whose verbal achievements, when you come to be familiar with them, 

 turn cloying and lose their power over us because the artist has no 

 equal grasp of the material of life— because the words are but faintly 

 impregnated by the power and truth of things. In poetry the late 

 Mr. Swinburne was to my mind the very type of such a writer. In 

 the work of other men, and greater men than Stevenson, the words 

 wiU sometimes twist and creak and jam themselves under the stress 

 and pressure of vital meanings and overcharged significance, as 

 happens not a little in the case of the writing of both Browning and 

 Meredith. If I were asked what was the first of Stevenson's qualities 

 as a prose writer, I should say this happy balance of power in his 

 dealing with those two worlds so unlike and so mysteriously related, 

 the world of things and the world of words. As contributing to this 

 singular power of expressing what he calls " the incommunicable thrill 

 of things," we can all perceive his infinitely scrupulous choice as well as 

 his fine parsimony of word and phrase. In his mature writing at least 

 ho would not only leave standing no redundant word, but none that 

 was trite or effaced or inanimate or a word of all work, or anything but 

 livingly and absolutely expressive of his thought, even if, as some- 

 times happens, such a word might seem to another mind far-fetched, 

 unusual, or strained. 



As a comment on what I have been trying to express, let me read 

 a rough, unmethodical but very suggestive phrase or two taken down 

 by his step-daughter from his table-talk. He has been speaking of 

 the need, for every artist in every work of art, to strike from the 

 outset a particular key and keep it. " Yet I am wrong to liken 



Vol. XX. (No. 105) e 



