1895.] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 591 



II. ROMANCE. 



The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered on 

 Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of develop- 

 ment ; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from 

 childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with 

 Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he 

 could pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories, 

 his imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of 

 its working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor 

 character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest 

 achievement of romance to be the embodiment " of character, thought, 

 or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking 

 to the mind's eye." His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly 

 conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody 

 emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama 

 proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach 

 of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that 

 the chief excellence of romance resides ; it was the discovery of a 

 world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, 

 neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the 

 Romantic revival of the end of last century. " The artistic result of 

 a romance," says Stevenson, " what is left upon the memory by any 

 powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined 

 that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple 

 as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of language 

 as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner of suggestions 

 and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name, 

 for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the 

 necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that 

 often hangs about the purpose of a romance ; it is clear enough to us 

 in thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we 

 are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been 

 sufficiently shaped to that end." He goes on to point out that there 

 is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, 

 not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories 

 of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel 

 Hawthorne. 



The progress of romance in the present century has consisted 

 chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new 

 subtle effects in story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not under- 

 stand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the times could 

 count for anything in a story ; all his actions consist of a few simple 

 personal elements. With Scott, vague influences that qualify a man's 

 personality begin to make a large claim ; " the individual characters 

 begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on 

 which armies manoeuvre and great hills pile themselves upon each 

 other's shoulders." And the achievements of the great masters since 



