50 Sir Sidney Golvin [Feb. 10, 



literature to painting. It is more like music — which is time ; paint- 

 ing is space. In music you wind in and out, but always keep in the 

 key ; that is, you carry the hearer to the end without letting him 

 drop by the way. It winds around and keeps on. So must words 

 wind around. Organised and packed in a mass, fis it were, tight 

 with words. Not too short — phrases rather — no word to spare. 

 There are two kinds of style : the plastic, such as I have just described : 

 the other, the simple placing of words together for harmony. The 

 words should come off the tongue like honey. I began so as a young 

 man ; I had a pretty talent that way, I must confess." 



Another, indeed an obvious, quality of Stevenson's prose is the 

 amount of poetry it can carry without falling into verse rhythms or 

 any kind of straining of its easy, composed, and ever lightly varying 

 cadences. "A poetical character with a prose talent," such is one 

 of Stevenson's definitions of himself. Now, from the days of the 

 romantic revival in 1800 onward, it has been one of the aims and 

 problems of English prose writers to combine the expression of a full 

 measure of poetic imagination and emotion with the maintenance of 

 the ease, the colloquial composure and simplicity, which Dryden and 

 the other writers of the age of Anne had brought into eighteenth 

 century prose. It is a difficult problem, and in its solution even 

 great writers have often strained the fabric of their style, often raised 

 their prose to too lofty a pitch, and given us the over-eloquent 

 rhythmic period, in a word the purple patch. I think hardly any 

 writer was more successful than Stevenson in avoiding this pitfall. 

 It would be an exercise in which I should delight, and which I think 

 might not be tedious to you, my hearers, to take some of the passages 

 of prose in which Stevenson writes with the vision, the imagination, 

 the emotion of a poet — let us say some of the passages of night-magic 

 from " Prince Otto," or of sea-terror from the " Merry Men," or of 

 moorland solitude tingling with the sense of coming tragedy from 

 " Weir of Hermiston " — and compare them with famous passages 

 from other great nineteenth century writers of poetical prose, 

 De Quincey or Landor or Ruskin. But time fails : so that 1 can 

 only suggest your doing this for yourselves, and in the meantime 

 quote a phrase or two from his letters showing how easily and 

 naturally the poet in him awakes and speaks. 



From Swanston Cottage in the Pentlands, 1875 : — 

 " I have been staying in town and could not write a word. It is 

 a fine strong night, full of wind ; the trees are all crying out in the 

 darkness ; funny to think of the birds asleep outside on the tossing 

 branches, the little bright eyes closed, the brave wings folded, the 

 little hearts that beat so hard and thick (so much harder and thicker 

 than ever human heart) all stilled and quieted in deep slumber in 

 the midst of this noise and turmoil. Why it will be as nmch as I 

 can do to sleep in here in my walled room ; so loud and jolly the 

 wind sounds through the open window. The unknown places of 

 the night invite the travelling fancy ; I like to think of the sleeping 



