The name is absent

Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 117
His wife reports that the way he worked was “appalling,”
and the magnitude of the results “almost incredible.”

Not Thomas Carlyle himself was more completely and
deliberately a man of letters by profession than was Steven-
son, and his essay on “The Morality of the Profession of
Letters” shows how high and grave an estimate he set on
the profession of his choice. The great difference between
Carlyle and Stevenson was that Stevenson believed that the
chief object of literature is to entertain, and Carlyle believed
that its chief object is to teach. Carlyle was first the moralist
and afterward the artist; Stevenson was first the artist and
afterward the moralist.

Because Stevenson took this lighter view of the purpose
of literature, he was content to expend his great and culti-
vated art on things Carlyle would have scorned, and most
serious novelists would not consent to—tales of adventure,
of buried treasure, of pirates, of wreckers, of beach-comb-
ers; sometimes of adventures in the forest, but more gen-
erally of adventures by sea, for the passion of the sea has
gripped nobody harder than Stevenson. He responded to it in
all its moods, its cruel treachery as in “The Merry Men,”
its vastness as in “The Master of Ballantrae," its mystery as
in “Treasure Island” and a score of others, its adventures
as in nearly all the books, including “Kidnapped,” “The
Wrecker,” and “The Ebb Tide.” But perhaps the chief
fascination of the sea for Stevenson—aside from atavism,
inherited tastes from his seafaring ancestors and his island
home—was that on the sea, as nowhere else, he observed
life in the terms he loved, man’s struggle to live amid con-
tinual threatenings of death.

To the fastidious it seems a pity—and perhaps it is a pity
—that this sensitive and highly trained artist spent so
much of his energy, his character, and his delicate art on
tales that hitherto had been written chiefly for the “penny

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