Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/205

 Stevenson was as much the sedulous ape in the spirit of his work as he had been in the style of it. Here we see Edgar Allan Poe, there Alexandre Dumas; here Walt Whitman, and there Walter Scott; Hazlitt here, and there Laurence Sterne. Yet what is this but to say that he was of the classic tradition and carried it on in all branches of his work? And in all his superiority of style put him on the level even of the great masters he was copying. If he could not equal Poe's command of the eerie and fantastic, Dumas's grouping and broad canvas, Scott's humour and geniality and multifarious life, he could clothe what he took from each in drapery more closely fitting than any they had in their wardrobe. His very choice of models was significant, and the Romantic Revival in the English novel of to-day had in him its leader.

But for one side of his activity he had to go back to no other original than himself. He first found himself in his characteristic studies of men young and old, and revealed in his treatment of them a philosophy of life that was all his own. Stevenson was the first of the younger voices who spoke out the thoughts of men who faced life without the support of the older traditions. He was the laureate of the joy of life, of the life here and now. He courted Life like the gallant that he was what