undistinguishable blackness,
filled them with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at
the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an
instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-building and
iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,' contributed to a
magazine years ago, he compares the artist in paint or in words to the
keeper of a booth at the world's fair, dependent for his bread on his
success in amusing others. In his volume of poems he almost apologises
for his excellence in literature:

'Say not of me, that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child;
But rather say: _In the afternoon of time_
_A strenuous family dusted from its hands_
_The sand of granite_, _and beholding far_
_Along the sounding coasts its pyramids_
_And tall memorials catch the dying sun_,
_Smiled well-content_, _and to this childish task_
_Around the fire addressed its evening hours_.'

Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In _The
Wrong Box_, for instance, there is something very like the card-game
commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous corpse, and
each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym and
bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance. It is an admirable
farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the breath of reality,
full of fantastic character; the strange funeral procession is attended
by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally melts into space.

But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is
stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy
and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if
they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals. The
decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half-
human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to
paint an easel picture.

Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich
fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him,
what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant
field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the
luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned