Spirit and Art of Robert Louis Stevenson 123
tion, until a novel to match it had been produced. All of
which was exactly like John Keats, who was teased and fas-
cinated by a phrase of Provençal French, “La Belle Dame
sans Merci,” until he simply had to write a poem to express
the emotion which the words stirred in him—John Keats
who cried out,
“Lo ! I must tell a tale of chivalry,
For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye,”
and who after he has described the knight and his plumes
has nothing more to say, for he has verbalized his vision.
In the prose writings which particularly pleased Steven-
son by their euphony, he would analyze and explore a fa-
vorite passage until he found in exactly what repetition and
variation of a particular vowel or consonant the charm
lurked, and then he would practise these euphonies in his own
style, until he had produced a result which could stand be-
fore his own critical judgment.
Whether in the atmospheric quality of the picture, or in
the unbroken unity of the narrative, or in the rhythm and
arrangement of the words, Stevenson was always not merely
“literary” but “artistic,” a distinction which he himself
made, justly observing that Walter Scott, whom he admired
extravagantly as “out and away the king of the romantics,”
was “hardly a great artist ; hardly, in the manful sense, an
artist at all. He pleased himself and so pleases us. Of the
pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils
and distresses never man knew less.” In short, Robert Louis
Stevenson was poet as well as romancer, novelist, and essay-
ist. And essentially a poet he must be who will achieve the
highest distinction in any of these capacities. Through
many years of vigil, Stevenson had cultivated the finest graces
of literary art, waiting patiently until he should feel that he
could use them for the greatest literary purposes. But