near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands

'on the face of the IMPASSABLE.'
The likeness of this last word to a very different word,

'IMPASSIVE,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the
sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense

of double meanings almost leads to punning. In ACROSS THE PLAINS
Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station,

and subsequently, he supposes, 'LIQUIDATED at the bar.' This is
perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess

to be found plentifully in the works of Milton.
His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more

stirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live
phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In THE

BEACH OF FALESA the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to
the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid,

gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra.
It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous,

and imaginative slang;
' "Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain

continued. "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he
took and shook me by the hand. 'I've dropped into a soft thing

here,' says he. 'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny! I never
saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round

there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of stick to
him: 'John Adams, OBIT eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do

likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm in
Johnny."

' "What did he die of ?" I inquired.
' "Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took

him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-
Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go - he was booked beyond

Kennedy. Then he 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,
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
description of his use of individual words or his memory of

individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and
emphatic arrangement 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

particularly 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 admirableinstrument for the telling of

stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him,
the slightlyunusual 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 nimbleliterary 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 distinction 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 brilliantexhibition of fencing, clean and
dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss

Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the
Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those

wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in A
LODGING FOR THE NIGHT and THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR. But people

do not talk like this in actual life- ' 'tis true, 'tis pity; and
pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not; in actual life conversation is

generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and
dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into

meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an
escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass.

The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can
only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself

incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation
is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the

thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to
describe each particular twiddle. Or in its more intellectual

uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our
thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity

of the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless,
flabby, and black - like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see

thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment
Stevenson devises for them.

There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not,
one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works.

Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be
mistaken for another man's. All that he writes is removed by the

width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he
avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and

unconscious skill.
If he ever fell into one of these - which may perhaps be doubted -

it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style.
His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father

Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless
piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he

ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should
have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the

wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy
Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of

the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's
letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father

Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance
of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a

serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was
in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is

something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something
irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular

to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in
Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all

the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of
the Rev. Dr. Hyde.

II. ROMANCE. - The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts
showered on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no

course of development; 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 romanticability that his own childhood
never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an