re that Meredith had possessed the power of complete control
of his material and himself, had revised his work to better
advantage. But perhaps it is more commonsensible to be thankful
for him as he is.

As to influence, it would seem modest to assert that Meredith is
as bracingly wholesome morally as he is intellectually
stimulating. In a private letter to a friend who was praising
his finest book, he whimsically mourns the fact that he must
write for a living and hence feel like disowning so many of his
children when in cold blood he scrutinizes his offspring. The
letter in its entirety (it is unpublished) is proof, were any
needed, that he had a high artistic ideal which kept him nobly
dissatisfied with his endeavor. There is in him neither pose nor
complacent self-satisfaction. To an American, whom he was
bidding good-by at his own gate, he said: "If I had my books to
do over again, I should try harder to make sure their influence
was good." His aims, ethical and artistic, throughout his work,
can be relied upon as high and noble. His faults are as honest
as he himself, the inherent defects of his genius. No writer of
our day stands more sturdily for the idea that, whereas art is
precious, personality is more precious still; without which art
is a tinkling cymbal and with which even a defective art can
conquer Time, like a garment not all-seemly, that yet cannot
hide an heroic figure.

CHAPTER XIII

STEVENSON

It is too early yet to be sure that Robert Louis Stevenson will
make a more cogent appeal for a place in English letters as a
writer of fiction than as an essayist. But had he never written
essays likely to rank him with the few masters of that
delightful fireside form, he would still have an indisputable
claim as novelist. The claim in fact is a double one; it is
founded, first, on his art and power as a maker of romance, but
also upon his historical service to English fiction, as the man
most instrumental in purifying the muddy current of realism in
the late nineteenth century by a wholesome infusion,--the
romantic view of life. It is already easier to estimate his
importance and get the significance of his work than it was when
he died in 1894--stricken down on the piazza of his house at
Vailima, a Scotchman doomed to fall in a far-away, alien place.

We are better able now to separate that personal charm felt from
direct contact with the man, which almost hypnotized those who
knew him, fr