motive. But even when he is professedly
concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate
to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or
allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought,
or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there
cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also
unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.

Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in _Treasure
Island_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Wrecker_--a something which suffices
decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially
they might be classed.

CHAPTER XIX--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE

It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over
forty--the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but
begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was
taken from us, the world would have lacked the _Waverley Novels_; if a
like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had _A Tale of Two
Cities_; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written
_Retaliation_, or tasted the bitter-sweet first night of _She Stoops to
Conquer_. At the age of forty-four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not
dreamt of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. But what a man has already done
at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise
of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to
expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a
measurable dynamic gain.

This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago,
Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his
address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut
Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of
Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in
the _New York Tribune_:

"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the
death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a romancer
and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have
begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest
cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid
achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone
out. A radiant inv