An image should appear at this position in the text. To use the entire page scan as a placeholder, edit this page and replace "{{missing image}}" with "{{raw image|Scottishartrevie01unse.djvu/134}}". Otherwise, if you are able to provide the image then please do so. For guidance, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images. |  |
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
AMONG those who remain north of the Tweed, as even among those who cross the Border, or go down to the sea in ships and do literary business in the great waters, there are many who carry on the traditions of a not wholly unlettered nation. But there is at this moment, in the dimly dis- criminating view of the heterogeneous public of English readers, no one who represents more decisively the belles lettres of Scotland than Robert Louis Stevenson. Yet there is nothing peculiarly national in his style. It is not quite guiltless of an American flavour. It is more French than English, and more English than Scotch ; for Stevenson is cosmopolitan rather than nationalist. The abrupt phrasing of his earlier essays is akin to the priggish opinionativeness of an American schoolboy ; the analytic faculty displayed in the one piece of Stevenson's which gives indisputable evidence of consummate mastery of the instruments of his art — The Strange Case of Dr. Jeltyll and Mr. Hyde — is worthy of Balzac, as the ' historic sense ' of Kidnapped is related, though dimly and distantly, to the strenuous grasp of the life of the past which has painted the burning pictures of Salammho.
Stevenson's confession of an author in search of a style, humorously exaggerated as it is, does give a certain clue, not perhaps so much to the conscious, but more to the unconscious, evolution of his manner. Who will not observe traces of Lamb's essays in Virginibus Picerisque, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's character sketches in the Merry Men, and, of course, most obviously of all, of Scott's historic romances in Kidnapped? This is all as it should be, for these things were done before, that those who come after, if they know how, might do them better.
Of a writer, the offspring of whose imagination has taken great hold of the public mind, it may be asked. Does he give value for our applause ? Is it well to have him for his quaint phrasing, for his humorous pictures of the roadside, for the hints of subtle play of forces in our own upper stories, and for glimpses of tragic life that happen as we loaf along with him? For these, even if they be alone, and for all such, let us be truly thankful. What
