582 Professor Walter 'Raleigh [May 17, 



works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques 

 carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours. 



All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the "sport-impulse" (to 

 translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power ; 

 Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound 

 sense, made game of life. But to make game of life was to each of 

 these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to he found for 

 him on this planet ; to hold the mirror up to Nature so that for the 

 first time she may see herself, to " be a candle-holder and look on " 

 at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder, would huddle 

 along in the undistiuguishable blackness, filled them with the pride of 

 place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the depths of his nature, 

 but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an instinct for work in 

 more blockish material, for lighthouse-building and iron-founding. 

 In a ' Letter to a Young Artist,' contributed to a magazine years 

 ago, he compares the artist in paint or in words to the keeper of a 

 booth at the world's fair, dependent for his bread on his success in 

 amusing others. In his volume of poems he almost apologises for 

 his excellence in literature : — 



" Say not of me, that weakly I declined 

 The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, 

 The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, 

 To play at home with paper like a child ; 

 But rather say : In the afternoon of time 

 A strenuous family dusted from its hands 

 A sand of granite, and beholding far 

 Along the sounding coasts its pyramids 

 And tall memorials catch the dying sun, 

 Smiled well content, and to this childish task 

 Around the fire addressed its evening hours.^ 



Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In 

 1 The Wrong Box,' for instance, there is something very like the 

 card-game commonly called " Old Maid " ; the odd card is a superfluous 

 corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and 

 a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance. 

 It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by 

 the breath of reality, full of fantastic character ; the strange funeral 

 procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and 

 finally melts into space. 



But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that 

 Olympus is stormed ; art must be brought closer into relation with 

 life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a 

 serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat among 

 the immortals. The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely 

 in limning these half-human processions of outlined fauns and wood- 

 nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel-picture. 



Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his pecu- 

 liarly rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing 



