1895.] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 581 



than the suffrage ; it is possible enough to say something of the 

 literary quality of a work that appeared yesterday. Steveuson himself 

 was singularly free from the vanity of fame ; " the best artist," he 

 says truly, " is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the 

 one who loves the practice of his art." He loved, if ever man did, 

 the practice of his art; and those who find meat and drink in the 

 delight of watching and appreciating the skilful practice of the literary 

 art, will abandon themselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes 

 without teasing their unborn and possibly illiterate posterity to 

 answer solemn questions. Will a book live ? Will a cricket match 

 live ? Perhaps not, and yet both be fine achievements. 



It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death. 

 In the dedication of 'Prince Otto' he says, "Well, we will not give 

 in that we are finally beaten. . /'. I still mean to get my health 

 again ; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to 

 launch a masterpiece." It would be a churlish or a very dainty critic 

 who should deny that he has launched masterpieces, but whether 

 he ever launched his masterpiece is an open question. Of the story 

 that he was writing just before his death he is reported to have said 

 that " the goodness of it frightened him." A goodness that frightened 

 him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair 

 of eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died 

 at his age, we should have had none of the great satires ; had Scott 

 died at his age, we should have had no Waverley Novels. Hying at 

 the height of his power, and in the full tide of thought and activity, 

 he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspiration and unconscious 

 prophecy of one of the early essays : — 



" Hoes not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body 

 over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? 



" When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the 

 gods love die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort 

 of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake 

 the man, this is to die young. Heath has not been suffered to take so 

 much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on 

 the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. 

 The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets 

 are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this 

 happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land." 



But we on this side are the poorer — by how much we can 

 never know. What strengthens the conviction that ho might yet 

 have surpassed himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly 

 no immaturity, for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs 

 about his earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that 

 brilliant series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in struc- 

 ture and occasion, so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary 

 craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was 

 playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding the graving tool, 

 the itch of craftmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the 

 Vol. XIV. (No. 89.) 2 b 



