of his reader's, upon the most solemn
enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician's
touch and insight.

"Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much
of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him
among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this
is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson's own, in
which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the
'sedulous ape' to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing
this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of
the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly
he was always much of a reader: but it was life, not books, that always
in the first degree allured and taught him.

'He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep'--

so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he
most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed--to
quote again a phrase of his own--to have been 'eavesdropping at the door
of his heart': those which told of experiences or cravings after
experience, pains, pleasures, or conflicts of the spirit, which in the
eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No
man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand.
The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme
natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An
instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform
to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life
or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would
not follow a general rule--least of all if it was a prudential rule--of
conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private
conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social
amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not
amuse _him_; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be
himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or
inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his
thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current
phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his
nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure,