Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/24

gentles and scholars; but if the swine come grunting around, with a laugh he scrambles a few handfuls among them. He pleases just because he claims to write only to please himself and a few kindred spirits—not you or me. His dainties were not dressed for us, but for our betters: we like them none the less for that; a few crumbs of the Empress Frederick's bride-cake fell by some chance to my childish maw—I pronounced them excellent. Again, even when most confidential and caressing, he allows no liberties; he never hobnobs with the reader like Sterne; when you are beginning to presume on his condescension, suddenly by a careless sarcasm or a courtly phrase he lets you know your place. When your curiosity is whetted by his own vivid interest in some topic, long before you tire of it he tosses it aside for something new. He suffers you to drain no cup to the dregs. You are to understand that he is no professional scribbler, but a lettered gentleman who just allows you a sight of his manuscripts. Granted that in these days such an attitude involves a certain illusion, still the art with which it is maintained is almost perfect. Stevenson alone—or at least most of all—among our finer writers has succeeded in veiling the nexus of contract between author and reader, book-writer and book-buyer, and in its place reviving the courteous, gracious, mutually-complaisant relations now well-nigh forgotten. Hence the humanising, if not precisely elevating, influence of his work. That work he seems to just carelessly leave in our way—not serious work, you understand—merely the pastime of a cultivated, leisurely mind. What scope, what license this artful dilettantism gives him! To criticise almost seems an impertinence. We must not even speculate what he could do if he liked; enough if we whisper that he has never yet chosen to do his utmost. Like those old experimentalists to whom I have compared him, he wades into deep waters, but no farther than he chooses; he diverts himself by turns with philosophy, fiction, science, the black art and what not; but nothing does he pursue in the sordid, technical, specialist spirit. Like them, too, his fancy is caught by chimeras and paradoxes on which he lavishes a world of elaboration. And why not? a literary aristocrat surely knows how to preserve his dignity while toying with his pen. Superiority—distinction is the note which separates the dilettante from the vulgar trifler, and this distinction is as conspicuous in the audacious incompleteness of some of his work as in the consummate perfection of the rest. Quite apart from style, his attitude to his craft—

14