Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/211

 the two brothers at the tailor's shop, are as vivid as anything he did, but the connection of the book is not organic.

I have now commented upon all of Stevenson's work in fiction that is of really first-class rank. The Suicide Club in the New Arabian Nights may go to join the others. But the rest is only fantastic trifling which leaves but slight impress on the memory. Almost the same might be said of the Merry Men volume, but the tales there touch deeper notes. In Markheim a higher level is reached—it wanted little more to have been a second Jekyll. Thrifty as Stevenson was as a creative artist, wasting never a word or an incident, he yet required a largish canvas before he could produce his full effect. It must ever be so with the masters of characterisation; the conte is not for them.

In thinking over Stevenson's work one is apt to overlook Prince Otto. It is of so different a genre, it has almost a note of insincerity. Yet that very note is cognate with its subject, and in its rococo manner it is a perfect bit of novelistic bric-à-brac, a sort of romance in Dresden china. There is one chapter, however, that redeems it. The flight of the princess through the woods in the night is one of the most perfect things Stevenson ever wrote. It is characteristic that it should come