Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/339

 testimony of such as are "within the pale." If a sufficient number of these haloed great can be persuaded to gather round our sinner, perhaps it may never be noticed that he himself wears no such symbol of intellectual sanctity.

Our first witness (we grieve to betray his identity, but we must give chapter and verse), is R. L. Stevenson, whose manner of composition was the very opposite of Dumas's. He is allowed to possess "style," and truly he laboured hard and nobly to win it—the quality itself, not the acknowledgment of it.

"There is no style so untranslatable" (as Dumas's), he wrote; "light as a whipped trifle; strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious, with no merit, yet inimitably right."

Next we have Mr Lang. In addition to his fame as scholar and critic, was he not the prize "stylist" of an "Academy" competition? That is as good as a degree at a University, it is an unofficial election to a fauteuil and Immortality (with a capital I). Then note with respect this evidence:

"When I read the maunderings, the stilted and staggering, sentences, the hesitating phrases, the farsought and dear-bought and worthless word-juggles; the sham scientific verbiage, the native pedantries