1895.] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 587 



business of the day. But Stevenson, who Lad romance tingling in 

 every vein of his body, set himself laboriously and patiently to train 

 his other faculty, the faculty of style. 



I. Style. 



Let no one say that "reading and writing comes by nature," 

 unless he is prejmred to be classed with the foolish burgess who said 

 it first. A poet is born, not made — so is every man — but he is 

 born raw. Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of 

 himself in the art of writing. 



" The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, 

 Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering." 



Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an 

 education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes o-ood 

 literature — they are " word-deaf," as others are colour-blind. All 

 writing is a kind of word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a 

 splendid tissue out of the diverse fibres of words. But to care for 

 words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least 

 essential to all writing, all speaking ; for the sad fact is this, that 

 most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, 

 not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of 

 phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shake- 

 speare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We 

 make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How 

 many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly leap into 

 meaning and brightness when they are seen in their context ! " The 

 cry is still, ' They come ! '" ; " More honoured in the breach than the 

 observance" — the sight of these phrases in the splendour of their 

 dramatic context in ' Macbeth ' and ' Hamlet ' casts shame upon their 

 daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the 

 time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, 

 so he borrows his sentences ready made, and applies them in rough 

 haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably 

 repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs 

 of thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by 

 others. It is a matter of natural taste, developed and strengthened 

 by continual practice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases. 



The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of 

 fine phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but 

 cultivates his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the raw 

 fibres in novel and bewitching patterns. To this end he must have 

 two things : a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, 

 meaning, and associations of individual words, and next, a sense of 

 harmony, proportion, and effect in their combination. It is amazin^ 

 what nobility a mere truism is often found to possess when it is clad 

 with a garment thus woven. 



