immediate place in public attention; but none has exercised
Stevenson's peculiar and personal power to charm, to attach, and to
inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style--qualities for
which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little--he might
seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the
artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work
is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to
universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative
excitement and entertainment in the race.

"The voice of the _advocatus diaboli_ has been heard against him, as it
is right and proper that it should be heard against any man before his
reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this
country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of 'externality.'
But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon
Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house
of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest
dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island
lagoon a last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the
appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber--such a reader can only
smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other
passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they
reveal themselves to true masters only: they are instinct at once with
the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of
nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the
Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was
feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means,
preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not
express adequately; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse
himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his
art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the
_Suicide Club_, or the airy sentimental comedy of _Providence and the
Guitar_, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and
the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality cannot help striking
notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of things deeper than
will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with
never a smile either of his own or