124 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
death came before the hour had struck. The best of Steven-
son is only a promise of what we should have if he had lived.
And so it comes about that the art of Stevenson is a blend
of psychology and adventure, a combination of a man’s
brain and a boy’s heart, an appeal to the thinking man and
to the active man, and all done in a literary style which was
partly the gift of his fine esthetic instinct, and partly the re-
ward of tireless industry, an art for which he paid the price
that must always be paid for the best accomplishment in art
—unremitting labor, unsparing pains. The heart of a boy,
the mind of a philosopher, the sensibility of an artist, and
the will of a purposeful man combined to make these books
what they are.
There is the authority of the master—Stevenson himself
— for appending a little moral to it all. He, the delicate and
sensitive artist, he, the active lover of adventure, he was
also the moralist, the worshiper of the “veiled mistress.”
The moral of Stevenson’s art and work seems to be a double
one: utter courage, no matter what it is we are facing, no
matter what it is that is pending, and complete absorption in
the thing we are doing, no matter what it is, if it is only the
writing of a boys’ tale of adventure. Charles Dickens said
that his Golden Rule had always been never to use one hand
in doing a thing to which he could apply two hands. Steven-
son worked by the same rule. In a sense, Stevenson’s life
was incomplete; all he did was a preparation for something
greater that he was going to do. He did not live to accom-
plish the greater things. But he did his part; he kept him-
self fully occupied with the work of preparation; the sequel
was with the gods. If the work had to stop before it was
finished, that was not his fault. If the exit was called before
he had played out his rôle in life’s drama, that was not his
concern—nor is it ours.
Stockton Axson.