122 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
Thackeray, we realize that this conception of the oneness of
a novel has not always prevailed in English literature.
Stevenson learned this from the French, and his example has
encouraged a care for technique among subsequent English
writers which had been seldom observed before he wrote.
He did for English romantic fiction something like that
which John Keats did for English romantic poetry: he
made it entirely artistic; he gave it what I venture to call
tonal quality—he fitted a particular tone to a particular sort
of romantic story.
The two novels which he left unfinished at the end of his
life were both romantic stories of Scotland, but almost un-
believably different in their tone: “St. Ives,” gay and sunny,
nonchalant and high-spirited in its account of the debonair
French officer’s adventures in Scotland; “Weir of Hermis-
ton,” somber, gray, dour, darksome with pending fate and
threatenings of dishonor’s doom. Had Stevenson written
only those two books, he would have demonstrated his ver-
satility; that he wrote on them alternately, dictating to his
stepdaughter now a chapter of one, and now a chapter of
the other, as the mood struck him, would seem almost impos-
sible if we did not know that it had been done.
He had an instinct that one kind of story would suit one
kind of spot, and that another kind of spot called for an-
other kind of story. In his “Gossip on Romance” he tells
how certain gardens suggested to him stories of murder, cer-
tain houses ghosts, certain coasts shipwreck. He tells of a
ferry which, every time he saw it, seemed to cry out for a
story connected with it, and never let him rest until he had
invented that story as we find it in “Kidnapped.” His wife
tells how “names always had a great fascination for him;
. . . the flowing, mellifluous sound of ‘The Master of Bal-
lantrae’ he felt gave the impression of elegance and smooth
duplicity.” For seven years the name lurked in his imagina-