te
for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but
we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they
will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from
Britain--though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely
heard our names--we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each
writer amongst us--small or more than small--had been proud to have
carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was
not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to
put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never
meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of
letters--that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great
Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as
to its magnetic pole.

Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have
poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimitable, yet never
seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in
the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.
One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no
great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an
artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty
with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of
joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal
fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the
beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness--a
"soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his
books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of
duty: that he labored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for
the time, other and stronger men did not.

Had there been another Scott, another Dumas--if I may change the
image--to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if
Stevenson would have offered himself. I almost think in that case he
would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of
new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for--let it be said again--no man
had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success. Think, too,
of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the
world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the
constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him,
as