Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/234

 then Walt Whitman. By an odd transition (as he observes elsewhere) Walt Whitman's influence blends with that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. 'I should be much of a hound,' he says, 'if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.' Next comes Lewes's Life of Goethe—though there is no one whom he 'less admires than Goethe.' Martial, Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, and Mr. George Meredith's Egoist follow, and he notes that an essay of Hazlitt 'on the spirit of obligation' formed a 'turning-point in his life.' One would have been glad of a comment upon the last, for the essay is one in which Hazlitt shows his most cynical side, and explains how frequently envy and selfishness are concealed under a pretence of conferring obligations. Stevenson, perhaps, took it as he took Mr. Meredith's novel, for an ethical lecture, revealing the Protean forms of egoism more or less common to us all.

Stevenson clearly was not one of the young gentlemen who get up a subject systematically. He read as chance and curiosity dictated. A new author did not help him to fill up gaps in a theory, but became a personal friend, throwing out pregnant hints and suggesting rapid glances from various points of view into different aspects