His essays attracted at first very little attention; they were too fine and too subtle to awaken popular enthusiasm.  It was the success of his novels that drew readers back to the essays, just as it was the vogue of Sudermann’s plays that made his earlier novels popular.  One has only to read such essays, however, as those printed in this volume to realise not only their spirit and charm, but to feel instinctively that one is reading English Literature.  They are exquisite works of art, written in an almost impeccable style.  By many judicious readers, they are placed above his works of fiction.  They certainly constitute the most original portion of his entire literary output.  It is astonishing that this young Scotchman should have been able to make so many actually new observations on a game so old as Life.  There is a shrewd insight into the motives of human conduct that makes some of these graceful sketches belong to the literature of philosophy, using the word philosophy in its deepest and broadest sense.  The essays are filled with whimsical paradoxes, keen and witty as those of Bernard Shaw, without having any of the latter’s cynicism, iconoclasm, and sinister attitude toward morality.  For the real foundation of even the lightest of Stevenson’s works is invariably ethical.

His fame as a writer of prose romances grows brighter every year.  His supreme achievement was to show that a book might be crammed with the most wildly exciting incidents, and yet reveal profound and acute analysis of character, and be written with consummate art.  His tales have all the fertility of invention and breathless suspense of Scott and Cooper, while in literary style they immeasurably surpass the finest work of these two great masters.

His best complete story, is, I think, Treasure Island.  There is a peculiar brightness about this book which even the most notable of the later works failed to equal.  Nor was it a trifling feat to make a blind man and a one-legged man so formidable that even the reader is afraid of them.  Those who complain that this is merely a pirate story forget that in art the subject is of comparatively little importance, whereas the treatment is everything.  To say, as some do, that there is no difference between Treasure Island and a cheap tale of blood and thunder, is equivalent to saying that there is no difference between the Sistine Madonna and a chromo Virgin.

IV

THE PERSONAL ESSAY

The Personal Essay is a peculiar form of literature, entirely different from critical essays like those of Matthew Arnold and from purely reflective essays, like those of Bacon.  It is a species of writing somewhat akin to autobiography or firelight conversation; where the writer takes the reader entirely into his confidence, and chats pleasantly with him on topics that may be as widely apart as the immortality of the soul and the proper colour of a necktie.  The