1895.] on Bobert Louis Stevenson. 589 



Kennedy. Then lie had tried to open a case of gin. No go again : 

 not strong enough. . . . Poor John ! ' " 



There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in 

 the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in ' The Wrecker ' ; 

 and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in ' Kidnapped,' 

 1 Catriona,' and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense 

 trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some 

 of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on 

 words, that remembered them for years, and brought them out when 

 occasion arose. 



But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a de- 

 scription of his use of individual words or his memory of individual 

 phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrange- 

 ments of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was 

 even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic 

 predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, 

 but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. 

 Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed 

 giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his 

 style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth 

 and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 

 " What English those fellows wrote ! " says Fitzgerald in one of his 

 letters ; " I cannot read the modern mechanique after them." And 

 he quotes a passage from Harrington's ' Oceana ' : — 



" This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One 

 Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with 

 her own hand, is herself King People." 



It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson 

 learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be parti- 

 cularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles 

 Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable 'Lives of Pirates and 

 Highwaymen.' Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few 

 modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style. 



However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion 

 borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of 

 stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, 

 the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order 

 of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of 

 novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A 

 nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current 

 small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming 

 them to its own stamp. This was what Stevenson did, and the very 

 conversations that pass between his characters have an air of dis- 

 tinction that is all his own. His books are full of brilliant talk — 

 talk real and convincing enough in its purport and setting, but purged 

 of the languors and fatuities of actual commonplace conversation. It 

 is an enjoyment like that to be obtained from a brilliant exhibition 

 of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of 



