ry of real life, where there is a definite check in the common-sense
and knowledge of the reader, and where the highest victory always lies in
drawing from the reader the admission--"that is life--life exactly as I
have seen and known it. Though I could never have put it so, still it
only realises my own conception and observation. That is something
lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me lovingly
remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce with such
vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him, exactly as though
I had been looking on real men and women playing their part or their game
in the great world."

Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:

"He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of
adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to bring
out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed character he
was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure books, but a modified
creature. . . . It is his essays and his personality, rather than his
novels, that will count with posterity. On the whole, a great
provincial writer. Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a
man's provinciality the very source of his strength . . . only the
centuries can show.

The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson--he could not, wholly or at
once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to his first
love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist, and the
mystic--Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the Mill, insisted on
his acknowledging them in his work up to the end. _The modified
creature_ at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the
egotistic element as well as through the romantic action, and this point
missed the great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in
generals.

M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart looked
when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance
of John Ford's _Annabella and Giovanni_, and how at the next performance
the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a
bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say
significantly:

"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette
espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la
couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de
nos yeux en ver