Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 113
suits, he had a livelier interest in everybody’s life and pur-
suits.
One of Stevenson’s crowning virtues was his utter sanity,
and out of that same interest in everything, including him-
self, there flowed a stream of human-kindness, of sympathy,
of comprehension of life in its true values, which has uttered
itself in many volumes, and made all the world love him for
his sweetness, as it has admired him for his courage. His
philosophy is as notable for its sweetly modulated reason-
ableness as it is for its dashing courage. Only a brave man
could have written “Æs Triplex,” only a loving and lovable
man could have written “A Christmas Sermon”: “To be
honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less,
to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence,
to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be em-
bittered, to keep a few friends but those without capitula-
tion-above all, on the same grim conditions, to keep friends
with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of forti-
tude and delicacy.”
The spirit of courage, of hope, of inexhaustible interest
in life, and of frank egotism is the spirit of youth ; and youth,
eternal and incorrigible youth, is Stevenson’s sign-manual,
both in his spirit and his art. In the conclusion of “Æs
Triplex” he says, referring to the reckless way in which
brave men die: “When the Greeks made their fine saying
that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help be-
lieving that they had this sort of death in their eye. For
surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die
young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as one
illusion from his heart.” In the dedication of liVirginibus
Puerisque” he says that he appears as uAdvocatus Juven-
tutis,” the pleader for “life at twenty-five,” the supporter of
youth’s arguments against the arguments of age. In the