Stevenson and California. 



113 



draw us a portrait of the actual world about them. The 

 novelists concern themselves more than do the poets with 

 the real form and circumstance of life, but only incident- 

 ally — as a means and not as an end. What they want is 

 the impression of reality, and this they often attain in sur- 

 prising degree with little or no personal knowledge of 

 the scenes they describe. 



Leaving then all these, and coming now to those who 

 have directly addressed themselves to portraying the life 

 and scenery of our California, and confining ourselves to 

 the foremost names — whom do we find? For the earlier 

 fiercer period of the rude physical conquest of the land, 

 Bret Harte and Mark Twain for Californian life, with 

 Clarence King for its mountain scenery and setting. For 

 the later and more settled period of its humanization, 

 Charles Warren Stoddard for the life, with John Muir, 

 Yelland, and Keith for its landscape and setting. These 

 are the men with whom Stevenson may be fairly com- 

 pared. The work of that earlier group made a profound 

 impression upon the world, and had an enormous vogue. 

 Like the "Sturm und Drang" period which it celebrated, 

 and like the life it endeavored to portray, it was weird 

 and wild, full of fierce contrasts and contradictions, — it 

 was sentimental, bizarre, melodramatic. So far, perhaps, 

 its quality was justified as a reflection from its subject. 

 But its sensationalism was so extreme, so deficient in the 

 sanity and poise which belong to all great art, that not 

 all its wonderful force could ever quite succeed in giving 

 to the scenes it depicted any deep and abiding sense of 

 reality. Already its tales read like romances of some 

 impossible, some mythical age. Even Clarence King's 

 famous mountaineering seems to those who have camped 

 on his trail almost as unreal as Tartarin's. 



Stevenson's Californian papers bulk far less than the 

 work of any of these men. They are little more than speci- 

 mens of what he might have done, had he found his home 

 here rather than in the Southern seas. They have won 

 us by no such sensational appeal. They have crept into 



