Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/23

THE GENIUS OF STEVENSON and sweetly. Too ready an eye for the ridiculous bars my claim to judge on so delicate a point of taste, but fairer critics have owned that sometimes he refines overmuch, and allows the sense to drift with the words. It may be so, but what of that? there is good store of bread to his oceans of sack. It is not here my purpose to analyse his art, but rather to point out how little it has of the modern air. Take two other prose-artists of our time, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold: each in his way is entirely modern; they simply took up our English such as they found it, perfecting it to their needs. Stevenson goes back not merely, as the critics fancy, to Sterne, but behind the Revolution to a period when scholars wrote for scholars and dreaded a solecism as a stain upon their honour, when the sonorous compliment and gracious urbanity of the cedar parlour were not cast aside on entering the library, when the reader was still "gentle" enough to relish the assiduous court and subtle flattery of a finely elaborated style. That he alone should have adopted this felicitous model I attribute to the accident of his birthplace. So long as Lowland Scotch survives, so long must English, as the aristocratic, the learned, the literary language, attract with the charm of Plato's Attic or Petrarch's Tuscan, and a Scotch student will seek out the purest English exemplars with a singleness of eye by us unattainable.

But the parallel is even stronger as regards his dilettantism, the other note in his attractive personality. At first you mistake it for Voltairian diablerie, then for Neo-Gallic heartlessness, then for agnostical weariness of the flesh. Is he ever sincere? does he care for anything or anybody? does he not despise his own puppets and gloat over their miseries? are his books mere sleight of hand, and is the showman sneering at us dull clowns agape on his benches? No, it is all pure dilettantism, and that of the high old English breed. With a certain polished reserve not wholly flattering to his rivals, he stands daintily aloof from the rabble who live by tickling the ears of the Public-Ass. True, he owes it to himself to make no discourteous allusions to the reader's ears, but in a graceful way he allows him to gather that their length has not wholly escaped his notice, nor does the honest fool like him less for his discrimination than for his reticence.

Were authors princes they might all write like this. Without being a prince, Mr. Stevenson somehow succeeds in evading the attitude of the labourer worthy of his hire. He does not profess to cast fine pearls before swine; he means them for