the original essay are highly characteristic of the man. Other men have said equally harsh things of Thoreau. Stevenson alone had the fairness, the frank, childlike spirit to go back upon himself. These are the things that endear us to Stevenson, and make it impossible to be angry with any of his paradoxes and extravagant capers. Who but Stevenson would have written thus: “The most temperate of living critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, ‘This seems nonsense.’ It not only seemed, it was so. It was a private bravado of my own which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting it down as a contribution to the theory of life.”
Touched by this confidence, one reads Stevenson—especially the letters—with a more discerning eye, a more compassionate understanding; and if at times one feels the presence of the Ariel too strong, and longs for a more human, less elfin personality, then the thought that we are dealing with deliberate “bravado” may well check our impatience.
Men who suffer much are wont to keep up a brave front by an appearance of indifference.
V
To turn now to another side of Stevenson—Stevenson the Artist, the artificer of phrases, the limner of pictures. His power here is shown in a threefold manner—in deft
and happy phrasing, in skilful characterization, in delicately suggestive scenic descriptions.
This, for instance, as an instance of the first:—
“The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated atmosphere, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equally forward over blood and ruin” (New Arabian Nights).
Or this:—
“Whitman, like a large, shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world, and baying at the moon” (Men and Books).