The name is absent

118 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists

dreadful” and the “dime library.” The fact of the matter
is that, to the end of his days, Stevenson was still experi-
menting, still practising his art, still getting ready to do the
great things he had in mind, and then he died before he was
ready.

There was a good deal of Scotch caution in Stevenson.
With all his facility and various talents, he ventured but
warily on new kinds of work. Thus he was well past forty
before he attempted a full-length picture of a woman, feel-
ing that this was too delicate a task for his art—-surely an
impressive instance of artistic humility. Such hesitation was
just an indication of the fastidious and self-critical artist that
Stevenson was by nature; he was unwilling to attempt a
thing until he felt that his art was strong enough to carry it
through.

Two sides of his nature express themselves in his artistic
hesitation to venture on the greatest things, and in his deter-
mined active employment in the cultivation of his art. Those
who are widely acquainted with academic minds know that
in most of our colleges there are men who are waiting to
write the great book of science, or the great book of litera-
ture, until they feel that their science, or their art, is sufficient
for the task which they have proposed. Stevenson would
have understood those men, for he also hesitated until he
felt himself equipped; but, unlike those men, he did not
wait in quiescence until time and the event should bring to
him the gifts he craved; he spent the interim in the busiest
exercise of his art for the sake of the art, intending to apply
it to the large things later. He did not merely bide his time ;
instead, he wrote boys’ books of adventure, and into every-
thing he wrote poured all the best of the art he had acquired
up to that time.

But if Stevenson was the true son of his active father, he

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