to tell the truth, if it would
succeed. Stevenson is splendidly real, he loves to visualize
fact, to be true both to the appearances of things and the
thoughts of the mind. He is aware that life is more than food--that
it is a subjective state quite as much as an objective
reality. He refers to himself more than once, half humorously,
as a fellow whose forte lay in transcribing what was before him,
to be seen and felt, tasted and heard. This extremely modern
denotement was a marked feature of his genius, often overlooked.
He had a desire to know all manner of men; he had the noble
curiosity of Montaigne; this it was, along with his human
sympathy, that led him to rough it in emigrant voyages and
railroad trips across the plains. It was this characteristic,
unless I err, the lack of which in "Prince Otto" gives it a
certain rococo air: he was consciously fooling in it, and felt
the need of a solidly mundane footing. Truth to human nature in
general, and that lesser truth which means accurate photography--his
books give us both; the modern novelist, even a romancer
like Stevenson, is not permitted to slight a landscape, an idiom
nor a point of psychology: this one is never untrue to the
trust. There is in the very nature of his language a proof of
his strong hunger for the actual, the verifiable. No man of his
generation has quite such a grip on the vernacular: his speech
rejoices to disport itself in root flavors; the only younger
writer who equals him in this relish for reality of expression
is Kipling. Further back it reminds of Defoe or Swift, at their
best, Stevenson cannot abide the stock phrases with which most
of us make shift to express our thoughts instead of using first-hand
effects. There is, with all its music and suavity,
something of the masculinity of the Old English in the following
brief descriptive passage from "Ebb-Tide":

There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in
the East; then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless
hue between crimson and silver; and then coals of fire.
These glimmered awhile on the sea line, and seemed to
brighten and darken and spread out; and still the night and
the stars reigned undisturbed. It was as though a spark
should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some
heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the room
itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole
East glowed with gold